Ig Nobel Science of 2013

a as a job, or all three. If you're us, Uh, Ignoble Prize is always a big deal because the Ignoble Prizes highlight the absurd, the comical, the the strange within the world of legitimate scientific research, generally generally pure reviewed scientific research. Sometimes in the world of patents. But it's always about let's look at the the individuals who are just really dedicated to study and one in scientific study in one shaper or another, and some of the strange

corners they work themselves into. Yeah, it is a play on the Nobel Prize. And uh, the it's from Improbable Research, which publishes the magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, and the whole point of that, they say, is it's there to make you laugh and then make you think with as you say, some of these bizarre turns and science. Yeah, Mark Abrams the main dude there. You know, some people don't catch the humor of it. They think that it's

making fun of scientists. But I think most people understand that it's it's a celebration of the of the necessary absurdity of science. Because you think of science like a slime mold. We talked about how slime mold solves a maze. It sends out all these tendrils through the maze and then just figures out what is the best route, and then it goes that way. Uh, And in doing so it can you know, decipher the best trade roots across the face of the globe. Science is kind of like that.

Science is all about finding out how things work, how things work the best, and and what the world and what the universally consists of. But that also means that the kindrels of science must sometimes creep into strange areas, into sometimes strange dead ends, and sometimes into very important areas of study that we are childish about and still

snicker at. It's true, it does appeal to that, and um, I think with the Ignoble, what's interesting about that is you see so much creativity and imagination from the researchers and the scientists who are working in their respective fields, and which you might think is really wrote. They have actually sort of peeled back and found very interesting and contextualizing it in ways that you might not have ever

thought of. And what we're talking about here when we talk about these prizes is each year Ignoble will honor the achievements that of course make you laugh and then make you think. In the award tend people these prizes. The winners trouble from all over the world at their own expense to a gallus ceremony at Harvard where actual

noble laureates present them with the prize um. This year's opera was The Bolonsky Device, a tribute to George and Charlotte Blonsky, who in the early sixties invented a machine for quote, facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force. Oh wow, so just sling the kid right out? Is that a great visual of what an Ignoble prize can be because it's a it's a perfectly logical idea perfectly logical theory that doesn't really sit well with people outside

of the lab. I think, you know, which, we've discussed that before, Like it's some of the often the amazing thing about scientists is that sometimes the scientific answer just is not going to sit well with anybody outside of the scientific world, such as, say, uh, creating a spaceship that is itself edible, or just figuring out a way that astronauts can eat their own poop on a return trip from Mars on a very you know, economic scientific level, Yes,

that makes absolute sense, but then the astro not saying, no, we're not doing that well. And in some ways these are thought experiments, right, especially the childbirth is probably not very pragmatic to be shooting out, you know, a child by a centrifugal force. But what kind of proof do we have? Do we have scientific proof that it's not a good idea? One day that might be the thing, right, you have to build on that research, alright, So let's

highlight a couple of the prizes here, alright. First up, the psychology prize. This one went to a team of French researchers including Laurette Bague Alman Zaruni, Baptiste Subra, and Nidhi or Ba as well as Brad Bushman. And that was the I think the USA contingent there. Uh. And that was for confirming that people who think that they are drunk also think that they are more attractive. And of course this is great because if you just ask somebody that, hey, do you think drunk people think they're

more attractive? Of course they do. It's it's a no brainer, right, But has it been scientifically proven? Do we know for sure? And there are a lot of more important questions in the history of of the human race that have come up where someone says, of course, this is the way it works. Of course, the Earth is the center of the universe. Of course the Sun is the center of the universe. But when you apply the light of science to it, then you get the real answer, um or

you get the evolution of a real answer. So in the first study carried out in the bar, they found that the more alcoholic drinks customers consumed, the more attractive

they thought they were. Okay, that's but in Steady too, they took ninety four non student participants and they put them in a bogus taste test study they were given either an alcoholic beverage or a nonalcoholic beverage, with half of each group believing they had consumed alcohol alcohol and half believing that they had not, so they had a balanced pacebo effect. So, after consuming the beverages, they delivered a speech and rated how attractive, bright, original, and funny

they thought they were. And they videotape these speeches and they were rated by a team of twenty two independent judges. Would they find those people thought they were brilliant and even if they weren't drunk, is all they had to do was think that they were drunk, and they instantly thought that they were, uh like greater than they actually are.

