You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Guess what, Mango?
What's that?
Will? I know you're curious, but I want to see if you can guess. Do you know why I'm wearing a tux today? Is it because it's Monday night in Alabama? That is right? You know I love doing that. But actually there's an extra special reason, and that's because it's the forty third annual Part Time Genius Awards. Mango, that is right?
How could I forget? But remind the listeners? What are the Part Time Genius Awards again?
Well, seeing as this is the forty third time that we're doing this, I'm surprised anyone is asking at this point. But the Part Time Genius Awards are our look back at some of the greatest things to happen last year and honoring them with our very prestigious prize, starting with the twoenty twenty four Old Factory Award aka the Golden Nose Award.
Mag I am on the edge of my seat here, So who is getting the Golden Nose this year?
Well, this year, the twenty twenty four Golden Nose goes to drum Roll please Professor wyn Who at the University of New South Wales and Sydney for developing a smartphone sensor called Vibe Milk. Now, Vibe Milk uses your phone to send vibrations against the milk bottle or carton, and then it reads and analyzes the freshness. That way, I
can tell you if your milk has gone bad. And so instead of having to smell your milk or make everyone in the room smell the milk to see if it's spoiled, you can just use your phone and save everyone the trouble. How revolutionary is this manga?
I already love this because my wife Lizzie does this all the time. She like she smells something awful. She's like, no, you have to smell this, yeh.
You smell.
I hate that you just smelling yourself.
Yeah. I'm playing the role of in my family. I make everyone smell and I'm relentless. I won't stop until they do smell it. But Vibe milk actually works. So, as Professor Who put it, quote, you can smell or taste of milk is off, but that requires opening the package and doing so exposes it to bacteria and that accelerates spoilage. So Vibe Milk is non invasive, which means you can test the freshness of the milk without breaking
the seal. That is really cool, and the ideas that you can use it at home or even at the grocery store before you buy the product now. Currently, Vibe Milk is a ninety eight point four percent accuracy rate for detecting spoiled milk, and the high tech methods should help us reduce dairy waste in a pretty big way. Actually, But that's just the first of a whole bunch of very important awords we're giving out today, So let's dive in.
Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm here with my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer and sitting behind that glass holding a conductor's baton and queuing up a whole bunch of orchestra music to play us out if we start taking too long, that's our good Palin producer Dylan Fagan, So mego. I'm glad we're finally doing this award show.
I know I always get jealous of other places that give out awards around this top of the year.
Like who are you? Who you think about the Nobels, the MacArthur Foundation, who else.
Yeah, I mean them too. But I also love the weirder awards, like the Ignobles, the Bulward Lytton Award, which gives out an award for the worst first sentence in a novel. But my absolute favorite is the Bookseller Prize for Oddest Title of the Year. And every year, honestly, every year I went to see which title wins. Actually, I'm just gonna pull up the Wikipedia page and read out a few of my favorites. And these are all real books, by the way. So in twenty ten, managing
a dental practice the Genghis Khanway. One. In twenty twelve it was a goblin proofing one's chicken coop, which is a chestnut obviously. Some other winners include how to Avoid Huge Ships, bomb Proof your Horse, and one of my personal favorites, the dirt Hole and its variations. They are all that great.
That sounds gross.
Yeah, anyway, I am really hoping that we can slip in some of that, like energy and joy and silliness into some of these really great innovations we're honoring for this year's awards.
You know mego, you did forget one, and this was back in our mental floss days. And I'm not sure if they were just scared of us being, you know, litigious or something, which is funny to me thinking about anybody being scared of us. But I don't know if you remember that book. It was called Dental Floss for the Mind. It was like talking all the way around the idea of the pun mental floss. But you remember
this book, of course I did. I thought it was hilarious that we had a couple friends send it to us, just because I still have it on my bookshelf here. But anyway, I am all into the silliness and all the great innovations and everything that we're talking about today. So where do you want to start?
How about we start with this year's Aerodynamics Prize, which we are also dubbing the When Hippopotamus's Fly Award, and this goes out to John Hutchinson from the UK's Royal Veterinary College. And this year Hutchinson realized that when a hippo is running at full tilt, the hippo is actually airborne for fifteen percent of that time. Oh wow, Now this is important research because hippos are apparently very hard creatures to study because one, they are mostly lulling about
in the water during the day most days. But also you do not want to run into a hippo at night when they tend to go on land, and that's because they are incredibly skittish creatures. A full grown male can weigh up to nearly ten thousand pounds and they will run you over. Also, they have terrifying teeth.
