Cockroaches producing energy-rich milk bag this year’s chemistry Ig Nobel prize

The 36th Ig Nobel prize ceremony – which celebrates research that ‘makes people laugh, then think’ – saw an international team of researchers take home the chemistry prize last night for finding that milk-producing cockroaches are more efficient than cows.

Leo Chavis, Subramanian Ramaswamy and Nathan Coussens accepted the prize on behalf of the whole team. The trio took centre stage, adorned with cockroach hats and t-shirts, to sing a song about their research journey, while advocating for cockroach milk as an alternative dairy source. The team used x-ray crystallography to analyse a milk protein from the only known cockroach that nurtures an embryo inside the mother’s body (Diploptera punctata), revealing that the protein contains three times more energy than milk proteins from cows.