From the Vault: The 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes

it always makes for a fun episode. We tend to come back and do them after Halloween. Is generally our first post Halloween episode or thereabouts. And so yeah, this is last year's selection, and we'll give your heads up that the next new episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind will be some selections from the Ignoble Prizes. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio's House to Works. Hey, Welcome

to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are revisiting a yearly tradition. That's right. Every year, pretty much about this time, we look and see what was honored at this year's Ignoble Prizes. The prizes themselves come out. I believe that the end of September or the very beginning of October timing for us, Yeah, because that's when we want to get into our Halloween content, and so we always do.

We just steamroll ahead into the Halloween content. And then afterwards, uh, you know, after especially after the dust is sort of settled on the Ignobele Prizes, the mainstream media coverage of the event has died away, then we come back and we picked through the winners and sometimes we cover absolutely everything. Sometimes we cover a few choice selections here and there, and that's going to be the mo all we're going

to be employing here. Yeah, we're just gonna take a look at a few highlights that stuck out to us. So for those who haven't heard before, a quick refresher on the Ignobles. Yeah, they've been awarded each year since by the publication the Annals of Improbable Research. The purpose of the award, according to the editors of Improbable Researches to quote honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. Furthermore, they stressed that the ten

prizes aren't necessarily meant to pass judgment on the winners. Instead, the official website emphasizes that the prizes quote celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people's interests in science, medicine,

and technology. And the principal individual here is editor Mark Abrams. So, yeah, every year it is just a it's you know, it's making fun of the idea a little bit of the Nobel Prizes, uh, which which celebrate, you know, key advancements and and and key examples of work that are really pushing forward are our understand ending of ourselves and the universe, nature. And the Ignoble Prizes tend to highlight more absurd intreats, but none not necessarily intreaes that are you know, that

are completely useless. And I think that's an important thing to stress, and something we've tried to stress in the past when covering the event is that studies that are honored by the Ignoble Prizes maybe snick or inducing. They may seem a little silly at first glance, but they are all works of real science, of real ingenuity, and if nothing else, they are expanding hoping to expand the

the threshold of human understanding. Yeah, I mean, I think one of our favorite things to explore on this show is realizing that there's an interesting question in a place you wouldn't have expected to find it, and that's what a lot of this research does. And so on that note, let us turn to the first Ignoble Prize winning study that we would like to highlight here today, and that is the two I was in a nineteen Award winner in physics, awarded to Patricia yang at All for studying

how and why wombats make a cube shaped poop. Wombats are so cute they are there. They are so adorable to look at. I mean, obviously the babies, any baby animal is going to be adorable, but even the adults look like living Teddy Bear creatures, like living Teddy bear marsu fiels. I bet they're just nightmarish, you know, it's given how cute they are. I'm sure they kill thousands

of people every year. Now, I mean, to be to be clear, they can protect themselves, and sometimes they do harm humans if provoked or I think there have been cases where like there was a wombat that had the mange or something like that and was therefore a little more agitated. So yes, there they can. They are kind of tough customers in their own right own right, They're not straight up wolverines or anything, but they can. They can look after themselves. So this particular paper, how do

wombats make cubed pooh uh? Came? This was presented at the seventy furth Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, And I believe this is presented in Atlanta, Georgia, where of course we record the show. Yeah, I think at least part of the team is Georgia Tech, right, yeah, yeah, So the species here, vombat us your sinus, is a pudgy herbivore roughly the size of a kind of a thick dog, like a really thick dog, and it's a marsupial.

They have pouches, but since they're burrowers, they have backward pouches so as not to fill the pouch up with dirt and endanger the young one that may be within the pouch. So interesting, so like if they're pulling themselves forward on their belly through the dirt, the dirt does not go in, right, yeah, because we can all imagine the cartoon scenario. They're just filling up with dirt, right.