I think this is important information, right for everybody who is going out there and going to have a couple of drinks and then perhaps do something that is important to their livelihood. Perhaps maybe you should reconsider the drinks. Maybe what you're about to do isn't quite as great as you think. It's also interesting, um, you know, bringing up the idea that even a non alcoholic beverage one

have the same effect. Um, And perhaps you can shed some light in this from your own experience, since you you gave up drinking. Uh, but I assume you still find yourselves having a drink, a non alcoholic drink, maybe in the in the the company of individuals who are drinking, or or sort of fill that space in the in

the ritual. Because I can think of a time or two where I've had something non alcoholic and that either the setting was right or or the company was right, that I really kind of felt as if I had been drinking alcohol. Well, I think it boils down to mirror neurons, because if someone is sitting across from you and and they're feeling a little bit loosened up, they've had a drink or two and they began to laugh a lot, then of course you're going to engage in

the same activity. So it's very easy, I think, to take on those sort of physical things for yourself. You begin to fall into the cultural script that has been provided to you. Yea. What I love about this study is the title, which is called Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer Holder. Oh that's great. Yeah, It's almost like they knew they were going to get ignoble. Yeah. Yeah.

Some I I tend to prefer the ones that are just really like rigidly scientific and you get the idea that they're completely oblivious to how ridiculous it might sound to an outsider. It's got like five prepositions and words long. All right, let's talk about the Joint Prize in Biology and Astronomy now. Marie Dack, Emily Baird, Eric Warrant, Marcus Byrne, and Clark Schultz received this prize for discovering that when dung beaetles get lost, that they can navigate their way

home by looking at the milky Way. This at first glance, doesn't seem like I mean, it seems like a sort of amazing boy. Yeah, okay, what are you talking about here? It is very cool. Yeah, I mean, obviously the moon is big money when it comes to night time navigation out there in the animal world. It's just that everything, it seems can can use the moon for some form of navigation. But previously only birds, seals, and humans were known to use the stars to navigate, I mean that

were to orient themselves. So that's privileged territory. So the idea that hey, the lowly dung beetle is using this

technique as well, it's amazing. What I like to imagine is that you know, these dung beetles, they actually like to run straight lines, by the way, And what I like to imagine is that when they find a pile of droppings, which they then roll into a small ball, and they start pushing it away from the other dung beetles that might try to eat it, I like to measure them just getting on top of that ball and staring up at the milky Way. I'll dowy eyed, and I want that to be a Pixar movie and it

should be right um. But I think it's very cool because it was thought that they were taking cues from from the sun and the moon um. But it was their capacity to maintain course even on clear moonless nights that got researchers thinking that it perhaps was something else

that could have been the stars. So lead researcher Marie doc She took the insects into the Johannesburg Planetarium, where she could control the type of star fields beetle might see overhead so they get their own little planetarium show.

She put them in a container with blackened walls to make sure the animals were not using other information from and marks on the horizon, which in the wild might be trees, for example, and she found that the Beatles performed best when confronted with a perfect starry sky projected onto the planetarium dome, although even in other conditions they

could still find their way. Pretty cool, Yeah, yeah, and it's the finding represents the first convincing demonstration for the use of starry sky orientation in insects um and and provides the first documented use of the Milky Way for

orientation in the animal kingdom. So that's pretty amazing. I actually was pretty I thought it was amazing because we've talked about navigation so much in how mysterious it is, particularly when we talk about birds or butterflies, and now you've got dune deals and on the game give a

