Ig Nobel: Strange Science, Part 1

Do check it out. Do a website. They have a great website and they focus on the ridiculousness, the the unexpected, and the often grotesque and hilarious aspects of legitimate scientific research. So this isn't like fringe stuff where like some guy in a in a shed in uh In in rural Mississippi is trying to to to create an artificial gravity device or something. We're talking about actual legitimate scientific research

that often winds its way into strange territory. Yes, it's true, and one of the things that they are trying to accomplish with the Ignoble UH ceremonies, they say, is to make you laugh and then make you think, this is a really important premise of this and I think that you just highlighted that. UM. As you will note, the name is ig Noble, which is sort of a spoof

on the Nobel Prizes. And each year the Ignoble Prizes honor achievements that do make people laugh and then make them think, and they are awarded to ten people and winners do travel from around the world and on their own dime, by the way, UM to a gallus ceremony at Harvard where Nobel laureates then present them with their prize. And the prize itself is made of really cheap material

that's prone to disintegrate. Yeah, it's a and the reason that everyone travels here and everyone everyone's in on the joke. Everyone loves it because with it with a few small exceptions here and there, because it is a celebration of the work. It's not a ridiculing of it. And it's not using it to uh to push some sort of agenda.

Well like we saw with the whole shrimp on a treadmill thing where uh, individuals that wish to cut the U S Science budget, we're using it like look at this with people are spending money and using time on on this experiment where they just put a shrimp on a treadmill, ignoring the fact that that particular experiment was very interested in in in how bacteria affects these important

food creatures in a polluted environment. It was just the catalyst that they were making, belittling it and saying this is stupid science that accomplishes nothing. Ignobles Ist is the entirely different direction, the positive direction, which is saying, here's the study that illuminates something hilarious, but that also illuminates

something important about the scientific workings of the universe. Okay, well, let's talk about about who this group is that selects the the nominate or makes the nominations, and then also what the process is. Basically, we have a group of people and we did we mentioned Mark Abraham's yet, but he is one of the principals. He is the editor and co founder of the Annals of Improbable Research and

the founder and master of ceremonies for the prizes. And he, along with a few other Nobel laureates, science writers, athletes, politicians from time to time to you, right, they make up the board that nominates the studies and the inventions. So basically they are flooded every year with up to nine thousand submissions. That's a lot they have to wade

through all of that. They also seek out nominations as well, our nominees, I should say, and Abraham says that they will quietly get in touch with them, offer them the prize, and give them the opportunity to quietly decline the honor if they want to, and if they say no, he says, that's absolutely fine, and that's it. He said that they don't mention it, and they don't even keep records at that point because again, this is something that they want to make sure the person is comfortable with and it

really is an honor. Well, the exception that comes to mind that was the was when the gay bomb. Yeah yeah, and we'll talk about that in a moment, but I wanted to awesome give you guys a sense of the ceremony itself. Paper airplanes are launched and then the winners

are confined to a sixty second speech. If if they go beyond that sixty seconds, they at least in this year's awards, they had two girls, not one, but two girls, eight year old year olds come up and say please stop, you're boring me, Please stop, you're boring me, over and over again until the recipient stopped, because you got to keep the point short, and it's a it's not about it. It's about celebrating the awesomeness of any of these given products,

not boring usarily with all of the hardcore details. I just wish they would do that for the oscars. It would be awesome. Okay, so let's give an example of a past recipient. Uh Dr Elena Bodnar invented that in an emergency can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks. So we have one for yourself and one for a friend, which I think is brilliant. Of course, you know again as the catalyst for is that the part that is so very funny, but it actually has

practical implications here for us. Yeah, and in that one they had a lot of fun with because I think even the ceremony after that they were still having people come on with. They brought the brawl back and they put it on the Nobel Laureates faces, which I thought was pretty anes because it also brings to mind the old flick Weird Science, you know, where they had the they were doing the crazy Man science experiment. They wore the braws in their head. Yeah. Some of the some

of the other winners we've discussed in the past. There was the the study that I believe this was a New Mexico or no, it was Nevada study University of Las Vegas, where they were looking at how ovulating strippers received more tips than normal than the other strippers at

a strip club. That's been brought into question by the way it has, But yes, I mean, if that doesn't deserve an I know, well, I don't know what does, because the story, like the the instant picture you get is a bunch of researchers spending their time at a strip club. Uh. Though the question that they're speaking to answer all the cheeky stuff aside is legitimate because we're very interested in human behavior. How does and how does uh?