They have a slow metabolism. They feed mostly on grasses and roots, and they're largely nocturnal or crepuscular, you know, so they're gonna you know, they're not going to venture out, usually in the brightest light of the day. They may come out though on particularly overcast days, and they can again, they can put up a fight if threatened. And you'll find them in Australia and in Tasmania. They're cute. They're not endangered, despite being treated as vermin by some farmers.

And oh I love this. Groups of wombats are are sometimes called a mob, sometimes just called a group, but sometimes they're also known as a wisdom of wombats. Oh man, that's better than a murder of crows. That is. I just imagine these wise, cute, elder wombats that have so so much wisdom to share with the world. I don't mean to be mean, but they don't necessarily look wise. They do look they look more clever than wise. Well what would you what would you refer to them as

It's like a snuggle of wombats. It would be a snuggy of wombats. That's pretty good. A slank it of wombats, A slank it of wombats. I like that. But one of the more puzzling attributes of the wombat has long been their poop, because it is cubic. And we're not talking necessarily perfectly cubic in a Mattris geometrical sense, but yet for a world mostly devoid, pretty much completely devoid of natural squares, certainly natural biological squares, this is pretty

darned cubic. Yeah, totally. I mean, if you come across these things in nature, you would think they were made by humans. Yeah. They look kind of like chocolate marshmallows, like really square chocolate marshmallows. If you see a picture of them, yeah, not the cylindrical marshmallows, like the more old school like carved out ones with corners. Granted, I think the images were both looking at here, they're dried a little bit, but still even fresh out the shoot.

They are there. They are cubic in nature. It is really hard to imagine how these things are made just picked. I mean, I don't know how much time one wants to spend contemplating a wombad anus, but like, it just doesn't seem like a normal thing that would emerge physically from a what I would assume to be rounded anus. Well, the wombat anus is not immune for the the inquiry of science, and that's where Yang and her team come in.

Uh And again, yeah, Yang is local, based out of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, where she's a post doctoral fellow. Uh So, since she's local, maybe

we should have her on the on the show. Because she's not just a one time Ignoble winner, she's a two time Ignoble winner because she and co author David who also shared the two thousand fifteen Ignoble Physics Prize for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals and empty their bladders in about twenty one seconds plus or

minus thirteen seconds. I don't know the plus or minus thirteen seconds buys you a pretty big window there, but yeah, I find myself very often thinking about this one in the bathroom. So, having turned away from the world of urine, the researchers were interested by this puzzle of the wombat poop, so they looked at how differences and wombats digestive processes and soft tissue structures informed this curious structure. So they investigated.

They used the digestive tracks of wombats that had been euthanized following motor vehicle collisions in Tasmania. Uh so you have to you have to have some actual bodies to look at there, and then it seems like a reasonable way to go about getting them. They found that the shape occurred towards the very end of the intestines. As the matter became increasingly firm, it became clear that quote varying elastic properties of wombats intestinal walls allowed for the

cubic formation. And the result is a cube, the only organic cube and nature, they say, and it's not made yang stresses by the two typical human methods of creating cubes. We because we tend to mold a cube or we cut a cube. Right, we slice a cube out of something via you know, subtractive manufacturing. But this is a third way. This is the way of the wombat where it is it is It is formed through the you know,

the excretion process of the lower intestines. So this would be not cutting a cube, not molding a cube, maybe pinching a cue cube yeah, pinching cube and then excreting a cube. Now you're probably wondering, well, what is the why of all of this? Right, if the wombat is doing something entirely different with its poop, there has to be a reason. Well, scientists believe it comes down to the fact that these burrowing nocturnal herbivores depend largely on

their sense of smell. They largely communicate by smell, and therefore, like various other animals that are also smell dependent, their fecal matter is their calling card. I mean, you have a dog, you know how the how they behave that the sort of the the the the heightened importance of fecal matter in the dog world. Yeah, out on a walk in the neighborhood. Poop is like a Facebook status update.

