Now really.
Really now really hello, and welcome to really know Really with Jason Alexander and Peter Tilden, who humbly suggests that not subscribing to our show is a terribly ignoble thing to do. And speaking of Ignobel, we've all heard of the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Literature, Science and Medicine Prize as well.
This episode has absolutely nothing to do with any of that.
But if you come up with an idea that is an unusual or trivial or bizarre achievement in scientific research, well then we have an award for you. It's called the ig Nobel Prize, and anyone can win it if their idea makes you laugh and then makes you think really,
no really. The prize was created by today's guest Mark Abrahams, who has awarded it annually since nineteen ninety one, and the awards are handed out by genuine Nobel laureates as they honor and celebrate the unusual, the creative, and the imaginative. To be prepared to learn about woodpeckers and concussions, an unusual childbirth device, and the importance of fish farts.
You heard me write, folks, fish farts. Here's Jason and Peter. So this was one. This was you brought this to my I did not know that this was the thing. I did not know it was the thing either.
Now we all know that if you if you come up with something brilliant genius, especially in science, mathematic, literature, the art, there's a very prestigious award called.
The Nobel Awards.
I did not know that if you come up with something that is just upside down, inside out, backwards, nuts, out of its mind, strange, odd, seemingly funny, there's also a no war called the ig Nobel Awards.
And that's our really, no, really, there's an award and the premise for the award is if it makes you laugh.
First makes you laugh, and that makes you think it makes.
You which is really and I want to ask our guest about that, as far as do most awards and do most scientific breakthroughs come where everybody goes, that's frigging genius, right right, jet Goo, like the guy's wife goes.
You gotta tell everybody who did they go?
You're out of your mind and it takes time. So our guest is Mark Abraham's who created this yearly award actually ten awards every year. He's also the editor and publisher and does everything for the Annals of Improbable Research, which comes out Is that bi monthly?
Still more?
You know, that's a confusing word. I've been doing this for a long time. I'm still not sure what buying means. It comes out every two months?
Oh, every two months? Every two months? Is it scept annual? Is that what it is?
And I got it six times a year?
Yeah? First of all, Mark, how did you get let's say, hi? And how did you get involved in the six Welcome to You thought what you were doing it was ignoble. Hi, Hi, how are you there?
Back in nineteen ninety I was doing very different stuff, and I, since I was a little kid, used to collect odd things and write about them and other stuff. I decided to see if I could get something published if I sent it into a magazine. So I sent a bunch of stuff to a magazine and then a few weeks later we got a phone call from a man who said, Hi, I'm the publisher of the magazine. Got your articles? Would you be the editor of the magazine.
But this is how I became the editor a science magazine.
I'm laughing only because I'm going, what what when you're a letter? Article arrived, the guy was gone. Thank god, somebody finally contributed. We've had nothing. We got one guy immediately knock him up the food chain already.
Yeah, it was. It was a glorious thing all around. So I started doing that on top of what I was doing, and suddenly was meeting all kinds of scientists, inventors, all kinds of people who've done all kinds of unthinkable things. A lot of them were very very funny things, but also really obscure. And I kept thinking, most of these people are going to live their whole life something, They're going to die and nobody will ever know they did
these things, and that's wrong. Somebody should do something. I realized, well, we can do something small. So we started this little thing nineteen ninety one. And it's a long story, which is not interesting. Why we called it the Ignobel Prizes. So we had a name picked, a bunch of winners. I had met a lot of scientists, so I invited a bunch of people who had Nobel Prizes to come to this ceremony we were having, and they all said yes.
