Ig Nobel Prizes 2018: Part 1

Terrible timing for us, like we're just getting going for Monster season and then they throw these in our past. But I think it works out too because then for us, because everybody can sort of read the initial press releases if you know, if you're if you're paying attention to them, to the science to science media, you'll probably pick up on on what one and then you can eventually check back in with us and hear us chat about it

as well. Now, these spirit of the Ignoble Prizes, if you're not familiar is they would say they follow the ethos of Professor Frank Right, Professor Frank, Professor Frank. He'll make you laugh, He'll make you think, Yeah, yeah, the Simpsons, Yeah, very very much. So, Uh, I have to we have to point out, as I think we usually do ignobles. In some cases, they rub some people the wrong way.

Some people don't see the humor in it. They maybe think that science should, uh should be a humorist affair and that we and or they think that that in some cases, uh, the honorees are being made fun of. But I think for the vast majority of individuals honored by the ignobles, uh, they get it, They get the joke, they see the value of it, and they realize that, yes, it's about having fun, but it's also about honoring legitimate

research as well. Yeah. I mean, so these are real studies, and it tends to focus on studies that are funny when you first look at them, but they usually do reveal something at least pretty interesting. I mean not always. Sometimes I kindaman, well, that's just pretty silly, But most of the time there's at least some kind of really interesting tidbit in there. It either moves the field forward in some unexpected way, or it gives you something to

think about. Uh, they do that, they Professor Frank. Professor Frank. So these have been awarded every year since by the Annals of Improbable Research, a humorous science publication that looks at various studies and whatnot. The purpose of this award, according to the editors of Improbable Research, is to quote honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make then make them think. Furthermore, they stressed that the ten

prizes aren't necessarily meant to pass judgment on the winners. Instead, as they they tend to emphasize that the prizes quote celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people's interests in science, medicine, and technology. And by the way, the principal individual here is editor Mark Abram's, editor of the

Animals of Improbable Research. Um, and I think that's important to the idea about spurring people's interests, because a lot of times do manage to highlight studies and papers and achievements in science then otherwise don't really rise, uh, you know, up in the headlines, or if they do, they only

rise in the headlines because they're funny. And so one thing that we like to do when we look at the ignobles is find Okay, are are there some of these that are actually kind of interesting when you start thinking about them? Do they give you something to ponder? Yeah? And in always we ask the question why is it important? And why is it funny? The second question is generally just very obvious and the kid go except for the

ones that aren't actually all that funny, which occasionally happens. Yeah, sometimes sometimes, but generally you're like, oh, yeah, I see why they honored that one. And in some cases I think we've mentioned on the show, a new study will come along and we'll realize, oh, that one that's going to get an ignoble at some point. Yeah, any study about like butts or bending over or something that's just it's just a shoe, and then it just naturally Nobell bait. Yes, exactly.

All right. So, now that we've established the ig Nobel Prizes and what they are for anyone it wasn't familiar, let's let's start jumping into some of the winners for two thousand and eighteen. Okay, Now, obviously we're not going to cover all of the winners in the same depth. Some we're going to engage with pretty deeply. Some we'll just sort of talk about pretty quickly. But I think

the first thing we should look at is maybe medicine prize. Yes, so this one honors Mark Mitchell and David Wartener for for using roller coaster rides to try to hasten the passage of kidney stones. Does this have practical utility? Well yeah, just just you wait. This was an October publication and uh, Dave Wardinger was the individual who accepted the honors at

the ceremony. So this one obviously links into an episode that you and I recorded years back, The Stone of Madness, which my name is Lubert nas because the episode dealt in part with the passing of kidney stones and bladder stones and what wait is it the Bosch painting? Is it Bosch? Yes, the removing of the Stone of Madness not from the bowels but from the cranium. Right, But the the idea is that there was like a removal

of stone surgeries in the early modern period. Was was kind of dicey, right, literally, like people were diced and sliced and then died horrible deaths on the operating table. But there's this painting by Herono Spash that makes fun of this guy who's going to try to get a stone and alleged stone cut out of his head, and he's like, please cut the stone. Master. My name is Lubert Doss, So I often think about that when I see somebody behaving foolishly in public. I'm just like, my

name is Lupert Doss. All right, Well I've I I don't know about you, Joe, but I've been fortunate enough to avoid kidney stones thus far in my life. If you've ever had a kidney stone, now I have not. Okay, Well, basically, what we're we're talking about here are hard deposits made of minerals and salts. They form, They can form inside your kidneys, and they often form when the urine becomes concentrated,