It's like, you know that you're interested, you want to check it out, Like we just see something we don't want to step in. Maybe the in the sense data there is just telling us not to step in it. But to a dog with heightened, far heightened sensibilities, there's a lot of data in the sense emerging from that poop. It's interesting stuff. And so while it's something like a while something like a cat hides its poop because it doesn't want to be known to either it's many prey

animals or it's many predators. Wombats are a different matter. Today. Wombats don't have many natural predators, uh so certainly adult wombats, and they use their piled feces to mark territory and to communicate with other wombats. And and they don't live on a prairie. Their ups and down to the topography of their natural habitat. And placing their poops at higher elevations such as a tops, some rocks, on top of a log, or on a ledge, it makes it stand

out more visually to other wombats. And again they don't have great great a sense of sight, but still you put it up there on a ledge, more wombats are able to see it, and then the wombats can come in and take a more informed a smell of the

wombat poop and learn something about about its maker. So the wombat rectum is sort of designed by evolution to create poop monuments like testaments to the will of the wombat that occupies this territory, poop that stays put basically, which is interestingly quite the exact opposite of the round goat feces and many of you've probably seen emerging from the rear end of a goat, which is believed to have evolved to roll downhill and essentially self hide in

hilly or mountainous terrain, so as better maybe to throw off a cougar that could be pursuing yours. Right, Yeah, like for the goat, it's better that the poop just gets lost, but for the wombat, the wombat has very specific needs. They require the poop to remain in sight and to be found. And so yeah, it's basically with the wombats, it's it's highly adaptive to be able to poop cubes that stay put. It's part of their language

of expression. Now, naturally there are potential bio mimetic possibilities here. In the future, yet, says, we might see human created cubes produced not by molding or cutting, but by this sort of excretion. So I can't help but wonder if this will be the future of our Valentine's Day chocolates. Oh yes, like a like a mechanical industrial anus for

pooping out chocolate and exactly that shape, exactly delicious. So that's the Physics Prize, and uh yeah, I just love this story because wombats are such interesting creatures and and this is ultimately extremely insightful like this is this is not this is something that, yes, it's laughable because it's poop poop from a cute marsupial, But on the other hand, it's it really it illustrates something amazing about evolution, and it also highlights where we might go in the future

when it comes to making cubicle candy. And if you want to learn more about this, Patricia Yang also has a website Patricia Yang dot net. Excellent. Well, maybe we should take a quick break and then when we come back we can talk about dirty money. All right, we're back dirty money. This is this year's Economics Prize for the IGNO Bells. This went to Habibkadek, Timothy A. Voss, and Andreas Voss for testing which country's paper money is

best at transmitting dangerous bacteria. The paper was called Money and Transmission of Bacteria in Anti Microbial Resistance and Infection Control in and So the authors here start out with a pretty obvious fact. Cash gets handled a lot. It changes hands. You touch it, I touch it. Tom Atkins probably touched it. Ted goes to the bathroom and then he touches it. You sneeze, then you handle it. Then

you pay for your lunch with it. Somebody pays me the gambling debts they owe me with that same money. It seems like a pretty obvious vector for disease transmission. When you were a kid, you probably heard this, and if you, like me, are a parent, you've probably said this,

don't put that money in your mouth. It's filthy, right, I mean, for some reason, when I was reading about this research, the thing that kept popping into my mind is that episode of Parks and Recreation where you find out that all the pawnees sit us drink from water fountains by putting their mouth over the fountain part. I

had completely forgotten about this until you mentioned it. Yeah, there was also a skit from the Upright Citizens Brigade right, Yes, that we can't go into full detail about here, but you can probably figure it out. Somebody who chose to pay for things with the fouled pennies that they themselves

had intentionally be fouled. Right. But as we know, not all physical substrata are equally hospitable to germs So the authors here tested different national currencies to see how well they transmitted various multi drug resistant bacteria, including methicillin resistance Staffylococcus aureus or m R s a UH, an extended spectrum of beta lactomaces producing E. Coli and vancomycin resistant, and Tero coxi or vr E. So here's the method.