Give a dune beetle is due. Indeed, all right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna roll through three more of our favorites from the two thousand thirteen Ignoble Prizes, all sorts of Google and amazing things are gonna happen in those studies. All right, we're back by the way micro cosmas Um. When that film first came out, all the DVD or VHS covers for it had this praying man it's wearing sunglasses on it,

which totally misrepresented the entire picture. Like they were trying to play up the like like it was a bug's life or something like it's some sort of cute insects story, and it's not. It's a It's just a beautifully shot insight into the world, the violent, the weird, and beautiful world of insects. Praying man says, do wear right? Not at all? Oh I don't. You should probably check into that, Okay, I'll fact check this, all right, all right, now we're back.

We're talking about the two thousand thirteen Ignoble Prize winners, and we're we're not going through all of them. We're just covering some of our favorites. You can check out the rest at the Improbable Research website and we highly

suggest to do that. The next prize, we're going to discuss Safety Engineering Prize, and this one went to the late Gustano Pizzo Um from the US for a nineteen seventy two patent for an amazing invention that I'm just floored that we haven't used that we have that we don't see in every airplane. I love this invention because on some level I think it appeals to the eight year olds and all of us as well as the

Bond fans. Yes, there's a little James Bond at this and a little like it's like an ACME invention from the road Runner car. Yes. Yes, um. It is actually an electro mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers. The system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the hijacker through the airplane specially installed bomb bay doors, through which he is parachuted to the ground, where, of course police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. Yeah,

on ski jets, I think yeah. And there was an illustration with the patent. I mean the patents you know, public the public domain, you can you can find it online. Uh. And and the the illustrations are wonderful because you see the individual, you see him jettison, you see him in the little package with the with the parachute, and and you're totally right. On one hand, it's it's very James Bond.

And I think it reminds me of of you to a kill where Christopher Walkin was the was the villain and he was in a blimp and I'm pretty sure there's a trap door in that blimp for jettison um members of his team that we're falling out of line. But you know, this is we're talking about a commercial flight here. We don't want people to just fall to their death and want them to fall safely on a parachute so that the police can apprehend them. Well, and you know, in theory, it is a great idea, Yeah,

and it makes a kind of like simple sense. You know, that's just in the execution, right, because you have to make sure that the person is standing in the right area and that you know, he doesn't inadvertently or she you never know, uh tossed you down and you who are not the person who's trying the hijack the plane or in you know, jettison down to the police. So

again it's just a matter of logistics here. But I do really like this, Yeah, I wish on some level that it would be pragmatic enough that you can actually use all Right. Up next the Archaeology Prize, and this one went to Brian Crandall and Peter Stall the Forum from us the Ladder from Kennedy, us UH for observing how the bones of swallowed dead shrews dissolved inside the

human digestive system. Now, the the the answer is in the in the study there because obviously this is a study about um humans swallowing the bones of a dead shrew and then later fishing through the fecal matter to see how it turned out. Yeah, the shrew was parboiled and then of course swallowed whole without any sort of chewing, and then carefully examined during the ex script ory period in which would have correlated from when it would arrive in that excretion. Uh so, Yeah, they wanted to see

how the bones would dissolve inside the human digesticism. But why you ask why, because they wanted to see how, or rather help archaeologist to turn whether small animal bones found a historic sites signified that the animals have been eaten or died naturally, So that the question is important, like having the answer to this helps us make sense of so many archaeological sites and finds around the world.

But the in order to answer it, they took a very straightforward approach and to the outside viewer perhaps an undignified um investigation. But that's just the way it is. Sometimes you want to you want an answer to a question that sometimes there was a very simple, straightforward way to do it. Yeah, you could go through some sort of complex chemical process that mimic the digestion of the human body. You could essentially build a cloaca bot to digest this, uh, this tiny rodent for you, or you

could just do what makes sense. You could just you could just say, screw it, I'm going to swallow this creature and then I'm going to poop it out, and then I'm gonna see and I'm gonna have my answer, and and I'm not gonna need all this ridiculous funding to do it. Now, if I remember correctly, this was

featured in Mary Richard's Gulp and Um. At the time of her writing that, I believed that it wasn't revealed whether it was Crandell or Stall who actually swallowed the shrew because they didn't want people to focus on who was combing through their poo to try to find the bones. They wanted people to focus on how it was actually digested.

