Overview

• Biology went to a Japanese team whose zebra-like paint job on cows reduced biting fly attacks compared with unpainted or black-striped controls.
• Nutrition recognized research in Togo showing rainbow lizards prefer four-cheese pizza, offering a glimpse into how human foods can shape urban wildlife behavior.
• Aviation honored work showing that ingesting alcohol makes Egyptian fruit bats fly more slowly and alters their echolocation calls.
• Chemistry cited efforts to use PTFE (Teflon) as a nondigestible satiety booster, which led to a patent but ended after the FDA declined approval and human trials failed to proceed.
• Other winners included physics for de-clumping cacio e pepe sauce, pediatrics for infants' longer feeding with garlicky breast milk, peace for modest alcohol improving foreign-language pronunciation, engineering design for smelly-shoe rack insights, and literature for a 35-year fingernail study; a recording will be posted to AIR’s YouTube, with an edited version on NPR’s Science Friday on Nov. 28.