Ig Nobels 2017: Liquid Cats, Didgeridoos & More

I had a good one. I had to go hunting for like an actual Halloween experience though, because I my wife and I got dressed up and we took the dogs out for a walk, and no one in like a like a mile radius of our house was was really celebrating Halloween. You're not saying hunting hunting, well, I was hunt You don't seem like a hunt humans. That's what you do on Halloween, right, for fine, but not hunting them for fun, hunting them in hopes of food exactly.

And I prefer the ones that are in costumes because they taste better. So we had to get in the car and drive to a suburban neighborhood where there was like full on Halloween going and it was great. Well, well, we just went around in our roborhood. UM, my son, his his friend, uh, their parents, and we all just walked around at the trick or treating thing and there, but there was one moment that was there was a little bit legitimately creepy. I'll say that that kind of

goes in with our recent creepy Posta episode. So we were finishing up, it was dark, uh you know, one or two houses left, and there are a lot of kids on this particular street that we're trick or treating on and one of the kids turns around and he points past me, behind my back and says says, he's dressed as slender Man. And I look around and there's clearly nobody dressed as slender Man. There's like nobody even

tall enough to be slender Man. And it's like left me confused for a second, and I for a brief moment, I considered, is he seeing something that only children can see? His slender Man back there? And that's actually that would make the Slenderman thing even creepier if it was only children could see slender Man. But I wanted to question him. I didn't get a chance. I was like, like, hey, hey, kid, where is slender Man? Point to slender Man. Let's have

a discussion about this. What hey, Joe, what did you do? I stayed home. Rachel and I stayed home. We gave out some candy to trig Re treaters. We we reheated some leftover chili. Kind of nice Halloween feast, and we watched Toby Hooper's Salem's Lot in many series with all of the haircuts horror. Yeah, the seventies haircuts unbelievable. That movie scared the hell out of me when I first saw it, but I was much younger. Yeah, it does

the scene with the little boy floating up against the window. Yeah, the vampires in it are really freaky. Yeah. I I haven't seen it in forever, but I listened to a lot of Halloween mixes yesterday and there was one in particular that threw in some samples from the Salem's Lot movie, the bit where the showdown between the Master and the priest, Barlow and Callahan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man, I would sample the heck out of James Mason in that movie because

he is so smooth. I love how they invert the classic monsters familiar, like in the Universal Dracula and well all the traditional Draculas. You get the crazy familiar. You get Renfield who's out of control, but he's also like imprisoned and not very potent as a character. In this one, you've got this smooth, suave James Mason and these fancy suits. He's basically Captain Nemo outside of the submarine. Hey, I

got a question. Though, we're talking about Halloween and actually October's over, guys, that means that we can't do Halloween episodes for another year. That's a bummer, though, you know us, if you're a regular listener, we kind of slip some Halloween in all year long, and we'll we'll we'll sneak it in, I'm sure. But of course we've been talking about Halloween for a month and in doing that we we managed to yet again let the Ignoble prizes slipped

past us. So we're gonna make up for that this week and also provide maybe a kind of a palate cleanser. I guess for anyone who wishes to move on from Halloween episodes for a little bit, this will definitely be like your silly science uh series of episodes. So let's why don't we tell the audience Maybe some of them haven't listened to our previous Ignoble episodes, but we generally

cover them every year. What are they Well, they have been awarded since by the publication the Annals of Improbable Research. The purpose of the award, according to the editors of the publication, is to quote honor achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think. And furthermore, they stress 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 interest in science, medicine, and technology. And the principal individual here and all of this is the editor of the of the Anials and Probable Research, Mark Abrams. And I would say that that goes along with our mission here, and so these kind of work together nicely and that like hopefully we give them a little bit of a boost.

They point out this bizarre research that we can take a deeper look at, and we have more time on the podcast than they have in their live ceremony to actually like dive into the research here. Yeah, and I think one of the big take homes about it. I mean, obviously it is a it is a reference to the Nobel Prizes, where where the like a Nobel Prize, and chemistry or biology is a big deal, and it's usually a study that is going to have a huge impact

with the Ignoble Prizes. I think it definitely highlights this idea that we have touched on before, science as this slime mold making its way through a maze or a labyrinth, and and the slime mold of science as it explores the world, it is going to explore everywhere. It is going to look in every mundane pantry and closet, and that is that's one of the things that the the Ignobel Prize celebrate, some of these studies that we're going to discuss. It's one of those areas where you can say, why

why did science need to look into that? Why why did money and effort and and scientific rigor approach this portion of the world. And the answer is, well, because science must. Science must go in there. And in some of these cases it actually turns out to be important, like stuff that seems totally ludicrous, which I don't know about you guys, but some of mine seemed totally ludicrous. But yeah, and and in fact, like other episodes of our show have built off of the entire premise of