allowing the minerals to crystallized and stick together. Uh if they If they form, then your body tries to pass them, which can be painful. In some cases, doctors can simply give you a pain killer and instruct you to drink a lot of water to help pass it. But in other cases, especially if it becomes lodged in your urinary tract, surgery may be required to it. That's just I'm shivering

over here. So there's no dud, you know, definite single cause for kidney stones, but dehydration can certainly lead to their formation. Again the concentration of urine. Remember now, as the authors of this paper point out, some three hundred thousand US patients seek emergency care for kidney stones each year. And in addition to hydration saying you know, drink a lot of water or the administration fluids to other things that are sometimes used are positional inversion and external application

of force. WHOA, so what does that mean getting upside down or something getting upside down getting thrown around a little bit, And so I think everyone can can can realize here while why we're getting into the domain of roller coasters, uh, They point out that there have been reports of spontaneous kidney stone passage associated with both the roller coaster riding and bungee cord jumping. So somebody had kidney stones and then they're like time to go bungee jumping. Well,

and that was a little unclear the weather. It was a situation where if the individual knew they had the stones, I assume they knew, um, given the discomfort that is generally reported, but attached the bungee cords. My name is Lubert Dass. The problem though, is, they said, these these accounts they tend to be reported in like non peer reviewed publications or it's just kind of like word of mouth.

And uh. In particular, uh, they noted that they had heard numerous stories about people passing kidney stones after riding Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, a roller coaster at Walt disney World's Magic Kingdom thing part in Orlando, Florida. Uh. Yeah, they they had turned apparently heard various accounts of folks spontaneously passing the stones after writing it, Have you ridden this roller coaster? Joe? No, I'm not really a roller coaster person, and I haven't wait. Which one is that

Magic Kingdom? Oh? Yeah, I've been to that one, but not since I was a kid. I was probably too short to ride to it. Anyway, when I was there, it's like it has like a mining theme. I wrote it just like what last year the year before. I wrote it with my son and my niece, and it's a fun roller coaster. I'm not really a roller coaster person myself, but I enjoyed some of the roller coasters at Disney because they're just like really phenomenal productions, especially

the one that has a YETI in it. Did you get the black lung? The black light? The black long was not a featured add on when I was at Disney. But but this, this is a roller coaster that does move you around. It's it's not like one of those just crazy, um you know, one of those just insane rides that does that some people go for. It doesn't look like it's a design and to get a confession out of you, but it's still it takes you for

a ride. So they wanted to test it out. They said, well, let's go there and let's see what happens to some kidney stones. Brilliant, I'm in now. They didn't take individuals with kidney stones on board, so there were no human test subjects here. What they did is they took three kidney stones of different sizes, suspended them in urine, and then placed them in adult uteroscopy and reino scopy simulators, and then they took them for twenty rides, so sixty

rides in total. Okay, so they what basically got them in some kind of fake kidney kind of contraption. Yeah, there were some pictures of these in the paper and they one of them looks kind of like a prop from a David Cronenberg film, and the other looks like a it's like a crystal tree looking, you know device. It looks like it kind of looks like an award you might win for, you know, achievements in Kidney Stone,

Remove Horse something. So do you know if they had to have any kind of arrangements to negotiate these organs onto the roller coaster, like are they arguing with the ticket guy or what? They pointed out specifically that that care was taken to preserve guests, employ entertainment, joinment. Um. So, so I believe they had them inside of something hidden out of the way because they also mentioned specifically, uh,

and this is this is an exact quote. Uh. Bovine and poor sign renal models were deemed impractical as patients surrogates for study, owing to ambient temperature and the inappropriate display of such material in a family friendly amusement park. Okay, so you couldn't bring like pig kidneys onto the roller

coaster because that might upset some people. Yeah, and Disney was apparently they were gracious hosts for this study, but they knew there were limits it's kind of a delicate situation when you're carrying out your kidney stone research on an active amusement park ride. But then again, you might have some science loving kids there. They get their you know, their picture hugging Mickey, and then they get their picture hugging some pig kidneyst opportunity. That's maybe, so maybe maybe

for the next study. So what did they find out, Well, they found that it did seem to prove helpful, but mostly only if you're seated towards the back of the coaster. So for front coaster passage, right, we're talking four of twenty four. Rear coaster passage rate twenty three or thirty six. Hey,

that's not bad. Yeah, I mean it's like, like everybody knows, you said at the back of the coaster, you're gonna get a bump, your more hillacious ride, and if you have a lacious kidney stone, well it's going this is going to help knock it out of you just a little bit easier. So the author is actually like suggesting people do this somehow, I would suspect not. No, no, I don't think anybody is saying go to to Disney