They do have terrifying teeth, which everyone in our generation would know from playing Hungry Hungry Hippos, which also happens to be the game that probably made my heart race more than any game out there. But anyway, it's funny because the animals are so goofy looking that I just assumed they were kind of gentle and sweet. You know, you'd look at them and you'd think so.
Yeah. I actually thought hippos were sweet too, mostly because I have this old story in my head from Victorian
times about Obayes the hippo. I'm sure we've mentioned this on the show before, but back in the eighteen hundreds, they brought this hippo from Africa to London and it was like the first time a hippo had been in Europe since ancient Rome and actually the first time one had been in England since prehistoric times, and it was like an immediate sensation, so people cued up for hours at the London Zoo just to get a glimpse of
the creature. It actually made about twenty eight million pounds in today's currency because like people were just waiting to see it, and there was like a real hippo mania. Now Obsha been trained to do some basic dance moves like a promenade and a pivot and some other things, and there was a poka composed for him. The hippo was so famous that Charles Dickens was jealous of it.
Like anywayzing all.
Of that made me think hippos were sweet, but in fact hippos actually killed over five hundred people a year, which makes them the deadliest land mammal, more dangerous than grizzly bears or big cats. Isn't that insane?
Yeah, that's pra It sort of reminds me of the Eddie Izzard bit where he's like, you kill enough people and it almost starts to be impressives.
But back to hippos taking flight, because hippo behavior makes it hard to monitor them. Hippos haven't been studied that much, but Hutchinson and his team realized that they could actually visit the animals and watch their movements at a local resort in North Yorkshire. It's called Flamingo Land, and then his team did all this painstaking frame by frame analysis of watching hippos run, and as Hutchinson told The Guardian quote, it is mind numbing. It's one of the things in
my work that I hate the most. It is really boring, agonizing.
Wow.
But what he learned is that while hippo's only trot, which means like their diagonal pairs of legs are moving and touching the ground at the same time.
That kind of feels like, what is this like the sport race walking like they've always got a foot on the ground or something.
Yeah, that's what everyone thought, except they would be disqualified because when they're moving at top speeds, the trot turns into flight as the hippos go airborne for zero point three second bursts. And that said, from what I can tell, the hippos are only like a few inches off the ground, so it's not like you're going to see an air bud style movie about hippos anytime soon, but it was still pretty wonderful.
Yeah, well that is fantastic art.
Well.
For our third award, we are diving into the category of medicine. Now, there were a ton of exciting and important discoveries in medicine this year, including there's just a few that we took note of, the first pig kidney transplant, where a genetically modified pig kidney was put into a living human. You had a new tiny catheter that removes blood clots from the brain, which is incredible for stroke patients.
And of course there's a new category of weight loss drugs that will help things like prevent diabetes and heart attacks along with just helping people get slim. So lots of things to choose from. But for this year's first ever twenty twenty four Medicine Award aka the No Pain, No Gain Award, we're giving it to Live in a Shank, Tom and Fedai and Christian Bush. So I'm probably getting those names wrong, but the spirit is there for their advances in placebos science. Now we aren't the only ones
to recognize the trio. They also won the Ignoble Prize earlier this year, which you mentioned, but placebos are a fascinating thing. So the fact that you can give someone pills or saline injections and somehow trick their brain and body into acting like they've receive real medicine has always been fascinating to me. And I didn't realize this, but the American Medical Association actually considers it ethical to use
placebos to enhance healing. Huh. And that's partially because placebos have been shown to be effective in pain management and signaling to the body that medicine is on the way. But the reason we're giving this trio of Swiss, German and Belgian scientists the award this year is because they showed that they can actually make placebos more effective by having the placebo cause side effects.
That is so weird. So how did they figure this out?
Well, this reporting comes from New Scientists, the magazine to Know You and I are both fans of. But in the study, the trio got seventy seven volunteers to test a nasal spray that they claimed contain the painkiller fentanyl. Now, first they had people use the nasal spray. Then they applied a hot object to this subject's skin and ask them to raise the pain but there was actually no fentanyl in the study. The scientists used two different placebos for the nasal spray. One had capsation in it, the
spicy compound found in chili peppers, and one didn't. So the capsation spray triggered a little burning sensation when people sniffed it, which made them think that it was the side effect of fentanyl. Anyway, people who took the capsation placebo felt less pain in the trials, hence the conclusion that placebos are more effective when they cause side effects.