I had been introduced to somebody at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who ran the museum there, who knew the history of my magazine a lot better than I did, and told him this idea of the ceremony. He said, you have a place to hold it, No, do you want to have it here? Sure? So we had a nice place to have it. The Internet was really small at that point, but we put out a notice on the Internet saying the first annual Ignobel Prize Ceremony will
happen on whatever the date. It's free this year, but you've got to have a ticket in advance, and to get a ticket, go to MIT to some particular audience on Tuesday afternoon at noon. Tuesday afternoon at noon, there were more people than tickets, one hundreds of miles, so we had the place packed. I'd also in those first months met a lot of reporters from a lot of places. So that first night we had winners, We had Nobel
Prize winners to hand out the prize. We had more people climbing the sides of the building than could fut inn. We had reporters coming from many countries, and we kept I think I can speak on behalf of everyone who was there that night. We all had the feeling that at any moment, some grown up person would walk into the room and tell us to stop this and go home.
But nobody did. And the next day and after that, we started getting lots and lots of publicity around the world, huge amounts, and because it happened to work so well, you know, we got lucky that first year. The next year we could do it on a much bigger scale, and that just continued and continued, and the fifth year, I guess we moved it down the road two miles from MIT to Harvard.
And I know you the actual physical award changes every year. Do you remember what the first one was?
It was, Yeah, you might have this in your memory. You could go into the worst toy stores in existence and you could buy a little plastic mirror that had some electronics and a battery inside and if you press the button, it would scream at you. That was the prize. And we try to keep the same spirit every year and designing our own prizes that we build.
My favorite is the ten trillion dollar bill.
You know, there are a lot of prizes that give money, sometimes a lot of money to the winners, and we never had any money, so we never thought about it, and then one day we realize there's a way for us to give a lot of money to the winners. And now each winner or if it's a team, the winning team gets ten trillion dollars. They get a ten trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe, which is worth maybe four bucks if you buy it on any day which is long.
And also the person responsible creed for printing those ten trillion dollar bills, doctor Gideon Gano, who's head of the national bank in the country Zimbabwe, won an Ignobel prize for doing that. In mathematics, all of these things, once you know a little bit of the lightest bit in any direction, you see really unexpected stories. He wrote a book to explain to his adoring public why he did this.
And at the same time he was printing bills and actually the largest was a I think one hundred trillion dollars face value on a single bill. The same time he was having the government print up bills same size with a face value of one cent. And he explained there was a reason for doing this the large value and the tiny values, said that when you're spending a large amount of money, you still have to make change.
One of my one of my favorite physical prizes that I saw on the website was it's simple, but it's kind of brilliant. Is they beautifully framed sort of box, you know, glass covered box with a hammer inside and a Blacklis says, in case of something like in case of emergency, break the glass, put the hammers on the inside.
It's just it's fantastic.
Well, everything about this, you do ten of these and words every year. As a matter of fact, this this, well you're get They give ten at the one and this was the thirty fourth coming up the third congratulation to thirty fourth award show correct.
Thirty fourth first annual.
Yes, and you are the masters ceremony. So I guess you should just rump in out. Can I give you my favorite of all that I've read, and then you'll go through some in Jason's favorite too?
Yeah?
Sure, My favorite It still is that they were trying to figure out submarine noises.
So yeah, can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Sure? Be sure you want to hear it.
I want to hear it.
All right, we gave a prize this would have been about what two thousand and two or three or four somewhere around there. It was to two teams of scientists, one of them in Canada and Scotland and the other in Sweden. They'd both at the same time done the same thing, didn't know they were both doing it, and both of them had discovered that there were these odd little metallic clicking sounds like click click click click click click click clicklick really fast, and that that was coming
from Herring, and that it was Herring's farting. And so they speculate that this might be a way that Herring's communicate with each other. That's why we gave them the prize, and they met each other, these two teams for the first time after Superman.
Your mother's name is, My mother's name is.
But the best part of the story we didn't learn until about fifteen or so years later. One of the Swedish scientists who had done this told me the other side of the story. He said, this was top secret, so nobody. We could not talk about this until recently. But it's been enough time that we can talk about it. But the public doesn't know the other team. They were researching Herring. That's why they heard this. We weren't trying to do any research on herring. We didn't do that.
