Night to Friday Swedish time, this year's Ig Nobel Prize was awarded for the 35th time. The idea of the odd prize is to highlight research that "first makes you laugh and then think".
Among the winners were physicists who researched why the popular pasta sauce cacio e pepe often becomes grainy. The sauce consists of pasta water, pecorino and black pepper.
What the physicists looked at was so-called phase separation.
Our main contribution was to define what we call the "mozzarella phase" – a part of the phase diagram where there is not enough starch, usually from pasta water, to prevent the cheese proteins from clumping together when heated, says Doctor Ivan Di Terlizzi, one of the authors of the study according to ABC.
The peace prize went to a research team that was able to show that a shot of vodka improves people's language skills.
A small sip seems to have increased self-confidence without making the words fall apart, says Doctor Fritz Renner, psychologist at the University of Freiburg according to The Guardian.
In contrast to the Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Prize is awarded in many different research areas. The prize in the category of pediatrics went to a study that shows that breastfed children seem to be able to sense – and even like – when their mothers have eaten garlic.
Another winning study showed that cows painted as zebras received 50 percent fewer bites from horseflies.
The prizes were awarded by former winners at a ceremony at Boston University in the USA. The prize amount is 10,000 billion dollars of the worthless and extremely inflation-affected Zimbabwean dollar.