The author has got a bunch of different bank notes from different countries, including the euro, the US dollar, can Adian dollar, the Croatian kuna, the Romanian lou, the Moroccan deer ham, and the Indian rupee. And they first of course started off sterilizing the cash with UV radiation. You don't want to bring in any pre existing germs, uh.

Then they inoculated the money with incubated strains of the bacteria they were testing, and then the cash was left out to dry for several lengths of time, I think three hours, six hours, and twenty four hours. And then the experimenters tested which bank notes allowed bacterial colonies to survive after the various drying periods. And then in the second experiment, they also tested the effects of people rubbing

the bank notes with sanitized hands. Would the would the bacteria transfer from the infected bank notes to people's hands. So which money came out on top? Well, the Romanian

lou was one of the most germ friendly. It yielded all three drug resistant pathogens after three and six hours of drying, and it was the only currency that still had a path the gen after a full day of drying, and that pathogen was vr E. The Canadian and US dollar yielded only m R s A. So I assume it's the U S money that Scrooge McDuck swims through in his vault. Oh well, maybe he had it purified, you know, because I've always heard the scroogeman Duck was

actually a bit of a germophobe. Oh yeah, they take after Howard use. Yeah. Okay. So the Euro yielded only the E. Coli strain after three and six hours, and vr E after three hours, the Rupie only v R E. The Croatian Kuna did not yield any of the pathogens at any period. So in the second stage of the experiment, they studied the transmission of bacteria from bank notes to

hands after rubbing. The Euro did not transmit bacteria to hands, but the US dollar and the Romanian Lou did, and they make sure to point out that all the money was sterilized with UV radiation after the testing, so it was safe to return to circulation. Uh. And the author there's also a point out that this means the type of bank note paper in circulation could have epidemiological implications. They think major variables here are probably like the materials

used in creating the fiber of the bank notes. The Romanian lou, for instance, which seemed to be the most germ friendly, has plastic content that is designed to improve durability and make it harder to counterfeit, but it also seems to create a more pathogen friendly environment that many of the other fibers and materials used in paper money don't create. So this would be like the when we've we've ever handled currency that basically has like a little

clear plastic windows in it. Uh. Yeah, it could be that, or it could be more spread out through I don't know exactly what's going on with the Romanian loop, but it has polymer content that apparently is germ friendly or even you know, not just German friendly, but like antibiotic resistant germ friendly. But the Croatian kuna, you can take that and just stick it directly in your mouth. No, I mean I wouldn't recommend that, but it seems like in this particular test the kuna turned out very well.

So maybe this is something other countries should consider and test out when designing the next generation of paper notes. Maybe take some inspiration from how the Croatian kuna has made. It seems to be an inhospitable environment for all of the pathogens tested. I don't know if this is something that has ever even figured into currency design before, have like they ever considered how well currency transmits bacteria and

just how gross money is. Yeah, I mean, granted there is less of it that is used on a daily basis for many populations, uh, you know, using our cards more often, electronic payments, etcetera. But still there's a lot of cash out there, and it's troubling to think about how, you know, how dirty it is that you get sick for money? Uh, you know, not in a spiritual sense, which I think we're all accustomed to, but you know, in an actual biological sense. You know, even if it's kuna,

I just say, don't put money in your mouth. Don't put it in there, Okay. So also I wanted to talk about one, not for a long time. Just a quick look at the two thousand nineteen Anatomy Prize which was awarded to Roger Musette and Boris bin Gudufa for measuring scrotal temperature asymmetry in naked and clothed postmen in France. And it's not just postman this. They still they study bus drivers too, and then people whose professions you don't

even know. Uh. The original research was published in the journal Human Reproduction in two thousand seven. So humans are mammals showing bilaterally symmetrical anatomy. If you split us in half lengthwise, you will mostly see the halves as mirror images of one another. But we're not perfect examples of bilateral symmetry. You've got internal organs that are oriented off center. Maybe the heart is a little more to one side,

