Zebra cows and pizza-loving lizards win wacky science awards

Every year, a scientific - but also very silly - award is given out for strange, funny, and surprising discoveries.

It's called the Ig Nobel Prize, and its creator Marc Abrahams says: "Every Ig Nobel prize winner has done something that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think."

The 'Ig' is not short for Instagram, but is a pun on the word 'ignoble', which means not honourable or lower in status.

The name deliberately sounds like 'Nobel Prize', the very serious award given for amazing discoveries in science, medicine, and other subjects.

The Ig Nobel Prize is all about unusual ideas and silliness, but still involves very real science.

For example, winning the nutrition prize, a group of researchers from Togo tested which toppings rainbow-coloured lizards liked best.

They discovered that the lizards love cheesy pizza, really cheesy pizza - especially the four-cheese kind.

Sticking with food, a mostly Italian team won the physics prize for their work on a kitchen mystery: why does cheesy pasta sauce sometimes go all lumpy? And how to stop it.

Elsewhere the biology award went to a team of scientists from Japan who found that painting cows with black-and-white zebra stripes halved the amount of times they were bitten by flies.

They think it's because flies don't like the way the stripes reflect light and say this could help farmers use fewer insect sprays and also help protect cows from health problems associated with bites.

Tomoki Kojima, one of the researchers, told the audience in an acceptance speech: "This award serves as motivation for us to continue striving for excellence," as other researchers on the project attacked him with fake flies, before he revealed he was wearing a zebra-print shirt for protection.