World instead of a doctor kidney stone. Like, for one thing, the lines for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad are pretty long, and I cannot imagine standing in them with any kind of like an abdominal discomfort going on, or you know, and enhanced necessity to urinate or anything. But how long they had the stand in lines total in order to run the ride the thirty six times or whatever that they were trying to pass the stone? Maybe there's some sort of a research based fast pass you can get.

I'm not sure. I don't know that they mentioned that specifically in the study. And then they also point out that their other you know, their limitations on the study.

Obviously they didn't get to use human patients. They use these models, But the study is important because kidney stones are a legitimate health concern, and I don't think, Yeah, even though we're not talking about installing roller coasters in hospitals, it does make one think what kind of what kind of an apparatus might be appropriate, right, Yeah, I mean you could probably just figure out what part of the roller coaster rides specifically is the most useful, like what

you know, kinds of g forces on the body and how that's applied, and maybe just like make a chair that does it to you or something. Yeah, that's I think that's the most logical application that I can imagine, short of just actually having a roller coaster at the hospital. That's also sounds kind of fun um. But anyway, that's why it's important, why it's funny. Obviously, it's science plus roller coasters. Anytime that combo was coming at you, it's going to elect a few giggles. I think that's a

pretty good one. Okay, well let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we will have more ignobles. Thank thank Alright, we're back now. The next one I think we should go to is Nutrition Prize. And I know what you have all been thinking lately. You've been wondering, can I lose weight by converting to a diet consisting only of human flesh? The Hannibal diets, the new fad. Oh no, Hannibal eats all kinds of other stuff. He would have to go like super paleo Hannibal. Well, he

supplements his diet with human flesh. That's how he stays so trim putting like a blueberry reduction balsamic glaze on this humane You know how unhealthy all that would be if he wasn't throwing in some some lean human flesh to just really balance everything out, all right. So this prize went to a researcher named James Cole for a paper published in Scientific Reports in called Assessing the Caloric

Significance of Episodes of Human Cannibalism in the Paleolithic. Who attended the ceremony is James Cole, the author of this paper. So let's say you come across some evidence of humans eating other humans, it's reasonable to ask why are they

doing this? Right? In fact, this is often a question we have to ask about the remains of Stone Age humans because they're Paleolithic sites, Stone Age sites that show clear evidence of human cannibalism at least as far back as our hominin relatives in the early place to see

in roughly two point five million years ago. So I guess before we get to the y. Actually, a totally reasonable question you might have is, if we're talking about hominin remains that are thousands or even millions of years old, how can we tell cannibalism took place. It's just bones, right, Like, what would the evidence be? Well, there are a couple of lines of evidence for cannibalism in the Pleistocene. One

is anthropogenic modification of human remains. That's the like polite sciencey way to talk about signs of butchering on human bones. So clear human made changes to the bones of other humans, and these would be the same kinds of physical marks that we would find left on the bones of what are considered prey animals. Signs of butchering, cooking, and eating.

And examples would include cuts and chop marks in the bone from the butchering process, like they might have been made with sharp stone tools, breaks in the long bones, which would be presumably to access the marrow, because that's the good part. Evidence of cooking, such as burned ends of a bone, human tooth marks on a bone, quote, lack of a cranial base to get at the brain on otherwise complete or near complete skeleton. Well you gotta suck the head. I mean, anybody who's like crayfish or

swamp bugs if you want to call them. So, I'm sorry, I said crayfish crawdads is the correct terms that I'm gonna go with. Crawdads. I have to admit I'm a

little hazy. I do like swamp bugs as a as a kind of Cajun description though right, well, they're they are quite bug like, but they have delicious heads, and so a lot of people just eat the tails, but people who know what's up also take the what would you call it this guess this is the thoracic cavity with the head there, and they just suck all the fat and juices and guts out of it, get those good tasty brains and uh so, yeah, there apparently there's

some nutritional value in the brains that some people might want to get. But there's also the idea and that sometimes modification of the skull is done for some kind of other purpose, not just purely accessing nutrition, but like the creation of skull cups, making skulls into like eating or drinking vessels. Yeah. I mean, we've we've seen more recent examples of this in Tibetan customs, for instance. Yeah.