And in case you're wondering, uh, the digestive action of either Crandell or Stall obliterated everything but twenty eight bones out of one d and thirty one, Way to go, Way to Go digestive stem. All right, and we're gonna look at one last study here, and this one is the Public Health Prize, and this one comes to us from high Land. And I have said we we left

this one because you have to leave the penis for last. Really, yes, because this study had to do with medical techniques for penile reattachment after amputations, often by jealous lives um techniques which they recommended except in cases where the amputated penis had been partially eaten by a duck. Now, yeah, I need to explain this, and I'm I'm just gonna pull directly from Mark Abrams article that came out in The Guardian last year titled why Thai women cut off their

husband's penises. He points out that quote it became fashionable in the decade after nineteen seventy for the humiliated Thai wife to wait until her philandering husband fell asleep so that she could quickly sever his penis with a kitchen knife. A traditional tie home is elevated on pilings and the windows are open to allow for ventilation. The area under the houses home is the home of the family, pigs, chickens,

and ducks. Thus it is quite usual that an amputated penis is tossed out of an open window where it may be captured by a duck. Then Abrams goes on to say, the report explains for readers in other countries. Quote the Tai saying I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat is therefore a common joke and immediately understood at all levels of society. So in case anybody is visiting Thailand and you happen to be able to hear this phrase, now you have a

context for it. Yes, So, yeah, I guess there was a prominent nineteen seventy three case in which a woman sliced off her husband's penis, and then during the seventies so were like something like a hundred other Yeah. Basically, it sounds like it got a tremendous amount of coverage at the time because it is it's you know, as we know in the West, um, case like this happens,

the media is just gonna eat it up. Um, no pun intended, and uh, and so it's it's in the public mindset, and and so you begin to see other cases popping up. That's right. That was the great bob at Escapade in the US. And I believe that penis was flung out a car window, yes, but was apprehended before a duck could inter s and it also was reattached. It was so basically this whole, the whole stuff. I mean, the study makes it in because on one hand, it

involves the penis and therefore is inherently funny. Uh. And then it also is weird and uh and and ties in this uh, this epidemic of of of peno amputation, and it involves ducks, and ducks are inherently funny as well. Even though at the bottom line, even bad philandering husbands uh probably don't deserve to have their their penises cut off.

I'm not gonna. And I imagine too that um, I don't have obviously the plumbing, but I would want there to be quite a bit of study where a man who's whose penis was cut off and had to be reattached to make sure that it was done properly. Yes, I mean, it's it's an injury that is going to occur in the course of of human events, and it's better that we do have techniques on hand, that we do know the best means by which to reattach it

if possible. So it's it's a study that at once is highly helpful and great and it's wonderful that the research has contributed to our scientific understanding with it. But on the other hand, there are a number of inherently giggle inducing qualities to it. And that's why we love Ignoble, right, because you get pretty much everything, yeah, from dung beetles

to penises. Yeah, from studies that are that just seem to sort of fill in one tiny corner of our scientific understanding or things that or studies that are they are actually highly important but still induced snickers. So there you have another Ignable Price ceremony has come and gone. We've highlighted some of the ones we like. You can check out the rest online at the Improbable Research website.

And uh yeah, all of those guys that put that the magazine out of the PDF and it's always tremendous fund to leave through it. In the meantime, if you want to chat without about it, if you want to share your favorites from this year's of award winners, or you have some past favorites that you still snicker about, let us know about it. You can find us in all the usual places. Our mothership is stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, where you'll find all our videos,

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