But what's funny is that this new knowledge might actually be used on real drugs, because if you had a very slight side effect to establish drugs, you can actually increase the treatment expectations in people's minds and up the effectiveness. I just thought this was so interesting. That is wild.
That's really crazy that you'd add a side effect to a real drug. Yeah, yeah, wow, that's amazing. So we're on to Award number four, which is twenty twenty four's Best Villain aka the Mister Clean Award. Now, to be clear, we are not in the habit on the show rewarding criminal behavior, but thirty six year old Damon Voinilovich made a name for himself this year when he broke into a house in Wales. He broke in, he did a bunch of laundry, cleaning and chores, and then drank some
wine and left. And according to a BBC article, Voilovitch actually tigied and swept the place. Did the laundry and hung it out to dry, mopped the floors, placed groceries in the fridge, refilled the bird feeders, emptied the recycling bin, put gardening tools away in the shed, whatter the plants, put new toothbrush heads on the toothbrushes, and cooked a meal for the homeowner, which he set out next to a bottle of wine, a glass and a bottle opener
with a note for them to enjoy it. During this breaking and entering, he also helped himself to some wine and food, which I guess feels fair now. Apparently, two weeks later he was caught in someone's hot tub after he showered in their outdoor shower and washed up, and he was about to head inside. After all this, jacuzziing to start his tidying process. Unfortunately, part of the reason he's been doing this is because he was unhoused and
out of work. But of course that's not a reason to break into a stranger's house and start cleaning it for them. So the people who saw him call the cops, and he's actually currently serving twenty two months in jail. But we are hoping that once he's out, all the good press and maybe even this very important award will help him find some quick work.
Yeah. I bet he's feeling a whole lot better after winning this award. But I would happily give someone a good bottle of wine if they did all my laundry and came and then mopped our floors for us.
Oh my god, I'd give them two bottles of wine. But that's my limit. So what award should we give out next?
All right, well, I feel like it's time to go to the financial side of things, So how about we give out the twenty twenty four Economics Award aka for the Birds Award, And this goes to the owner of Cheesy Toast Shack in Saint Andrew's, Scotland, where they've come up with a novel financial product called Seagull Insurance. Basically, the Cheesy Toast Shack is swarming with goals and they're very aggressive and very good at swooping down and nabbing food.
So I was actually at the beach last summer in Maine and I was walking out with a bunch of food from the stall for my family, like you know, carrying burgers and fries and whatever, and this seagull swooped down and just sold some fries for me, and I was both horrified and also so impressed, Like it moves quickly and it snatched it so precisely. I was almost like, well done. You know, it's really amazing.
Yeah, it really is. And you're right, I agree, terrifying when that happens, but you obviously know what it's like to lose food to a seagull. But apparently whenever it happened at the cheesy toast shack, the mom and pop business felt bad for the victims, so they'd give them free replacement food. And it starts to add up. You can imagine if it's happening all the time. So they tried a bunch of things to keep the goals away.
They played the bird calls of predator birds like hawks, and they did this over like the loud speaker there, and they tried flying kite shaped like the predator birds to scare the seagulls away. None of it worked, and so finally they came up with this novel solution of offering seagull insurance for an extra pound on top of the six seventy five for a cheese toast meal or is boring one put it peace of mind for a piece of sandwich.
I like the well, congratulations to the cheesytoast shack. It is well deserved. Okay, So next up we have the twenty twenty four Pieace Prize aka the Tough as Snails Award, which goes to entomologist doctor Valerie Corone from France for
her efforts to improve human snail relations. Now I actually had no idea about this, but in Australia, invasive species of Mediterranean snails are a really destructive force that should cost the grain and cereal industries about one hundred and seventy million dollars in damages per year.
Oh a lot of money. So what are the snails actually doing?
Well? They definitely eat the crops, but they also leave mucus on plants, which contaminates them and deters other animals from eating them, which actually throws off the ecosystem. But the biggest problem comes to the fact that the snails climb up these tall crops right about the same time they're supposed to be harvested, and then the snails go
into a hibernation. So all of these snail shells end up getting into the harvesting machinery, which gems up the machinery and it just throws everything off.
The only thing I'm confused about here is remind me, why are we giving out a peace prize here?