Uh So, another thing that Cole mentions is like a physical sign of cannibalism in ancient human rains or ancient hominin remains, not necessarily just holmo sapiens uh is quote, the virtual absence of vertebrae due to crushing or boiling to get it bone marrow and grease, so like maybe you want to get that good spinal cord, you're gonna have the vertebrae kind of coming apart. It's like eating

crab legs. Yeah, and then tool scrapes on the bones, which there could be scrapes on the bones related to butchering and accessing of meat, but there could also be scrapes on the bones for ritualistic or symbolic purposes. On top of that, there's some interesting genetic evidence of cannibalism in the in the world. In the prehistoric world, for example, there are diseases known as transmissible sponge iform and cephalopath ease or t s S, and examples of this would

include CURU or kreuz feld Yakob disease. And these are prion diseases or pre on diseases that cause degeneration of brain tissue and can be acquired often through cannibalism. When you might have heard of is kuru. The members of the for A linguistic group in Papua New Guinea have often been exposed to the t SC known as kuru because of their practice of ritual Indo cannibalism. For religious

and cultural reasons. Yeah, and a lot of these ideas, um, you know, they have to do with the passing on of a departed individual, parted family member, like and you consume some of their flesh and it's like their spirit lives on through you, that sort of thing, exactly. H And So an interesting thing is that there are worldwide patterns of genes we find that seem to indicate our species genetic history sometimes favored in the past adaptation for resistance to T S S, for example meat at all.

In a two thousand three paper, and Science wrote, quote heterozygosity for common polymorphism in the human pre on protein gene p r n P confers relative resistance to prion diseases, and then later they're write worldwide p r np haplotype diversity encoding alleal frequencies suggest the strong balancing selection at

this locust occurred during the evolution of modern humans. So the authors argued that the patterns of genetic resistance to T S c S that we see in human populations indicate that something in our evolutionary history favored people who could cannibalize, who could eat human flesh without contracting fatal

encephalopath ez, this is a fun paper thus far. This really it's kind of a nice follow up to our ghoul episode, the delta impart with you know, with the question you know what about the consumption of human corpses in in in our in our past, and in our biology. It is an interesting subject. In fact, I'm not even really getting deep into the paper yet. I'm just I'm just setting it up, so it's going to really get

going in a second, okay. Like, first of all, their disputes about whether individual sites actually do show evidence of cannibalism rather than some other form of manipulation of the dead, like you could have had maybe ritualistic de fleshing of the dead without eating. Maybe for some reason they wanted to get the meat off the bones of a dead person, but not not eat it. Well, like one example that comes to mind, to come back to Tibet, the practice of sky burial, the breaking down of a corpse so

that they flesh may be consumed by sacred animals. Uh Like, if you were just looking at the forensic evidence of that, you might say, oh, well, clearly this person was butchered and eating, because essentially it is butchery, but it is not for cannibalism, but whether or not it happened in individual cases, it at least does appear to be something that happened enough for us to have records of it.

Sometimes prehistoric humans and other related hominins were eating each other at least often enough for us to have some archaeological record of it. So back to the original question, the question of why why were these ancient humans and other hominin relatives eating each other? Coal notes that there are multiple document and motivations for human cannibalism. So several of these would be like survival cannibalism. That's when you're not normally a cannibal, but you're about to starve to death,

so you eat somebody. Right. This is essentially with the touch of the wind to go in in the folklore of native people's in the America's gets that the idea that is forced to uh, you may have to enact cannibal cannibalism, right. And then there is of course psychotic or criminal cannibalism, and aggressive cannibalism. These would be various types of cannibalism that is some sort of like aggressive symbology,

like warfare cannibalism. You you know, not only defeat your enemies, but you defeat them so totally that you feel you should eat them. There is, of course, as we've pointed out, spiritual a ritual cannibalism, and then there is gastronomic or dietary cannibalism, nutritional cannibalism. Basically like this is part of your diet and you're eating it because it's meat. Yeah, it's kind of like that list the old school cannibalism.

This is more in line with the biological cannibalism that we've discussed in the show before, right, of other organisms. Uh uh, yeah, there's that. And then also he points out a good a good category that often gets left out medicinal cannibalism. Right, sometimes you might want to eat another human because you think it does something kind of a vampiric cannibalism. Could the flesh of the young and you shall feel better wise one, Yeah, something like that.