Igno bells, like, for instance, our necrophilia episode. Uh, basically we got the jumping point off of that from I think it was like an Igno bell from like five years ago maybe, yeah. Yeah, And and we were able to find a whole ton of information. That's one of

my favorite episodes. Yeah. I remember after you guys had first been talking about doing that, we were in this long meeting and at the end of the meeting somebody came over to talk to me about something and I realized what was on my computer screen was all this stuff about duck necrophilia. Yeah. Yeah, I hope they liked it. And if you out there haven't listened to the episode, you should because it's really really surprisingly not as grim

as you would think. I mean, it's grim, but it's also like really educational, both in terms of the animal kingdom but also psychology of human beings. Yeah. It demystifies the topic, and I think I managed to do so in a non exploited way. So what, And it's a great way to get through a meeting, boring meeting, hit up the duck necrophilia. So what can we do that with today? Oh, we have a we have a host of studies here to touch on. There are ten awards, right, so this is gonna be part one of a multi

part episode. Correct, how many episodes? Who knows it might be too, It might be three. Well, we'll see how it goes. So the approach here, as in previous years, is we divided these ten prizes up. We each took three of them, and then there was one left over and I ended up taking that one just because I had one of my other papers turned out to be a bit short. Okay, well, it looks like I'm up

to bat first. All right, what do you have for Joe? Well, this would be the Physics Prize this year, which was offered to Mark Antoine far Dan for use fluid dynamics. You probe the question can a cat be both a solid and a liquid? This is a real Shroggger's cat slash not scenario, right, Okay, Yeah, I can see that the cat's both a liquid and a solid until you look at it. Okay, So it's for a paper called on the rayology of Cats. So here's an experience I'm

sure you've all had. You're at a restaurant, you get some French fries, you want to put some ketchup on your plate. But the ketchup at your table is the glass bottle. You know there may be trouble ahead. So you turn it up, you unscrew the top, you shake, jiggle, tap and all that, but you can't get the stuff out of the bottle. It will not flow. You'll have had this experience. Yeah, that's when you have to It's probably not very polite, but you have to get the

butter knife. I always take a butter knife. Jam the knife in, and you did, but then you'd end up feeling like a real animal, which is always a shame because I find that the glass bottle of ketchup, you tend to encounter it at not the highest level of restaurant, because that kind of place is going to have it's

gonna bring it out to you. And but it's also not a super cheap restaurant because otherwise you would have packets, or you would have a plastic squeeze bottle, or you would have a pump and a little little cups that you fill it up with. So it's a nice enough restaurant that you feel awkward jabbing of a knife into a bottle like an animal, you know, some restaurants take those glass bottles and then just refill them at a restaurant.

For four years while I was in college, that was part of the job, was refilling those much cheaper to buy in bulk and then just pump it back into But in that case, why wouldn't you use a scort bottle? Anyway, So if if you have ever had this experience, and you've ever wondered why won't the ketchup come out, your interest in the subject of yology has been ignited. Reyology is the study of how matter flows. So given your experience with the ketchup bottles, you can probably guess that

this is a surprisingly complex field. A lot of variables are going to go into how a substance flows under various conditions. So you know that one glass catchup bottle sort of cleanly evacuates onto your plate, maybe even faster than you wanted to, and then the next one, same brand, same content, same bottle, just will not budge until you jam the knife in. So what makes the difference. There are a lot of variables. Temperature is a big one.