Yeah. So, doctor Coron, along with the help of a few other labs, figured out how to deter the snails. And the first thing is that everyone thought snails were color blind, and they are, but it turns out that they're actually really attracted to the color red for some reason, which means that farmers can put red steaks or fake red stalks into the ground and lure the snails away
from their prize crops and then collect all these pests. Also, Coron and the team discovered that snails are held by garlic. Maybe because it feels like foreshadowing to end up, Cooke does es cargo, But between some garlic seasoning and painting the farm red, the two discoveries actually should help farmers out and make for better snail human relations.
Okay, you brought it around. I like that snail human relations the Peace Prize, all right, Well, the next award also involves food, but in a very different way. And I know we really don't like to get political on this show, but this next award is for international law. Now it goes to Superior Judge Craig Bobet of Allen County, Indiana.
But I've got to say this is probably the most controversial judgment to come out of Indiana since eighteen ninety seven, when the so called Indiana Pie Bill proposed to change the value of pie in the state from three point one four five, nine, two six to a simpler three point.
Two, which obviously doesn't work for math, or engineering or anything else. So what is this new controversial judgment from Indiana?
All right, now, I hope you're sitting down for that. But it's that tacos and burritos should be considered sandwiches. Sandwiches, man.
No. I mean, I know that there's so much controversy over whether a hot dog is a sandwich, but I have never heard anyone debate whether a taco is a sandwich. No, first, well, do you think it's a sandwich? I'm not sure where I stand on this.
No, I mean my feelings are that that that tacos are just kind of their own thing. We have a hard time just acknowledging that sometimes things are their own thing. You know, that's my philosophy and life. I'm gonna get a t shirt. Sometimes things are their own thing. I like the tacos are not. They're just not a sandwich. And I don't even have a great defense for it other than just saying that they're tacos.
How about you, Yeah, they seem like tacos to me too. Yeah, they're tacos. Are tacos, So tacos lad tacos. That's always what I say. And and honestly, you know, I get it. I'm not the judge here, and that's the very brave man and legal scholar, the honorable Craig Bobay.
Now you might be wondering why it is that Judge Bobe had to rule on this important issue, and this story goes back to a Fort Wayne strip mall where
a local joint called the Famous Taco opened up there. Now, the Famous Taco had the blessings of the developer, but apparently there was an agreement with the local condo association that only made to order sandwich restaurants could open in the Strip Mall, so you could put a subway there, but fast food places like McDonald's, RB's, and Wendy's weren't
allowed to set up shop. So for Famous Taco to continue serving food there, the Planning Commission insisted that there would need to be an amendment to the Strip Mall's prior agreement with the condo association. But Judge Bobe stepped up and he declared the taco and the burrito are Mexican style sandwiches, paiding the way forward for other sandwich esque food shops to open up, including places that serve euros,
bond me or even Kati role. So actually, I kind of get it, and I got to give it to them for the creativity on this.
I love that in Indiana now you can legally say I want a sandwich for lunch and someone will respond what kind of sandwich? And you be perfectly within your ris to say a taco sandwich.
Talk it is. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point, all right. So what's the next award I'm hoping it's not quite as controversial as that.
I think it's time to do the twenty twenty four Botany Award. But before we get to that, let's take a quick break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're giving out the forty third annual Part Time Genius Awards.
Yeah, forty third. It's amazing that we've been doing this for this long, but it's historic, very important, and I was about to announce the twenty twenty four Botany Award.
I cannot wait for this one, Mango. So so who's it going to.
Well, this year's Bondani Award aka the You Light Up My Life Award goes to Keith Wood, Karen Sarkisian and Ilia Jampolski from the firm Light Bio, and they came up with a way to make petunias gently glow in the dark. Now, over fifteen years ago at Metal Class I'm not sure if you remember this, but we talked to this chef who's the head chef at this restaurant called Moto, and he was trying to make a glow in the dark tomato plant.
Yeah.
The idea was that you could grow tomato plants in your house. But by tweaking the genetics, the tomatoes would actually act as gentle night lights. And it was such a cool idea. But I also remember we were, like, you know, confused whether or not we'd feel comfortable eating a glow in the dark tomato. You know, it's a
change of mindset anyway. Scientists have been trying to make glow in the dark plants for a while, mostly by inserting the luciferase gene from fireflies into plants, which can work, but in the past the plants have only glowed under a black light, or they've needed expensive specialized food to make them glow. But with this so called firefly petunia that the scientists have come up with, they actually used
a group of genes from some bioluminescent mushrooms. Now, according to Scientific American quote, the fungus feeds its light emitting reaction with the molecule caffeic acid, which terrestrial plants also happen to make. By inserting the mushroom genes into the petunia, researchers made it possible for the plant to produce enzymes that can convert cafaic acid into the light emitting molecule lucifern and then recycle it back into caffaic acid, enabling
sustained BIOLUMINESCIN. So basically, as long as you water the plants and you give it enough sunlight, it'll grow and glow for you.