So a couple of other relevant categories. Just to mention is that there's the idea of exo cannibalism versus indo cannibalism. Exo cannibalism would be humans eating humans who were not part of the in group, for example, eating rivals killed in war. And then there's indo cannibalism, which is eating humans who were part of your in group, for example, ritualistically eating one's own family members for religious reasons. Right, and you can sort of divide these up two has

been into categories of nice cannibalism and mean cannibalism. Right, So, the majorities of studies of paleolithic cannibal sites have tended to deposit, Cole says, a nutritional motivation for the cannibalism, while a smaller number have positive religious rich rules or aggressive cannibalism associated with warfare. And Cole points out that there's some confusing things about the ways these motivational labels

are applied to instances of cannibalism from prehistoric times. And so to help refine the discussion about the types of cannibalism and the role of raw nutrition in motivating prehistoric cannibalistic episodes, Cole said, basically, hey, wouldn't it help to know exactly how nutritious a paleolithic human was? That could sort of help us better understand whether these are purely nutrition seeking events or whether there's some other kind of

significance to them. Right. So, ultimately the goal of this paper was to construct an informed estimate on the nutritional value of a human. First question, has anybody ever done that before? Cole says, yes, it has been done that it was just sort of in a short letter to American Anthropologist in the year nineteen seventy, and their methodology for how they came up with their number was not clear, But in nineteen seventy Stanley M. Garn and Walter D.

Block wrote quote the limited nutritional Value of Cannibalism. In this short letter to American Anthropologist, garn and Block claimed that an adult male weighing fifty kilograms or about a hundred and ten pounds, which is a reasonable estimate of the body mass of a stone age human, would yield about thirty kilograms or sixty six pounds of edible skeletal muscle mass, and nutritionally, that breaks dound about four point

five kilograms of protein and about eighteen thousand calories. So based on this, garn and Block said that if human is your only source of protein, that's the only meat you're eating and the only real protein you're getting. A group of sixty people would need to eat a person every day in order to get enough protein to have a healthy diet. Uh. And if it were rationed out, so you've got less out to a diet of like one human per week shared between sixty people, the group

would not be getting nearly enough protein. So, based on this garn and Block conclude quote, the nutritional value of cannibalism may therefore be viewed as questionable unless a group is in a position consume its own number in a year. So basically you'd have to be eating a lot of humans. All right, Well, you know, I really want to see these numbers broken down and compared to the Chainsaw family and the Texas Chainsaw massacre, Right, is that nutritional cannibalism? Well,

I don't. I feel like it's a mix of nutritional and commercial because there are four individuals in the family and obviously they need the protein. Uh, it's commercial. This is not taken into account at all. I know, because they're running the barbecue restaurant on the side, and as we find out in Texas Chainsaw Masacre to they're they're winning awards at regional barbecue competitions. This is prestige cannibalism. Yes. Uh So to follow up on Garden Block coal asks, Okay,

is their estimate correct. They don't say how they got to these numbers. And to figure that out, Coal did a review of the existing literature on the chemical composition of the human body, relying on three studies from the Journal of Biological Chemistry in the middle of the twentieth century, which were drawn from analysis of four alt human males. So how much nutrition is there per kilogram of muscle

mass on a human? Well, this data yielded an average of nineteen thousand, nine hundred and fifty one calory calories per twenty four point nine kilograms of muscle mass. So garden Block weren't all that far off by estimating eighteen thousand calories in thirty ms of muscle. And so there's and then Coal comes up with some estimates of the nutritional value of the protein and fat on a human.

I think this is supposed to be for a roughly a hundred and forty five pound human male, So total body there would be about a hundred and forty three thousand, seven hundred and seventy one calories. And it's got a breakdown by body parts, right, so like the body parts reasonably expected to be consumed based on ethnographic studies of cannibalism, so not eating stuff like teeth and nerve tissue. That would leave you with about a hundred and twenty five thousand,

eight hundred and twenty two calories. And there is this wonder full table in the paper where the body is broken down into parts based on their nutritional value. So the heart it's about six hundred and fifty calories, the brain, spinal cord, and nerve trunks about undred calories, the four arms one thousand, six hundred and sixty four calories. I'm assuming this is not for a popeye, but just like regular forearms. Now that hard, that's that's some that's some

good calories there. But that's some tough eating. That's some tough tissue. Oh yeah, I think you've got to You've gotta make a stew with that. Well. Yeah, So part of the one of the caveats, and I'll get into the caveats in a minute here, but one of the caveats is that this is just for raw meat. It it can't take into account how the nutritional value of these things change when cooked. But we have discussed before how cooking is thought to significantly increase the caloric value

