Overview

• Ten studies were honored across disciplines, including work on pizza-eating lizards, garlic compounds in breast milk, and a 35-year log of a single fingernail’s growth.
• A team including Fritz Renner and Jessica Werthmann of the University of Freiburg received the Peace award for a 2017 study suggesting alcohol can sometimes improve foreign-language speech, while cautioning this is not a recommendation to drink.
• The Physics prize went to researchers including a Max Planck Institute team for identifying a phase transition in pasta sauce that can cause clumping.
• Other cited projects examined how smelly shoes affect shelf use, whether zebra-like stripes on cows reduce fly bites, if ingesting Teflon influences satiety, and how alcohol exposure alters bats’ flight and echolocation.
• About 1,000 people attended the Boston ceremony, which featured paper airplanes, comic sketches, short musical bits, and appearances by Nobel laureates.