We did it because the Swedish government, the Prime Minister, asked us to do some research. Because this was about thirty or so years ago. The Prime minster of Sweden was very angry because the Soviet Union at that time had sent a submarine that got washed up on the rocks and got stranded, and he was convinced that they
kept sending submarines to spy on them. And he kept getting up in public and announcing that there are more submarines and we've got further evidence, and they're hidden underwater, but the evidence always dissolved, and he was getting really embarrassed and frustrated. So he directed the Swedish Navy to get a bunch of the best scientists in Sweden to under top secrecy do research on all aspects of this.
They put microphones underwater in Stockholm Harbor. Stockholm's the capital of the country, and they heard these clicking sounds, these metallic clicking sounds, which the Navy decided obviously submarines. We got the proof, they told the Prime Minister, who said, I'm going to get up and announce it, and he double checked with all the scientists who said yeah, yeah, yeah, except for these fish biologists who listened to it for about a minute and said, that's not a submarine.
That's fish.
And you give us, give us a couple of days, tell you exactly what kind of fish. And they pretty quickly discovered it's herrings. They could do it, they could take you know, even a dead herring, put it underwater in a fish tank, squeeze it. And the Prime Minister did not want to hear that. He said, no, it's submarines. I am going to announce this. So the best part of the story to me is what happened next these
two science these two biologists, these two scientists. Sweden said go ahead if you want, but if you do that, we're going to get up and tell the public that no, we've got the evidence that it's herring's parting. And the Prime Minister back down and never made an announcement.
One of mine that I was particularly dre onto. I guess because I want to know. I just I want to know the inception transmission of gonea rhea through an inflatable doll.
Yeah, I have questions about that.
What was was it? I can imagine a number of scenarios. One could be somebody said, hey, there's a proliferation of these sex toys and sex dolls, and I wonder if it is safe and healthy to use them without protection that we would use with a real person. Or if somebody, you know, suddenly acquired a case of gonorrhea, as I swear I haven't been with anything other than this sex doll, and had.
To then verify what was the impetus to do the study.
Here's the story of it. This was a doctor in Norway.
So it's always the Netherlands.
The story is that there was the captain of a ship who came in. He was the patient. He had a case of gonorrhea. This was the ship had stopped in Greenland. That's where the doctor and the nurse were working at the time. So it's a you know, sort of isolated place. Sure, and I believe that there are laws on the books that said any medical people who treat certain sexual diseases have to try to track down where did this come from, so that they can try
to keep it from spreading. The patient did not want to talk about it, but they really pressured him and he told the story. The story was that he had gone and knocked on the door of one of his crewmen who wasn't in, so he opened the door and he saw this inflated sex doll and it made use of it, and a few days later they landed somewhere and he discovered he now had a disease and he went to see the doctor.
Oh my god.
And the doctors treated it as they could treat it with drugs pretty easily. They were kind of amused, and they also did some research to see it's possible. Yeah, see, you know, is there a history to this? Are there recommendations? And discovered that this is probably the very first time that this had ever happened, transmission of gone rhea through
an inflatable doll. This is a good reminder that when you sleep with an inflatable doll, you're sleeping with everyone who ever slept with that inflatable doll.
Colonoscopies. The guy who did the research who try and prevent people from exploding during a kolonosky? Is that true? Oh yeah, tell us about this. It's all fascinating.
We've given two prizes about colonoscopies. That was the first. They're very different from each other. Okay, there is a history of this in the probably the nineteen fifties, but I'm a little vague on exactly when. There was a point when colonoscopies started to become almost routine. But before that it was rare that they would be done. And part of the reason it took a while was that it took doctors a while to figure out how to do this safely. Think about what has to happen there.
They want to look inside you, deep inside idea, So they have to get something inside, and they're going to do it from one end rather than the other. It's a lot easier the journey from there. It's dark in there, so they need a light that they stick in there, and it's also cramped, so they need to expand the thing so they can see. So what they do to expand it is they would put gas inside you, and they use oxygen at the beginning, and then they would
put a light inside there. And in the fifties, every light they used generated heat, so they're putting oxygen inside you and then heating it. Patients, they were having patients who explode it there happened fatally exploded some of them.
Yes, how do you come out and tell me wife. We got good news, no problems.
