Overview

• The ceremony took place in Boston on the night of September 18–19 and presented ten prizes across disciplines.
• Italian researchers won physics for showing how to prevent clumping in cacio e pepe, highlighting the role of starch concentration and water balance.
• Japanese scientists earned biology for demonstrating that painting cows with zebra-like stripes reduces fly attacks.
• Other animal-and-food findings included lizards in Togo pilfering hotel leftovers with a preference for quattro formaggi pizza and bats losing flight ability after ingesting alcohol from fermented fruit.
• Further winners examined infants’ reactions to garlic-flavored breastmilk, modest alcohol improving foreign-language pronunciation, a Teflon ingestion experiment on satiety, smelly shoes diminishing a shoe-rack user experience, and a posthumous literature honor for decades of fingernail growth records.