or nutritional value of a lot of foods. Things that cannot otherwise be digested can be digested after being cooked exactly. So I wanted to come up with some comparisons, not analyzing protein ratios or anything, but just purely in terms of raw calories. I worked out that on this number with the with the edible part being about a hundred eight hundred and twenty two calories, human body is worth about a hundred and thirty two Windy's bacon eaders. Now,

what's a bacon eater. A bacon eader is a Windy sandwich that has a bunch of bacon and cheese on it. Okay, so it's like a bacon cheese barker. Yes, basically, it's like that there. I think they make a big deal about how like we don't put any lettuce on this. You know, this is just bacon and cheese. It's one of those sandwiches that uses kind of crass masculinity marketing. It's kind of sandwich for men, like the double down

sort of that kind of thing. Yeah, so it's like that human body is worth about a hundred and thirty two Windy's bacon eaters. Or I've got another one here about two hundred and ninety three slices of pizza Hut Meat Lover's large original stuffed crust pizza. All right, well, that's that's quite a lot of pizza. Well, I mean, a human body is somewhat nutritious, though I did I want to say I arrived at those numbers using those

restaurants online nutrition calculators. Those numbers could be they could be massively under shooting the glories in an average baconator. Now, obviously there are gonna be some caveats in this type of because this is just coming up with some very broad est so some major caveats coal mentions. He says the data he used to arrive at his estimates were only based on adult males in the twentieth century, and he's got a great sense of humor when he writes this,

so quote. Ideally, nutritional templates for females and a range of ages would be constructed to represent the full nutritional potential of hominin social groups. However, data for females and subadults are not available within the published literature, and the collection of primary data of this nature was outside the ethical and legal scope of this study. Uh. He also says that the data only pertains to basically anatomically modern humans.

It's not known how different the nutritional value of other species like Neanderthals or Homo erectus might be. Also, the average values here are drawn from a small sample size. Better estimates could be drawn if you had more humans to measure the neutra rational value of Also, these values are of the nutritional value of raw me. Like we said, cooking might change things. So after that coal also does some estimates of the nutritional yield for body mass at

different Paleolithic cannibalism sites found by archaeologists. So you've got a Stone Age cannibalism site and you look at okay, what were the different people here that apparently got eaten? And so he like tries to add up how much

body mass calorie value was was being served at this site. Uh, and so how so the question he asks is how do you humans stack up against other meat sources of the Paleolithic quote when compared to most other fauna, human skeletal muscle has a nutritional value broadly in line with those that match our size and weight, but produced significantly fewer calories than most of the larger fauna such as mammoth, wooly rhino, or deer species known to have been regularly

consumed by past hominins, So they're better meals around. Yeah, exactly. So, while you could get decent nutrition from a human body, Cole argues that it would be much more worthwhile to simply hunt the same large fauna of the time that you would normally be hunting mammoth, Rhinoceros RX, bison, cow, bear, horse,

giant deer, all this stuff. So hunting and killing a human for meat has a kind of wonky risk to reward ratio because, you know, he points out that humans are crafty and sometimes they can fight back in clever and dangerous ways. Is it really worth hunting humans provided that they're going to give you relatively low amounts of nutrition compared to these big, fat, bulky animals that are also probably easier to hunt. So Cole asks were hominins

actively hunted by members of their own species in prehistoric times? Uh? He says quote active hunting raises the interesting question of whether the relatively low calorific return for hominins would justify the energy expenditure in hunting an individual or group. If the motivation was driven was driven purely by balancing energy quotions.

It is suggested here that this would not be the case when a single large fauna individual returns many more calories without the difficulties of hunting groups of hominins that were as intelligent and resourceful as the hunters in their ability to fight back and evade pursuit. So now he said, you know, we have these instances of what looks like prehistoric cannibalism among hominins, but it just doesn't seem like that is a very smart strategy for getting meat generally.

So what what's going on here? Why do we see this cannibalism? And he hypothesizes, well, maybe there are cases of occasional opportunistic nutritional cannibalism. For example, we're pretty hungry and a member of our group just died of natural causes, right or or certainly to go back to the warfare, and now ities like you get into some sort of uh an altercation with a rival group, perhaps over access to fauna to fauna, and then well, I need meat.