the liver more to the other, and so forth. Uh. And apparently this extends to some aspects of the human scrotum. So the authors here begin by noting a discrepancy in the anatomical literature. Is the human scrotum on average hotter on one side than the other. Uh? Some previous reports said that it's equally hot on both sides, while others reported that the left side of the scrotum is generally

hotter than the right. Interesting, and of course this comes down to the fact that, of course, on one side is one testicle, on the other side is the other testicle. And of course part of the whole uh design of the testicles has to do with the fact that there's a there's an importance of maintaining certain temperatures. Absolutely, I mean this is highly reproductively significant information. Temperature of the male reproductive organs plays a role in gamme eat production

and thus in fertility. So in fact, the major biological purpose of the scrotum, as you alluded to, seems to be thermoregulation to move the testicles near or away from the body to help keep them as close to optimal temperature as possible. Yeah, this is why sometimes if if fertility doctors may ask, okay, are you are you going to a hot tub all the time? Do you have a really hot laptop setting on your lap a lot? You know these sorts of questions because you know they

are susceptible to outside temperatures exactly. So, the authors here wanted to get new data to help clear up these discrepant reports, and so their methods were quote retrospective analyzes of scrotal temperatures in mid age twenty to fifty two years, measured every two minutes with probes connected to a data collector in three experiments, so three different experiments. They tested this out both naked and clothed in a number of

different body positions. They also tested it on yes postal workers who were working in a standing position for ninety minutes at a time, and they also tested out on bus drivers who were working in a sitting position for ninety minutes at a time, and they found that, especially in the clothed state, left scrotal temperature was higher, significantly

higher than right scrotal temperature. Now why is this? They offered a number of possible explanations, including differences in blood flow and cutaneous heat receptors, bilateral differences in testicular volume, so if like one testicle is bigger than the other,

that might also affect temperature. But then finally, one thing they pointed out as a possible explanation is the resting position of the penis, which really seems to naturally go more one to one side than the other, and they signed a study from nine by Bogart at All that found that the penis is naturally positioned to the left in about eighty nine percent of cases. So really it was an inside job the whole time. It seems very

likely to be. This study is really interesting to and it is looking at like the clothed human and the naked human, especially because you really have to think at times like how, how to what extent does clothing, you know, change the definition of the biological experience? You know, oh sure, I mean, clothing is a technological innovation. It comes fairly recently, and our evolutionary history is reasonable to say this might somewhat change our reproductive behaviors and and how the body's

reproductive organs respond to the environment. So like part of the environment our bodies were shaped for might not necessarily be having like the testicles tightly packed against the body within some kind of container all the time, right right though, I mean to our credit like that that I think

was a huge accomplishment. Like if you think back to a time when when human you know, human beings did not have underwear, meaning they did not have as much control on like how tightly bound parts of their body were to their person. These are things that can get in the way of say, chasing after prey or doing you know, any kind of physical activity. Sure, but you're

saying there pluses and minuses. I think so, yeah, But then you know the other side is, like the human body, the testicles have evolved so that they are there's a self regulation of temperature. Uh. The scrotum is supposed to be the one in charge of how closely compact the testicles are, not the individual who picks out their underwear in the morning. Right, So obviously this is a study.

We can all identify why this study is hilarious because he's dealing with French postman with or without their underwear on, and temperature differences between one testicle and the bus drivers too. Yes, it's it's even funnier actually if you start reading into the like their full explanation of their methods, because they talk about, uh, like the methods that are used to

determine testicular volume. There are like units of measure for that, and I think like special special apparatus, uh, some that's called like an orchidometer or something. This is the probe that was mentioned. No, I think that I think the orchidometer. The problem is something like that, it's to measure testicular volume. I don't know exactly what the deal with the probe was. They didn't like have a diagram that I found. But still, again, this gets down to human biology re reductive system. So

it is an important study. Sure. I mean, as we said at the beginning, of testicular temperature is reproductively significant. This could be useful in a clinical setting when studying