You probably know this from cooking, right, You've got a lot of sauces, soups, so they're edible fluids that are very runny at a high temperature but almost solid at a low temperature. And there are just tons of reology characteristics that you can chart exactly how does a flowing material react to different types of substrate materials, Like how does it flow on glass versus on some other type of material, or how does it like how far will it bubble up off the lip of a container before

it overflows? There are all kinds of questions like that. So the measurement of a material's ability to flow is known as rheometry, And I think this paper technically qualifies as a foray into rheometry because it's going to be measuring cats and how how well cats flow out of catchup bottles. Uh, not quite catchup bottles, but it gets

surprisingly close. Uh. So reology is actually kind of it's one of those things that seems kind of dry at first, but it's more interesting the more you think about it. The Greek philosopher Heraclitis is famous for this insistence that the fundamental nature of the universe is sort of constant change. It's sort of like the static change, since everything is always changing in a way, everything is always the same. You've heard that quote that no man ever steps in

the same river twice. That's attributed to Heraclidas. But another way of expressing this idea is the aphorism panta ray, which is Greek for everything flows, like we all flow down here will flow too, and uh and so everything changes, nothing remains still and far. Dwand points out that the field of reology is sort of along the same same same lines as this idea by Heraclitus. States of matter are not fixed features of the universe. They're expressed through

a matter of time. So eventually forces act on every massive particles to make those particles deform or flow in some way. Uh. Solid matter tends to deform over time. Liquid or gas tends to flow. Gotcha. Okay, yeah, this

makes sense. So I'm thinking about like we recently talked about, like these massive glaciers in uh small Bard, and that some of these glaciers have different states inside of themselves, so some of them are more liquid and more solid than other states, and that causes them to move, the

entire glacier to move at different paces. This is somewhat related. Yeah, but that's a great example because on a long enough time scale, glaciers do flow as well, even though they're solid and you can walk on them if you want to look over hundreds of years, they're sort of flowing. Uh So, a major factor in how things flow or resist flow is the state of matter at her. We all remember this from you know, elementary school physics. But

by traditional definition, you've got solids, liquids, and gas. And a solid is the state of matter which has both a fixed volume it's not going to change in size, and a fixed shape it's not going to change in shape. Liquid is the state of matter that's got a fixed volume but not a fixed shape, and instead it conforms to the shape of whatever contains it. And then gas doesn't have either one. It doesn't have a fixed shape or a fixed volume, but expands to fill whatever container

it's in. Here's where the cat comes in. Now, being an animal, I think you generally assume the cat is more or less a solid, right, well, kind of complex.

It's a solid filled with liquids, that's true. Animals are kind of bags of juice, right and then, but then cats, I haven't read the study, but ever since I saw the title, I keep looking at my cat and watching her move and she does have like a very flowy liquid movement to totally, but it's not I would say it comes through less when the cat is moving around and walking, and more when the cat is at rest

in various containers and substrates. So you guys are both cat owners, haven't you seen the way a cat will sometimes seem to puddle in the bathroom sink or pour itself into a basket or box. Oh definitely the baskets and box like that seems to be universal. Yeah, definitely. My my female cat rowing is she she has an ability to, like she's a little overweight, which she has an ability to kind of just make her her mounds of flesh kind of form around her in a liquid status. Yeah,

I mean, I remember this. I've seen lots of cats that love to just sort of not just get into depressions and cavities in various types of containers, but seemed to fill them perfectly to every edge like a liquid would. So that inspired some people on the internet to make posts like cats are liquids, and then far Dan is basically like I saw a thing on the internet that

said cats are liquids, let's find out. So he essentially takes a bunch of photos of cats and analyzes them using the criteria of reology the same way you'd measure I say, a massive ketchup or paint or mud to understand the way it flows. A cat in a jar, a cat spread across a lot of bars, a cat in a basket, And what follows in the paper I would say is mostly just a bunch of in jokes for yologists, But I do think it's kind of interesting.

The results are obviously that cats can have some unique reeological properties, combining apparent features of both solids and liquids. But wouldn't that be true of basically any mammal Well, I mean part fur. Yeah, I think the fur, the fur and the sort of soft body is very crucial for the cat because probably a little bit solid and a little bit liquid. Oh yeah, like, well, my bodies liquid. Well, I mean we are pretty much blood bags. But I

would say something about the shape of your body. So imagine yourself trying to get into a sink or a box or a basket and just fill it the way a cat appears to like a liquid. It doesn't seem quite as easy for you and me. Right, One of the things about cats of course, is that they are extremely flexible and uh and and then they have these sort of various resting states that they'll go into, these

kind of uniform uh, you know, resting states. So there's there's I like to think of it as you have the bread uh shape where the cat you know, kind of tucks its legs in and it it's kind of busy, kind of cat bush cat loaf, Yeah, the cat or

a cat loaf, you could call it. There's also the bagel in which they curl up, and then there's one there's one I think most of them do this, but my cat Mo, she definitely does this one where she just kind of like lays like she's been hit by a truck or something, you know, where it's just just completely sprawled out. But all of these they do look like different animals in these different shapes, and it's really hard to nail down exactly what the shape of their

body is. Yeah, but my flesh isn't as loosely hanging off of my body as it does in my cat's right, Yeah, and cats you feel like you can just move it all over the place, and the fur really helps. Also. The fur gives the illusion that there's like a much more body there than there actually is, and that part of the body obviously can be deformed into almost any shape. That's why when you give a cat of bath, it is like one of the saddest things ever because they're miserable.