I was hunting this thing, but I just bashed the skull in of this guy, who, granted looks a lot like me. But is made of meat, right, So yeah, it could be sort of occasional opportunistic cannibalism. But then Cole also says that quote the motivations for cannibalistic episodes lay within complex cultural systems involving both intra and intergroup

dynamics and competition. Essentially, he's saying he thinks a very likely explanation for a lot of these cannibalistic episodes has something to do with prehistoric culture, which we don't know a lot about. But it could involve uh, religious uses, ritual uses, medicinal uses, things people believed there to be reasons to eat other humans that went beyond just the nutritional value. I mean, it is very difficult to put ourselves to attempt to put ourselves in the mindset of

of such cultures. Yeah, and we don't know what they were. I mean, that's one of the fascinating things. They're interesting little tidbits, but they didn't leave written records, so we don't really have descriptions of what they believed and what their relationships were like, and you know, just all the things that the kind of everyday texture of society that we know so well in our own world. It's it's mostly opaque to us what it was like this far

back in the past. Well, you know, even the Chainsaw family from Texas, Chainsaw Masker, they they have their own sort of culture and system of beliefs that seems to have risen up out of this, uh, this Texan um avatoir culture and their family history with the business there. You know, there's some intentionally or or perhaps accidentally uh, kind of ingenious ideas about like the spiritual nature of cannibalism,

kind of indebted in that original motion picture. Yeah, do you have an example, Well, there's a sense of there's a sense of ritual to the cannibalism it's going on at least within the own their within the family, and maybe you could apply that to the barbecue restaurant as well.

But like there's that whole scene with the uh, you know, seated at the table and granted, you know they're they're proba really drawing a little bit from Judeo Christian traditions there, but you know, there's there's some something sacred going on with the family dinner and allowing Grandpa, the greatest killer that had ever ever lived, to attempt to to kill the victim. So that he can, uh, you know, drink

of her blood, eat of her flesh, and grow stronger. Uh. And then all these other sort of elements of like that, the little bone wind chimes and constructions that have been created. It seemed it's almost like there are people that are so cut off from the rest of of a modern society that they're kind of reinventing primordial religious concepts. That

is fascinating. I had never thought of it that way, Like all they do, like if if if everything that they do is concerned with meat and the importance of meat and the preparation of meat, um, and then what kind of ideas come out of that? It's it's it's not unlike what we might try and imagine for prehistoric people. So you know, if your whole life is, of course about the hunt, then various ideas spring out of that.

If your whole life is about about the importance of meat and blood, Uh, then you know it, who knows exactly how they view the importance of our own flesh and what kind of powers or or or or I mean, we tend to put a horror show interpretation on it. And obviously I'm drawing in Texas chainsaw maskt right. But

I mean perhaps in a way it's beautiful. Perhaps it was like I have killed this individual in battle, and I must eat them like that is the the only like that is how you show respect for a worthy adversary. I mean we're tempted to want to construct some sort of brutal like I have killed my enemy and now I must feast on their brains kind of thing. But it maybe in its own way it was sacred. Well.

I think it's also possible that we frequently underestimate the degree to which a lot of the strange features of our culture that don't seem strange to us, because there are culture um are just are in traceable ways downstream of economics which are ultimately reducible to chemical energy economics, you know, acquiring food to eat. Uh, you can trace

a lot of culture back to getting food and surviving. Absolutely, So to bring it back to the study, another thing you can imagine is how perhaps certain practices that were originally just opportunistic nutritional practices, maybe opportunistic cannibalism, when someone died and you didn't want to waste the meat, so you ate them. Uh, It's possible that could have turned

into religious beliefs and rituals exactly. And that's not even taking into effect like any you know, sort of abnormal psychological effects that might have taken place and in certain individuals and therefore influenced the overall shape of the culture. You know, like if one individual claimed and or even believed that, say they consume the flesh of their departed father and then heard their father's voice, then that could have enormous effects, you know. I mean, we're talking about

the spread of religion. Yeah, this is always interesting territory. Uh so, yeah, well, not the last time we will visit the potential religious beliefs and rituals of prehistoric common ends. But we're gonna go and take a break now. We're gonna leave cannibalism for now. But when we come back, we're gonna look at just a couple of more Ignoble Prize winners briefly before closing out part one of our Ignoble Prize series for this year. All right, thank thank

and we're back. Robert. Do you have a shorter look you wanted to take it something? Oh? Sure, why don't we talk about the Chemistry prize? Okay, let's do some chemistry. This is from Romeo at all and they were honored for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a

