Overview

• At the 35th annual event produced by the Annals of Improbable Research at Boston University on Sept. 18, Nobel laureates presented the prizes during a digestion-themed show complete with a mini‑opera and the tradition of paper airplanes.
• The Biology Prize went to a Japanese team whose zebra-like paint on cattle cut biting fly landings by roughly half, pointing to a low-tech alternative to insecticides.
• The Aviation Prize recognized research showing Egyptian fruit bats fed alcohol flew more slowly and altered their echolocation, analogous to human speech impairment when inebriated.
• Physicists won for mapping the phase behavior of cacio e pepe to prevent sauce clumping, including defining a ‘mozzarella phase’ that explains how starch and temperature stabilize the emulsion.
• The Chemistry Prize honored work on polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon) as a nondigestible satiety additive, which yielded a patent but no FDA approval and abandoned human trials despite animal data showing weight loss without observed toxicity.