But it's.
One of the things that the medical profession learned fairly early in this was that you do not use pure oxygen.
Yeah.
So that was the first Nobel prize related to colonoscopy. The second prize was more recent, maybe about ten years ago, to a doctor in Japan who wrote about why he did the first self colonoscopy.
Because it was Saturday and there was not much going on. What do you mean why my sister was ill? Wow?
Yeah, he came from Japan over to Massachusetts, came to the ceremony and we gave him the prize. Nobel Laureate handed him the prize, shook his hands, and he gave a speech, and then he did a little demonstration on stage.
No, no, yes, yes, Well is this like a lapeta main kind of thing or was there entertainment and what do you know?
Stuff coming out? This is stuff going in?
Oh my wow? Or do it?
You know what it looks like? And and if you look at his paper in the Medical Journal, he drew a little cartoon of himself so you can see what it looked like.
He did this on the stage.
Yeah, well, not the entire procedure. We didn't have time.
How much of the procedure did he do on stage?
Just just the start, just enough so people could get clear on what was going on.
Mark, you're.
You want to know why he did it?
Go ahead? Oh wow, I'm on the edge of my z. How could I not all right?
All right? No, you want to know why he did it?
Oh wow, I'm on the edge of my z? How could I not all right?
All right? They do klonoscopies mainly because there are diseases, cancers or the biggest one that they might be able to catch early enough to do something about it. And most of what used to be called advanced countries around the world do that to a lot of the population now, but not in Japan. In Japan, this is as this doctor explained it in the paper and to us that in Japan the population in general is frightened of colonoscopies, so it doesn't happen much there, and he wanted to
figure out why are people so scared? So he's trying all sorts of stuff, including trying it on himself so he could first and see what was going and then from the publicity from this he was hoping maybe this will get people laughing and curious and they'll start relaxing and start having And he said, the cancer rates for those kinds of cancer are much much higher in Japan than in most other countries. So it's kind of a serious thing.
So he did it to an example, So he's the Katie couric basically.
On a serious note.
Though, you know, when I have a call and Oscar me I'm I'm out, they put me out. I I can't imagine if he's doing this, if he really did the full procedure to himself, remaining concia.
I mean, it must be.
If you want, if you ask them, they won't put you out.
It's there's not asking.
There's discomfort, but not a lot of pain. And it can be interesting.
The folks that receive it.
Other than it's it is acknowledgment, and it is kind of fun and and and perhaps in its own way has become prestigious.
Is there anything in it for them other than that? Does it? For instance?
Has has something that's won the Ignobel ever gone on in some other form to become uh, I don't want to use the word more serious science, but has it become more practical?
Has it actually turned out to be.
One thing to think about is all the stuff that we get taught in schools about science, all these great discoveries and inventions and stuff. The picture I always had from the way I learned stuff was, you know, so and so came up with this idea, made this discovery, and everybody realized how great it was. That almost never happens. You know, you know, from your own life, from your own experience. Every time even a tiny thing, even in your household, that you figured out that made life better.
You tell whoever you're living with, how do they react. First of all, they don't want to hear it. Quite often they'll say, oh, that's stupid or that doesn't work. And this is what happens to scientists. This is what their job is. You know, Nine out of ten or more of the things they come up with, that's the reaction they get. But the rare ones that do go on to get used, especially if they turn into a lot of money around the world, then the story changes.
Then it's this great glorious discovery everyone recognized, and the real version that gets forgotten ye lost and one of them. And one other thing to think about, too, is what really makes these things. Funny is that everything we pick for a prize is way outside almost anybody's normal experience.
Well that's where that's where I am with the it's a typical force delivery to.