good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces. The paper was a titled human Saliva as a Cleaning Agent for Dirty Surfaces and it was published in Studies in Conservation back in nine and and the winners delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video. So with the original title should I spit

on it? And that got rejected that it may can't sound a little bit a little basically yeah, but we can all relate to this, right, I mean, have you ever used your own saliva to clean off, say a smart smartphone screen or I know, in my case, I've used it on a kid's face. Plenty of times. I used my saliva as dishwashing detergent. So I don't know why people buy those pods. You just spit in the dishwasher a lot and then get it going. It does a great job. Well I I nobody's pushing it that

that far. But there does seem to be something to the cleansing power of spit, at least to you know, a limited degree. And this is exactly what the paper and question looked into. They used quantitative test and chromatographic techniques to isolate alpha Emily's as the key cleaning property in human saliva. Now you're probably wondering, well, what is

an Emily's Is it some sort of microbe? What is it? Well, an Emilyes is a member of a class of enzymes that splits a starch compound via the addition of water molecule. Now we we divide them into alpha's and betas because they differ in the exact way that they attack the bonds of a starch molecule. But Alpha Emilyes is found throughout the biological world, specifically in the digestive systems of

humans and other animals. The one in the salivary glands is called Thailand that begins with the P P T y A l I in. So why is it important, Well, it concerns human biology. Obviously we're humans. We're always interested in that. It also concerns hygiene. And it's funny because it involves spit, and it involves the idea of cleaning something with spit, something that on on a basic level,

I feel like we all do this. We all have probably had a situation where we use spit to quote unquote clean something, and yet at the same time spit is considered dirty. Uh, Like someone spitting at you is gross, seeing someone spit in the street is disgusting. Well, yeah, I mean you can see some of the things, Like, I can see why this would be because the role of saliva in the mouth is somewhat the same as

the role of average cleaning liquids or detergents. Right, So it is a detergent mean that it's like a wedding and lubrication agent that helps things move around and wash off. And then it's also a somewhat a digesting agent, like it breaks some things down and tenderizes some things. Yeah, it is that. Our mouth, we have to remember, is

the first stage of the digestion. You know. We masticate the food, we get it all cut up, we get it nice and wet and soaked, and then our tongue helps to form it at the back of our throat into a bolus that is going to pass down our throats, preparing a package for shipment to the rest of the digestive system. There's nothing more appetizing than thinking about the lubrication of a bolus going down your throat, right, And

then you know, ultimately that's what a French kisses. A french kiss are two individuals deciding to link uh the initial stages of their digestive system and to manipulate each other's um uh, you know, a oral manipulation. Limb. It's a beautiful moment. I just got a brilliant idea for an episode in the future. It should just be called Robert and Joe ruined Kissing, and we just like we just destroyed. We just take it to the point where

nobody who listens will ever do it again. All right, Well, coming this Valentine's Day to a stuff to blow your mind episode near you? Well, I have another one here. This is another short one and we're not going to spend much time on to kind of close out the episode. But their medical education prize uh, this one went to A. Kira hora Uchi for the medical report colin Oscopy in the sitting position Lessons learned from self colinoscopy self colonoscopy. Yes,

I'm just gonna read the abstract on this one. Okay, Okay, just read it. Colin Oscopy is typically done in the supine position, with the patient's position varied as needed to assist instrument insertion. We found that a newly developed small caliber variable stiffness colonoscope design for colonoscopy and pediatric patients

was especially useful in patients with difficult colonoscopy. The outside diameter is ten point three millimeters, and the working length, the field of view, and the range of the tip flection are similar to those of standard uh kolonoscopes. So, I mean, I don't have much to say about this one. It kind of calls back to our and we did an entire episode on on the evolution of the anus, so it's not like we're shy about discussing this part

of the human anatomy. But I think this is one of those studies that basically they honored it because of the whole uh self colonoscopy aspect of the title. I suspect that is what set them off. Yeah, it was the self colonoscopy. Though at the same time it's important because this is an invalid and important diagnostic method for

for for human health. Oh yeah, colonoscopies are important. All right. Well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead and pinch off this particular episode of to to Blow Your Mind, but we're coming back in uh in the next episode, and we're going to discuss the remaining Ignobel Prize winners, UH, some of them in more detail, certainly than we than we spent with the colonoscopy study. There's some really good ones in the next episode, indeed, acording more, including morning Wood.

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