How how did these various animal properties of ourselves influenced the the the culture that we have built on top of it. Uh. There was of course the gay bomb and this was the one where uh, nobody from the US military actually showed up to accept the prize, but it was and I feel like we discussed this one in more detail in the past. But the idea was, all right, you get some enemies in the trench over there.

I mean they would not now obviously wouldn't be in a trench, but I like the simple version of the of it. You know, we're in this trench there, in that trench. We wanna either kill them or make them not kill us. Both would be great, preferably both because you know, we're soldiers, right, So let's fire something into their trench that makes them love each other in a very biblical fashion. So in other words, let's distract them from war and it releases chemical that induces them to then, uh,

cuddle with each other. Yes, at least it's pretty great. Yeah, it's and it was. They did a fabulal spit on Dirty Rock where they lampoon did as well. Um, I mean, and and this is a fascinating because on one level, it's hilarious the idea of forcing a makeout party on on your your enemies, but also it's it's very telling, like the idea that we are we are these creatures that could potentially be manipulated in this fashion, that that we ultimately don't have that much control over our our

violent or passive tendencies. Um. I wanted to point this out. In an interview with Ira Plateau of Science Friday, Abraham's talked about the worth of this sort of thing by using an example of a shrew. Um. Now, these anthropologists Brian Crandell and Peter Stall, who who did the study on the shrew, they did not get an ignoble prize and they perhaps could um for this, but right now they were just covered in the Animals of Improbable research

for this. But they were featured because, uh, they worked with the shrew, which is, you know, as a reminder, a small, nearly blind animal. Yes, they boiled it and then one of them it was never said in the study, but either Crandell or Stall actually swallowed it whole. Okay, um, And they wanted to make sure that there was you know, no sort of masticating, no chewing going on here. They wanted to deliver it to their gut whole. And then

this is it gets even better. For three days, the anthropologists examined the resulting feces to discover how the human digestive system might break the shrew down. Okay, all that seems absolutely crazy and ridiculous, right, uh. But the reason they wanted to do this is because they thought there is a gap in the knowledge of how something gets um digested and the remains, the resulting remains, and what

is actually there. In other words, if you're an anthropologist or an archaeologist and you stumble upon remains that were digested, you don't know how much of those remains are a result of the process of digestion or the actual like teeth marks in the tearing apart of a jaw, which would give you a really good idea of how big

or small the animal was. Right, So, what they did discover when they went through all the feces is that a lot of the bones of the shrew, including a lot of the big bones, were missing, and one of the big jawbones was missing. Four of the teeth the shrews teeth were missing, and a big chunk of its

school was missing, just from this digestive process. So this tells us something now going forward as an anthropologist of what you might be looking at, You're not probably going to make the same assumptions if you know that the digestive system can play a as much of a part as let's say, the creatures chief or the humans teeth. Um. So I thought that was a good example to share. Of course, not everybody really gets in on the humor

of the thing. Robert May, who at the time was the British government's Chief Scientific Advisor, UH, he wrote a letter to both Nature UH, you know, the Science Journal, as well as the Annals and Probable Research, and he took the ignoble Prize agenas to task any UH for quote ridiculing serious work um and UH, also arguing that the awards should only target anti science and pseudoscience and

leave the real scientists to their labor. So his he was like, this is horribly youre just making fun of these I don't think it was a particularly informed opinion. I think it was more of like a gut reaction to him hearing about it. It's it's kind of my take on it. But but he did. Here was somebody

who did not get the joke. Yeah, And again Abraham said, we are not ridiculing, which is shining a light on science, and we're doing it in a fun way in which most people don't necessarily think of sciences is fun, you know, lighthearted thing. But here we are talking about things in a way that um that again, as he says, makes you laugh and makes you think, well, I can't help but be reminded of a little tidbit from Mary Roaches packing from Mars, because she was talking about the space program,

especially in its early days. You kind of had two groups. You had the scientists who were very much immersed in this world of science and world of scientific research and hardcore facts and trying to factor out these various equations to to do amazing things in space. And then you had the astronauts who were, hey, you had more of a cowboy mentality. You know a lot of these guys where they were former experimental jet pilots and all this, so there was a big divide between their outlook on life,

and occasionally it would clash. And the example that Mary Roach brought up was be you know, the scientists were trying to figure out how to do long distant space flights and they were like, well, uh, let's you know, I'm thinking about ways to make food for there for a long flight through space. Um, let's see, there's got it.