But also they lose this ability you're talking about, right, So that's part of the thing. A shaved cat would not appear to be a liquid in the same way a very furry cat is. But I I think it's it's pretty funny in the paper, Like a lot of these are obviously a lot of these things, he says in the paper are funnier if you are a reeologist or you're familiar with all these concepts, but they're still pretty funny even to an outsider. Like one is a picture of a cat in a basket, and it's a

very small basket. So picture a large cat in like a small French fry basket, and it's it's gathered up into the basket, clearly filling it entirely, but puffing out over the top and hanging over the sides. And he analyzes this photo by saying, quote cat on a super philadophobic substrate, showing a high contact angle. Another one, he's got a jar turned on its side with the mouth facing out, and there is a kitten pretty much completely filling the jar, and he says, quote tilted jar experiment

showing the yield stress of a kitten. So the yield stress would be like what kind of stress has to be put on a mass of liquid before it flows out of a container at a certain angle. So, for example, the ketchup in the bottle, A lot of times the ketchup will not come out of the bottle because you have not adequately met its yield stress in whatever form it takes in the bottle. Here we've got the kitten will not pour out of this jar because it's yield

stress has not been met. So while this is funny, right, and it's written to be funny, it also seems like it's probably important because it illustrates the principles of reology in a way that that basically backs up how well

they work. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I would say that this paper seems to me to be jokier than most of the other papers were looking at this time, Like he actually does do some math in the paper and actually applies the reheological principles does real analysis, but it's mostly I think, just for the purpose of being funny, especially to other reeologists. But I think it matters, and he mentions in the paper some ways in which

it might matter. Like one thing is that cats are unlike most other types of liquids you would measure the flow of because they are self powered and self moving. And there are some analogies here to other things that you might actually want to study, like studying the flow of self powered materials does matter in a lot of scenarios, like studying the movement of large packs or flocks of animals, or studying the flow of crowds of humans under various constraints.

And this is sort of me extrapolating, because I think that would also come into some different kinds of fields other than reyology. There's probably, you know, such a thing as just studying crowd dynamics. But but hold on, I got an idea of how this connects. Okay, So remember that movie World War Z with the zombies like zombie flow basically, yeah, exactly, like the zombies like came together

as like a hive mind and could like didn't. There's even one point where like I think they turned into a hand or something something dumb like that, Right, They formed structures kind of like firing'st you're talking about the movie, the movie, not the book at all. Yeah. Uh, well they would climb walls by piling themselves up against the wall and then scaling over. Yeah, exactly. And so you could Let's say you were one of the c g I operators on that film and you needed to figure

out how they would flow. You could probably use the principles of reyology applied based on something like on crowd dynamics. Yeah. Possibly, Well, I mean I would say that crowd dynamics, studying the flow of crowds and other self powered uh types of flow could have real consequences, and say designing environments. For example, crowd crush and trampling are real things that happen when you get a bunch of people together in a place and they start flowing in a non optimal an entire

brain stuff episode on the science of crowd crushing. And so I think maybe like understanding self directed flow of bio materials, whether it's a single animal or lots of animals acting as a pack, could help us better maybe maybe better design public spaces to accommodate sudden human crowd flow without leading to tragedies. So cases where say a large group of people are screaming and flowing out of a movie theater, and also cases where the blob is

flowing out of the same movie theater after them. Uh. Both both of these would be opportunities for reology of the blob would be a great paper. That's what this guy should right next. I bet somebody has done that out there. I bet that's one of those things you could find. But to your point about just raising awareness of reality, I think that's a great acent point on this show. I do not believe we have ever discussed

reeology before, and here we are discussing it. Well, I think we should commit now we should try to find at least one really truly interesting yology topic to cover within the next year. Okay, yeah, maybe the blob. Alright, we're gonna take a quick breaking. When we come back, we will jump into another two thousand seventeen ignoble winning study. Alright,