things about fertility, right. I mean, it's not impossible to imagine it could influence underwear design in the future either, either reasonably so with you know a situation where a doctor is saying, like, okay, we it makes more sense for both testicles to be the same temperature, so we're going to create underwear in which the penis is positioned out of the way of the testicles, or perhaps more likely, you have a situation where somebody who just wants to

sell some underwear looks at this study and this starts saying, Hey, you don't want to be one of those asymmetrical testical temperature people. You want to have both testicles the same temperature, and the only way you're gonna do that is by buying this special pair of thirty dollar underwear well against

that person's marketing concerns. I think the study found that while the I think the major differences were when people were clothed, but they're also were some asymmetries even when people were naked, depending on like what position they were in. All right, well, on that note, we're going to take another break, but when we come back we will discuss diaper changing machines. Alright, we're back. Why does the idea

of a mechanical diaper changer horrify me? Yes, it horrifies me, and yet it is also I think a grand goal in human technology. Yeah, that's kind of utopian. It's like, at the same time enticing and terrifying. It's a thing that you want but you know you should not have. It is the very sort of thing that Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park would be irate over right. They were so concerned with whether or not they could they

didn't stop to think if they should exactly. So, I've changed a few papers in my time, and uh, and I think I've even wondered about the possibility of a

robot robotic diaper changer. It's the kind of thing you fantasize about as you are essentially wrestling with an infant or a toddler, and especially the infant, trying to to to get at the foul diaper off of them, all the while keeping them from say, getting their own foot into the poop, uh or and then then flinging the poop on the wall with said foot, trying to avoid being pete upon, especially if it's a boy, and then if there's a girl. There are other concerns about about

where and where you don't want poop. It's it's it is a high. You know, we talked before about how driving is a cognitively demanding task. Changing a baby's diaper is a cognitively demanding task, and uh, and so you you you fantasize, you think, I really wish a robot could come in here and do this. But on the other hand, I don't think a robot could. And I feel like this has also been exit. I feel like

that the Jetson's probably had a diaper changing robot. I could find no evidence of it, but I feel like this idea has also worked its way into fiction in the past, and so this year's Ignal bells. The engineering prize, in fact went to Iranian inventor I'm men of Fara Bakas for inventing a diaper changing machine for use on human infants. Now, this is a patent. It's US patent number one zero zero three four five two, granted on July thirty one, two thousand eighteen. And I'm going to

read to you from the abstract quote. A washer and diaper changing apparatus includes a main chamber, a glass window, a seat, a leg holder, a safety belt, a diaper removing arm, a sprinkler, and a dryer. The main chamber is configured to receive an infant therein. The glass window is placed on a top wall of the main chamber. The seat is movably coupled to the main chamber and

configured for placement of the infant on the seat. The leg holder is movably coupled to the main chamber and configured to support at least one leg of the infant. The safety belt coupled to the seat and configured to retain the infant on the seat. The sprinkler is placed inside the main chamber and configured to spray water to wash at least a portion of the infant, at least a portion of the infant. Yes, like some too, I

guess all of the infant. Why why am I? Why am I picturing those like sealed up self cleaning public bathrooms that got in some places like it came across these in Switzerland. I don't know I've seen one of these. It's like a public bathroom. You go in, it's a small little building, and then you use the toilet, and then when you're done, like the door shuts and like a light comes on outside and it says like cleaning. Oh wow, that sounds remarkable. I guess they're a little robotic.

I don't know, sprayers and wipers and stuff in there. I don't know what happens on the inside. I couldn't see. Surely somebody has has trapped themselves and found out, I should hope. So I have to admit. What it made me think of was the surgery pod in the sci fi horror film Prometheus. Uh. Horrifying scene, but I think actually one of the most effective parts of the movie.