The Blonsky device. Yeah, a lot of people listening may have this picture deep deep in their memory. It's a drawing. It's a technical drawing from an old patent patent who's given in nineteen sixty five to a couple, a married couple, George and Charlotte Blonsky, and it's for what they describe as a device to assist a woman in giving birth by using centrifugal force. So this device, it's it's a
large round table with a bunch of machinery underneath. When the woman is ready to deliver her child, she lies on the table on her back. They strap her down to the table, and then the table's rotated at high speed and the child comes flying out this patent. It's a truly beautiful pattern. The drawings are highly detailed, they're beautiful drawings, they're very memorable, and the writing, if anything, is even better. The writing is the closest I can think of to describe it is. It's sort of like
Edgar Allan Poe. It's beautiful writing, and it goes on for pages, and most of the detail, and there's a lot of detail, is about the little and the big things they built into this machine to try to ensure the safety of the mother and the child. For example, there's a lot of stuff in there to put in what they call a speed governor something to make sure it doesn't spin too fast. Right, And so they sat
as a maximum. I think they they say, if you build this properly, the mother and the child will not ever, ever, ever encounter more than about eight g's eight times the force of gravity. Fighter pilots sometimes pass out less than that.
Right, top gun. It's top gun delivering a baby. Oh my god. And do they have the diagrams?
Do they have people stationed at different places in case the release happens at twelve o'clock or twelve fifteen or one thirty.
There's there is, there is, there's a lot of provision in there to do this. I became really fascinated by this. We tracked them down. They were no longer alive by the time we found them, and we gave the prize posthumously.
It's brilliant and By the way, one of the studies it's interesting that we talked about before you came on was the woodpeckers get headaches, which you go, haha, except the NFL adopted that one as far as some of the research right.
That was why they did this. This was a couple of doctors when British when American many years ago, and they were they're ophthalmologists, that eye doctors, and they were getting really concerned about exactly the issue you bring up, people getting whacked in the head sports or anything else and then getting brain damage. And they started wondering, why doesn't at least far as anybody can tell, this doesn't
seem to happen to woodpeckers. What's different? They started looking at how the woodpecker's head is built, and they discovered it's built in a very very different way. It's sort of they describe it as like a very well packaged FedEx package where the brain is protected if the if the blow is coming from that direction. And that was their whole purpose to try to persuade not as sir of the NFL, but you know, anybody to start protecting your head.
Well, I have to both thank and blame mark for two things, because one of their discoveries verify something I've always believed, and one of them is going to still give me trouble with my wife. The one, oddly enough, that will not give me trouble with my wife is that there is no direct correlation between foot size and genital size and a man.
That one I was very happy to see was proven.
Thank you for that, and thank you for the wonderful scientists they grow it us that.
But the the five second rule, the dropping just f to answer.
Now I know they got the answer, and the answer would have a say and I'm capsulizing, but it dropped.
No, if it may contact, it's a problem.
But I will d like sometimes I'll take my I have like one medication and a bunch of vitamins and supplements that I take in the morning, and sometimes a pill will drop on my kitchen floor. My wife goes throw it away. I go, are you out of your mind? It's a dry pill on a dry floor that is regularly cleaned. People walk there and I go, come on, come on. So I know it was proven. When they dropped something that had some viscosity to it onto onto a floor, it immediately picks up.
Germs or bacteria or whatever.
Have they ever run it with like you know, a dry bill on a dry floor.
I should go this.
This was a high school girl who did these tests working in a college lab over the summer. I think many scientists since then, professional scientists who have done the same thing, and what they found was just what you described that if everything's dry and clean, probably no problem. If everything is wet and sticky, well, profly don't want.
It's brilliant. You're brilliant.
You're brilliant, and you you bring joy to science and tech and medicine, and we will we will, we will remind people that they can watch on nineteen plans.
It's not just science techondmagine. We give a literature prize, office and art prizes when you prizes and anything as long as it's something that will make any anywhere laugh and then.
Think Mark, thank you very much, Okay, thank you Boom. There are a couple that we didn't get to by the way that I just want to and then we'll do our goga teim. That's that's just unbelievable. Let me start looking at the blond skis with the table just yeah, it still gets me let me sing here, let me see, let me see here.
Well, there was one that I love that thematically has been a part of our show forever. Go ahead, the chemist who extracted vanilla from cowpoop. We keep finding vanilla in the strangest places.