That is actually amazing. I will be honest, I wasn't actually that excited about this award before you talked about it, but now now it's one of my favorites so far. So what does it look like exactly?
Yeah, so the plant is white during the day, but it glows this faint green at night. And you can actually buy the plant for about thirty dollars, which feels like a lovely thing to have, like lining your garden path or whatever for the summer nights or whatever. But what's interesting is that the scientists picked petunias for a
very specific reason. The plants aren't native and they aren't an invasive species, so there is very little risk of the petunia's modified genes spreading to native plants or disrupting any ecosystems.
That's very cool and very smart. All right, Well, it is time for the twenty twenty four Fashion Award aka the Wild Style Award, which I know you've been waiting for Mango.
Yeah, this one is always one of my favorites.
I know.
In the past we've given it to the makers of the eighties style tracksuits for chickens, which is obviously a good look for any chicken. Also, we gave it to one of the Japanese designers who made the baby mop, which is a onesie with the dust mop stitch to the bottom of it so that babies who are crawling around your floor can pitch in on housework and learn responsibility and a healthy work ethic. But it's very curious to see what we've got plucked for the Serious Fashion Award.
I'd forgotten about the baby mop. If you don't have to somebody coming in your house and stealing your wine and cleaning your floors, you can just use a baby but true, all right, But this year's award goes to artists Sarah Ross and her design for Archasuits. Now, the designs which she created a while back, just came to our attention this last year and their response to the
hostile architecture in cities. And this is something that we've talked about before, but hostile architecture includes things like benches that have bars, on them for every seat so that the unhoused people can't sleep easily on them, or slope surfaces and big planners in public spaces to prevent sitting or skateboarding anyway. This defensive style of architecture is basically targeted at populations that don't have homes and make it uncomfortable for them to rest there. So Ross decided to
make some leisure whear to counter this. Her Arcasuits are four absurdly designed leisure suits that have fins, sloped backs, and other cushionny pieces to fill in the negative space so that you can sleep comfortably on a bench or on a slope, or even help you sit comfortably against a fence. Actually, I'm just gonna show you a pick, because these things are pretty incredible.
Oh, these are brilliant. Actually, it's really really fun so funny, and they look ludicrous, but I love that you can just like lie down on a bench with them. It's absolutely and I actually love how it's calling attention to the ways we think about public spaces and think about our neighbors as well. That's really wonderful.
Oh totally. I mean the design feels very humane, so our esteemed prize committee thought she deserved a prize. But here's the thing, Mango, We've actually only got one more award. So do you want to do the honors?
Oh? I would love to. So being a podcast, of course, we've got to give out an audio award aka the Lift Every Voice Award.
All right, and who's it going to?
So the twenty twenty four Audio Award goes to an assistant professor of bio engineering at the University of California Law, Los Angeles. His name is Jun Chen, and he invented a tiny throat patch that can help people speak without vocal cords.
Oh wow, that's incredible. So how did he come up with the idea?
So apparently, Professor Chen was lecturing at the university for a few hours, his voice began to wear out, and he started thinking about how to solve this problem, not only for people like him, but for people who can't speak, and that led him and his colleagues to invent a little patch that you can stick on your throat. The patch uses AI to decode and translate muscle movements into speech, and amazingly, it doesn't need a battery to work because
it uses the muscle movements to generate electricity. And I learned all about this from the site Oddity Central, but I really really love it.
It's amazing, like what a little patch can do.
Yeah, apparently, when it's been tested in the lab, the algorithm is about ninety five percent accurate at decoding a person's speech, both when the person is speaking aloud but also when they're pronouncing words voicelessly, which is just super cool. Anyway, there's still more designing to do before this hits the market, but you know, it's this very thin, very small, multi layered patch and it is really incredible.
Yeah, you know, we finished with a couple of really inspiring ones. I love that, And what a great way to end with a contraption that gives the voiceless voice. So that is it for our forty third annual Part Time Genius Awards. You can catch us later this week with a new episode, and if you want to read more about these incredible innovations and stories, be sure to visit us on Instagram on our handle part Time Genius. But from Dylan, Mary, Gabe, Mango and me, thank you so much for listening.
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me mongs Chatikler and research by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey.
For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.