There's probably a really good way that we could make portions of the spaceship edible and potentially come up with a way to turn the astronauts poop into food and and the astronauts Scott winted this and they're like, no,

we're not doing that. So you had this clash between the scientific world in the outside world, and that is where a lot of the humor tends to come from in these experiments because you have you have scientists immersed in their studies when then the closed confines of the lab and then they bring out these results that that may not necessarily even seem all that funny to them, but when you expose it to the rest of the world,

that's that's where a lot of the humor comes. Yeah, when you back up and take some perspective, I think it's so interesting. Although some of the scientists know that if they're having fun with it, but um for for them, it's you know, sometimes it's even a thought experiment, which we've talked about being so um valuable in trying to have breakthroughs. All Right, there's a little background on what

the Ignable prizes are all about. We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to dive into some of the two thousand and twelves more notable in all right, we're back. So we're not going to get through all of them are certainly not in this podcast, but we're gonna we're gonna highlight some of the ones that kind of resonated with us and we thought were particularly um amusing. Yeah. One that I thought was great both of us that were great is the

two thousand and twelve Neuroscience Prize. And this is largely a story about a dead salmon's brain activity and about statistical correction methods in F M R. I. Okay, so first of all, why is this funny? First of all, dead fish. There's just a dead fish in and of itself is hilarious. I couldn't help but think of the character Lose Zealand from the Muppets. You remember him with the I had the big frilly collar and the mustache

and the eyes and just throw fish, boomerang fish. It's part of his act, or any kind of a skip where somebody is slapped with a fish. It's just it's true, it's interesting, hilarious, it's it's on par with a rubber chicken. Right, And the idea that you could study dead fish, I mean it's not it's not hilarious. Factly, because the dead fish is still that's it's an animal, it's a it's an organism. We can perform a necroxy on that species

and learn all sorts of things. But there's something just hilarious about the idea of a dead fish being anything other than something rotting on the bank or or laid

out on ice at the grocery store. Well, um, in the in the salmon comes to us actually kind of by accident, or rather to the researchers Craig Bennett, Abego Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford, we're all looking at a rather preparing themselves for an upcoming experiment or study with humans, and they were I think it was a social stimuli study. But anyway, they had to test out fm R I machine and get some baseline operations on it. So at first they used a pumpkin to try to gather some

statistical data and do some scanning. Um. And then they thought, well, that's not, this doesn't quite work out. We can't really see that too. Well, that's not there's going on inside of a pumpkin. Yeah, exactly, you could see the seeds. But then they said, okay, a cornish game hen would be great. Did that wasn't quite on par with what they needed. Finally they settled on in an Atlantic salmon because it had, you know, the sort of definition it needed,

had the guts um, it was pretty much ideal. So they ran all the usual anatomical scans and then they ran the experimental set of the study as well, and then they actually showed the salmon images of people in social situations, either socially inclusive situations or socially exclusive situations, and the salmon was asked to respond saying how it felt. So of course, they basically just did the baseline of the machine testing and then they took the data and

they stored it away. Well. Two years later, one of the authors of the study was running a seminar on how to properly analyze FMR eyes, and they thought to themselves, you know, what, what sort of data can we use to try to illustrate what we're talking about? And they came on their sam and data. And the reason why they were using or looking for data is because what they wanted to try to illustrate is that information can

get so bogged down from these fm R eyes. In other words, they create so much data UM, and they're broken down into sections called voxels, and these voxels can have something like a hundred and thirty thousand pieces of data and UM, and they're looking at this contrast selection and they're trying to do these comparisons, and doing all the statistics can be a problem because as soon as you have that much data, you can actually produce false positives, all right, So what they wanted to do is they

wanted to do something called multiple correct comparisons. In other words, you correct for all these different points of data before you really run your final fMRI data sets. And they used the salmon. They took these scans and they then ran it against uh what they call their normal multiple comparisons, and they found that there was actually brain activity it looked like in the dead salmon when they ran it across these multiple comparisons. And then they ran it across

