A researcher who studied fingernail growth and a group that explored whether painting zebralike stripes on cows reduced fly bites are among the winners of this year's Ig Nobels.

Nobel Physics Laureate James Peebles attends a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden Saturday, Dec. 7, 2019. Didier Queloz was one of several Nobel laureates who spoke about climate change at a news conference Saturday in Stockholm. “We'd better spend our time and energy trying to fix it.”Several other Nobel winners also urged that climate change be taken seriously. The remarks came as a two-week global summit on climate change is taking place in Madrid. Esther Duflo, one of the Nobel economics laureates, cautioned that dealing with climate change “will require a change in behavior, particularly in the rich countries” that are heavy consumers of goods and energy.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for research on alleviating global poverty. The trio pioneered an approach to poverty reduction that was based on carefully designed experiments that sought answers to specific policy questions. Duflo, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the youngest person and second woman to be awarded the prize. Kremer, a professor at Harvard, used field work to test how school results could be improved in western Kenya during the mid-1990s. "This year's laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty," organizers said in a statement.