A team of researchers from Japan wondered if painting cows with zebra-like stripes would prevent flies from biting them. Another group from Africa and Europe pondered the types of pizza lizards preferred to eat.

Those researchers were honored Thursday in Boston with an Ig Nobel, the prize for comical scientific achievement.

The year’s winners, honored in 10 categories, also include a group from Europe that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades.

The 35th annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony is organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think. It’s usually held weeks before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced.

A ceremony to celebrate the winners was held Thursday night at Boston University where winners were pelted with paper airplanes and feted by actual Nobel laureates

Singers also performed a mini-opera about gastroenterologists and their patients, inspired by this year’s theme, which is digestion.

Other winners included a group from India which studied whether foul-smelling shoes influenced someone’s experience using a shoe rack and researchers from the United States and Israel who explored whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume. There was an award for a dead researcher who spent 35 years studying fingernail growth and a winning study from a team of international scientists that looked at whether giving alcohol to bats impaired their ability to fly.