A clip from the Chris Simms Nature Magazine article
LITERATURE
The late physician William Bean, for persistently recording and analysing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.
PSYCHOLOGY
Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac, for investigating what happens when you tell a narcissist — or anyone else — that they are intelligent.
NUTRITION
Daniele Dendi, Gabriel Segniagbeto, Roger Meek and Luca Luiselli for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza.
PEDIATRICS
Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp for studying what a nursing baby experiences when their mother eats garlic.
BIOLOGY
Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Naoto Aoki, Say Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichi Ueda, Hiroyuki Hirooka and Katsutoshi Kino, for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like stripes can avoid fly bites.
CHEMISTRY
Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich and Frank Greenway, for experiments to test whether eating Teflon [a form of plastic more formally called ’polytetrafluoroethylene’] is a good way to increase food volume, and hence satiety, without increasing calorie content.
PEACE
Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field and Jessica Werthmann, for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.
ENGINEERING DESIGN
Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal, for analysing, from an engineering design perspective, “how foul-smelling shoes affects the good experience of using a shoe-rack”’.
AVIATION
Francisco Sánchez, Mariana Melcón, Carmi Korine and Berry Pinshow, for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats’ ability to fly and echolocate.
PHYSICS
Giacomo Bartolucci, Daniel Maria Busiello, Matteo Ciarchi, Alberto Corticelli, Ivan Di Terlizzi, Fabrizio Olmeda, Davide Revignas and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti, for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can yield an unappetizing dish.