Are we running out of vanilla? I know we're running out of other stuff? Why are we going to gopher anals? The Starbucks?
Starbucks says, I'm sorry, right, vanilla, but we're squeezing stuff right now to try and find some more. What else do we have? Are there equal number of hairs and human nostrils? Somebody was doing that experiment mine cadavers. Let's see what else here?
I know that there was a survey, a preliminary survey of rhino to lexiomania in adolescent samples, meaning the preponderance of teenagers to pick their nose.
Oh, that was a big And they also had a sound.
Somebody was studying a sound that would annoy just teenagers and no one else could hear.
Here, I'm watching the Awards show this year.
We have to maybe on every year. It may be an annual for us. So, Gougenheim, what do you got, David Google?
Oh? Wow? Yeah.
Wow.
Wow. There's a lot of a lot of science, a lot of science, a.
Lot of science.
And you know me, I love science.
So I went up correction, I started reaching.
Because it's like, it's the Nobel Prize, right, but a lot of people think it's the.
Noble correct, like nobility, right?
Yes, So of course, how many Nobel Prize winners are no nobility?
Nobility? Okay? Interesting, you went down a weird rabbit too, too. Okay, we'll play some of.
The John Williams Strutt, the third Baron of Brawley, won the Nobel Prize Physics in nineteen oh four. And then there was this guy, Max von Lowie, a German gentleman, who again in nineteen thirteen won the Physics Nobel Prize for his diffraction of X rays on crystals.
And the interesting thing that I learned about him is.
He was born Max Lowie, but when his father became a.
Noble, they put the Vaughn in. That's how the Germans indicate no building. I not everybody that has won his noble, but that's where it began.
I'm like, oh, he also, in making that change, won the Jerry Lewis I love that name.
Of Mac lowy and that's why people don't know.
They say it is Jason Alexander, your real name.
His real name is Jason alex Vaughan Alexander. My you know my son did My son wandered in while I was doing research for this thing, and he said, you know, I've heard of the ig Nobel Awards. He said, I watched the documentary on people who were killed by their own invention.
Oh, this is the Darwin.
It's the great it's the greatest. I forgot the Sedgway or such Sedgway. Guy that a ride who wrote the Sedgway created it died on my favorite.
No, he he bought the company and and died on it.
Favor Darwin Award was the guy who was in a log cabin in the dead of winter and he was drinking and drinking, and he ran out of things to drink. So he's sitting in front of an open fire and he drinks the kerosene out of his kerosene lamp and throws up into the fireplace and the kerosene ignited on the vomit flow and he blew.
Out his lungs and goodbye.
Wow, And you're right about the Sedgeway by the way, and William Brody, I love this one. Deacon Brody of the eighteenth century Edinburgh is Sumputer, who had been the first victim of a new type of gallows, of which he was also the designer.
So that's it's reported. David.
Thank you, everybody listening, Thank you, and most importantly thank you Mark Abrahams.
Wow, because this show will make you laugh and make you think and then make you cry. And then wouldn't it be great if we want to make no better? Give you more farts than than than a head Ham School.
Of As another episode of Really No Really comes to a close. I know you're wondering why was the real Nobel Prize created?
Well, I'll award.
You with that information in a second, but first let's thank our guest, Mark Abrahams. You can follow market his website improbable dot com, on masted on, he is at Mark Abraham's on Facebook he is just Mark Abrahams and his podcast is Improbable Research.
Find all pertinent links in our show notes.
Our little show hangs out on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and threads at Really No Really Podcast, And of course you can share your thoughts and feedback us online.
At reallynoreli dot com.
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And now the.
Answer to the question why was the real Nobel Prize creed? Well, According to many sources, the prizes founder, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamites and other explosives, didn't have a wonderful public image. It's been said that when his brother died, a newspaper erroneously thought it was Albert who died and published the headline the Merchant of Death is dead. The obituary also noted that Nobel had become very rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.
This may have motivated did.
Nobel to create the Nobel Prize to let's say, enhance his legacy really.
No, really, really no.
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