Oh yeah, yeah, because if if you haven't seen it. Basically, the idea is that it is a surgery pod created for a specific male individual and an elderly individual, and the supposed to take care of any needs that that individual has. And then our heroine in the film eventually has to use it to remove a zeno more from herself. But she's having to sort of uh improvise with the machine,

and it's terrifying, just like not so much even. I mean, certainly it's terrifying when the thing starts cutting into her, but just her climbing into it realizing what's about to happen, makes for some some great sci fi horror. Uh so yes, I thought about that throughout reading this patent. However, the pattern does have some sketches, and when you look at them, the design looks less like a high tech surgery pod and more like a washing machine or an oven dishwasher.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, a dishwasher, not a washing machine. Yeah, it's like a front loader, but it doesn't have a spin cycle, not to this version. Maybe a future model will so um A man of Patobakas is an associate professor of Islamic Azad University in Iran, and his engineering research involves nanostructures and nanoparticles. So he's so this is a legit engineer here that has developed this. Uh, And

here's a little more from his patent quote. The apparatus may be said to be automatic, and some implementations in that once the infant is placed inside the apparatus, various steps may in some cases be carried out automatically without needing the operator to touch the infant or interact manually with the diaper or infant during the changing process, which may create a more sanitary environment for the ambient area

and the operator's hands. So I I looked for more background on this concept and I wasn't able to find much to really shed light on just like how serious he is with the proposal as and you know not as and is he does he seriously see this as a place our technology will get to the human lifespan? Or is this more of a sort of an engineering thought experiment. If you could create this thing that we sometimes fantasize about existing, how might we go about it?

What might an apparatus like that look like? Sure? Because

I mean again jokes asiety. As you mentioned earlier on, it is a job that people really probably would like to outsource if they felt they could do it safely, and if it if it is a thought experiment, though, it is kind of a perfect thing to think about when contemplating the idea of having machines that operate alongside humans or upon humans in a human environment, because I can think of very few examples of such a highly sensitive and specialized job for a machine than changing the

diaper of an infant, because granted, we desire a mechanical baby changer, because number one, it's a gross job. Number two, it can be challenging or frustrating to do, and number three, it absolutely has to be done. Yeah, it is a job that is in extremely high demand and nobody wants

to do. And certainly we've already thrown machines at jobs that felt that all three of these bullet points, such as sewer cleaning robots, you know, creating some sort of a mechanical device that goes through like a pipe and helps clean it out or at least go down there and look and see what the clog might be. But there's far less risk in cleaning a sewer, right right, Yeah, unlike a clog in a city sewer system, a human infant is one the most valuable thing in your life.

Number two, it's afforded legal protection like it is a person and if you if you don't take care of it correctly, you could go to prison. And also it's susceptible to pain and injury. Getting more into the personhood part, like this is this this is a human child and not a sewer clock. However, like a clock, the baby is limited in its ability to fend for itself, which which I think also ties into the horror of letting

the machine have a go at the diaper. Now, granted, we already live in an age of robot assisted surgery, such as various you know, prostate surgeries, but in these cases we're talking about the machine having an advantage in a in its ability to use tiny instruments that humans would would have, you know, a little more difficulty operating.

And then there's also going to be a human operator in the room for those and I guess presumably with this diaper changing device, the language of it tend tends to imply that it's sort of hands off, or it could be hands off the robotic baby changer. However, it doesn't really benefit from tiny tools. It doesn't really have an advantage over human hands or more specifically, human ability

to roll with what is often a puzzle again. How to wipe the poop without the child getting a foot in the poop, how not to be pete upon, how to keep the child from rolling over, grabbing the diaper and flinging it, etcetera. You've ever performed this task, you know that a lot of things can go wrong and will go wrong on the diaper changing table. Yeah, I mean, I see a huge difference here in that robot assisted surgery is not for the purpose of allowing the doctor

to not have to do the surgery. Likes to like increase the doctor's capability to increase increase the efficiency of the surgery. And I do not see a way in which having the machine involved improves the efficiency of changing a baby's diaper. As such, I would say that this sort of machine seems to me to be more of an end game of robotics, because creating machines that can work alongside us in human habitats, that's challenging. Word, It's it's hard to imagine a more challenging place than the