their multiple corrected comparisons and they saw no brain activity. Right, and that's the correct thing. So all of it seems ridiculous, but the point of it is that uh fm r I s are widely used and they're widely cited in media, and they have told us so much about our brain or mental abilities UM and even certain diseases, but there wasn't really a control or a control that was being widely used. So Bennett says, Okay, fine, laugh at the

salmon thing. But in the year before work was released around something like of fMRI I, papers didn't use the proper statistical correction methods. And now that they ran their paper and everybody's laughing about the salmon, that number has dropped. So it's an important aspect of it. It It seems like it's kind of minutia. But if all of us are depending on the data that comes out of fMRI I, and it is certainly a technology that is so widely used, then you want it to be corrected for to get

the best results. Yeah. I mean the great thing about studies like this is that at once they seem to be both ridiculous and pointless and then also highly important and illuminating about an important topic. So yeah, so I mean this is a perfect example. I think, you know, of course they were having fun with it as they were asking the dead salm and questions about how they

felt about social stimuli. We could also mention the fluid dynamics UM work is also pretty which on the surfaces hilarious because the fluid Dynamics prize went to the paper

walking with coffee, Why does it spill? This study came from a team of Russian, Canadian, and US scientists who were studying the dynamics of liquid slashing to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee, which, which which this is of course on the surfaces is great because there's nothing more every day than a cup of coffee, and that's certainly slashing coffee. So the idea that you would study something so seemingly low steak is

that is hilarious. Well, and I love that these guys physicists Ruslan Katchnikov and HC. Meyer, they were at a conference, say that they were watching all of their colleagues slashing their coffee around, and they sat down as we all, you know, most of us wouldn't say, wow, what a my coffee, were like really actually, like, what's the physics

behind coffee slashing around? Well, most of us would probably leave it right there, because guys were like, let's actually get to the bottom of this, which I thought was fascinating. Piece of fluid dynamics papers and fluid dynamics publications and conferences that they're always really amazing, Like there's we try to keep an eye on the various studies that come out, you know, because we're we're looking at Eureka alert in all those places in an intent to keep up with

with current science and cover it. And the fluid dynamic papers will come out and it's always crazy because it'll they'll range from stuff like one paper in particular that really blew my mind. It was dealing with how nuclear fallout moves through an urban city. So there's an idea of something potentially very high stakes because you use you analyze how fluids flow and again flow, how fluids be it air, you know, airs, gases, waters, The way they

move through an environment is complex. That's why, I mean, it's one of the reasons. It's whether prediction is so complicated and impossible beyond a certain point. Uh, it's a it's it's so when we get down to the science of how those movements work, it gets really rich and complex and uh and if we're looking at how uh fall outspreads through the city, that allows us to better uh plan out our means of responding to a disaster.

But then On the other hand, these same papers and publications will also analyze things such as this, like how does how does coffee slash out of a saucer? And ultimately they're illuminating that they're adding more data to the same equation, how do these how do fluids move? Like? What are the physics of these of these fluid interactions? Right? Because it's a mental exercise, right, because you can apply this to rocketry, like shifting weight that could destabilize a

missile or a rocket, so um, if you're interested. They did come to the conclusion that the slashing is due to a complex motion of a cup and also the biomechanics of walking and the low viscocity liquid dynamics. And this is great because all of those things, I mean, it's a pretty much a no brainer. We pretty much knew all of that already. But there's something hilarious but also really fulfilling about somebody setting out to scientifically answer

a question that we already had an answer to. Like it always it always kind of blows my mind. It's like it's just something that we like, here's an example of something that we just we just saw it, we took it on faith. It turned out to be exactly what we thought it would be. And when we have the scientific reasons why, But what if the reasons had been different? You know, never know until you actually prove it. You know, this is basically a proof of common sense

with science. I like that proof of common sense. And if you wanted to, or if the industry wanted to, it could change the design if it's coffee cups. Right, Um, all right, So I think that gives a good couple of examples. We have some other ones that we will leave for our part two, and just to wet your appetite, what they have to do with monkey butts, thwarting along winded orators, and preventing gastro intestinal explosions. Yes, so all of those things are definitely worth tuning into on the

next episode, so join us for that. In the mean time, if you would like to reach out to us and share something about a current or past ignoble winner that you thought was particularly fascinating, you can find this on Tumblr and on Facebook. We are stuff to blow your mind on both of those and on Twitter we go by the handle blow the Mind, and you can always drop us a line and blow the mind at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com