than the diaper changing station. To throw a machine, uh though, that's you know, one of the reasons perhaps that he was pursuing the patent, you know, kind of again kind of a mechanical thought experiment, and it does serve as an interesting way to discuss home robotics. I mean, I think this highlights interesting questions about the future of robotics and and it reveals our intuitions that that are already there about like what are the kinds of places where

least comfortable with allowing robots to be implemented. I mean, even if you came up with a pretty good robotics system that worked pretty much all the time, people still probably might just not feel comfortable with like allowing robotic arms to be moving around near their near their baby, right, like one of my very understandable reasons. Yeah, Like like one of my I think a very positive area of robot exploration is in elder care, particularly in among the

Japanese robotics companies. And in that case, to you, you're looking at aging population with fewer individuals to look after them. And also you're dealing with environments where if, for instance, if you need help getting up and down from a toilet, which is something that you know that that cannon will happen with with individual of advanced age, that might be the kind of situation where you would say, yes, I would prefer to have a robotic helper with to engage

with me in a situation like that. However, you know you're still dealing with you know, you know, a rational individual and not a complete infant. Who again, it's just so many problems come to mind when you imagine just sticking the baby inside of the diaper changing device and letting it do its thing. Like best case scenario, you put the baby in and you just get an error message.

It's like trying to operate any printer or all you want to do is is get this one thing done, But there are a million things that can and do go wrong, and you just end up having to do something else, change the diaper yourself in this case with printers. I think we've talked about this on the show before,

haven't we. That like printers seem to follow an inverse law of technological advancement, where like as most technology becomes better and better and more and more user friendly, printers always go in the opposite direction, Like every year they get worse and more incompatible with everything. Oh yeah, the last time I went to buy one, I was thinking, you know, Apple makes pretty good uh computers, got they make a pretty good printer. How I'm going to buy

that printer. I don't care of its over priced, And of course they don't make a printer their printers that are compatible with their machines. But it's almost as if they're like, no, we're not touching that. That's just too complicated.

It would be bad for our brand a printer. We'll do the printer when we do the baby changing robot, all right, So we're gonna go ahead and call it there, because let's see, we covered pooph We covered more poop, more poops, qurotums, bacteria you might associate with poop, right, Yeah, the diaper robots really just a good haul overall. Now, once again, we did not cover all of the winners here. We didn't even list them. There were some more interesting ones.

There was one about the health effects of eating pizza, specifically Italian pizza made in Italy. Does it prevent cancer? Stuff that one get picked up in in the media

a lot. Yeah. There's another one that I think we want to return to at some point, just as a follow up to an episode we did earlier this year about the facial feedback hypothesis, And this had to do with the psychologists involved in early research on the facial feedback hypothesis participating in failed replications of their own work, and and that leads to an interesting, bigger discussion about uh you know, the role, like how you communicate scientific

validity and whether effects are quote real or not. Uh So that's worth revisiting, I think absolutely. If you want to check out the full list of twenty nineteen winners. In fact, if you want to check out the full list of all winners from the very beginning of the Ignobles, head on over to www. Dot Improbable dot com. That's, of course Improbable Research. There the publication that puts out

the awards each and every year. And if you want to check out past episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind, go check out our past Ignobel Prize episodes, because again we've been doing them every year. We always come. Sometimes we cover all the winners, sometimes we cover just a selection of the winners. But with without fail, they always highlight some some wonderful studies that all so invoke laughter every year. It's frank delicious. They make you laugh, they

make you think yes, yeah. And if you want to check out all those episodes Stuff to Blow your Mind, dot com is the website if you want to check out our other podcast, Invention pod dot com is the place to find Invention, a journey through human techno history. Believe what, it's November right now. We're doing a lot of food related inventions over at Invention, including canning, which which is really fascinating you if you take it for granted,

but canning technology is amazing, no doubt. Check it out huge, thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.