we're back, Robert, what do you have for us? Alright, so this one, this was actually the first one that I I snagged from from this year's offerings because it is a paper that I have covered before. Kind of ad nausea because there is a stuff to blow your mind podcast episode. I believe that touches on this. There was a video and I'm pretty sure I did a blog post as well. Oh I remember this, Yeah, yeah, yeah. The title of the paper is female penis, male vagina

and their correlated evolution in a have insect. And this was a Current Biology paper paper from two thousand and fourteen. I gotta say, first of all, for our listeners, there's an image that's inserted here in our notes for Robert's referencing. Insert is a good Yeah. It is very difficult to tell what is happening here, but it is also very easy to imagine what is happening here. It's just these uh oregan like structures flowing into and out of each

other with a male and female symbol on them. It looks somewhat insectile, or maybe there's just hair on everything. I can't tell. Oh it is it is a cronenberg Ee world. This image attempts u this with so basically the reason that this the study was highlighted previously, the reason it want to ignoble UH this year is because it concerns sex the sex swapped world of cave bugs,

which I think we can all get behind. Um. So specifically, we're talking about Brazilian cave insects of the neo Trogla genus. We're talking four to sink distinct species here, and they mark the first documented example of an animal with sex reversed genitalia. So as this as detailed in the Cell pressed journal Current Biology, the females quote insert an elaborate penis like organ into the males much reduced vagina like opening during forty to seventy hour long love making marathons.

So to clarify, would this mean that's the male still makes sperm cells, correct, and the female still makes egg cells, but they bring them into contact by the female inserting an organ into the male to retrieve the sperm cells from inside. Exactly. It's a different like formation essentially, but it's but it's unique, is the thing, Like, there are no other examples of of a a sex or gender swapping like this robust right, yeah, and this is I mean that's forty to seventy hours. I mean sting would

probably be embarrassed looking at us. Well, these cave bugs. The thing is of that the sting is a lover. And uh, I think love making is a bit anthropomorphic when you're talking about h I kind of agree, yeah, because the insect world is pretty brutal, and the love making world of really the love making world of a lot of organisms is fairly brutal. Uh. And is the I love how we've just landed on love making instead of mating. I don't know, you know, it just sounds

more romantic, right, I guess so? So um, But there's more, There's there's more. There's some more brutal details here. As the team of Brazilian and Japanese researchers discovered, the female inserts her phaalic gynosome into the mail and then the sex organ inflates, hooking a bevy of spines into the male's body to anchor the two insects together. Now, this is not the only organism with penis spines. No. In fact, there there's evidence that human ancestors have had penis spines

and harmedid other hominids have had penis spines before. And I believe there is some genetic data you can point to. Robert, tell me a little more about penis spines. I think I'm woefully under educated here, all right, So, yeah, it's

like basically like a cactus penis. I guess you could describe it as a because basically there's sort of a reproductive arms race in many organisms, and this is where spines may serve to stimulate or anchor, uh, the organism into place, and or it may serve in sexual conflict. Now I think you're probably out there thinking, like, what, so some insects have penis spines. That's it, right, No, I mean like mammals have penis spines, like cats have

pens have like penis spines. Kind of right. Yeah, humans should wake up every day and just be thankful that, you know, for a number of things, But one of the things on the list should be that we don't have to contend with penis spines um in this case of the the cave insect. Of the researchers think that it may have other functions aside from just anchoring it into place. It might have a role in genital stimulation

or or in or quote, in inflicting harm. So it's it's kind of hard to figure out that it's like the brundle fly told us. So there's no such thing as insect politics. It's all it. And so wait a minute, that like this could be a sex organ or a defensive or offensive weapon, well only in so far as it plays into the the the war, the continual battle of sexual reproduction. Yeah, when whenever I've read about this in the past, it's been a biological, uh, survival mechanism,

I guess. And it's this is horrible from an ethical standpoint of humans, right, But the idea is that the one without the penis barbs can't get away if they do not want to mate with the one with the penis barbs. Once the barbs are attached, they're kind of stuck, right, So I think that's what you mean by the inflicting harm, right that it's it's sort of along the lines of, uh, if those are human beings, we would be referring to

this as like a masochistic act. Now, the the gynosome in this case, it again, it does not deposit material like a male penis. There's no semen coming out of it, there's no sperm deposit. Instead, this gynosome it receives sperm as well as capsules of nourishment, sort of a gift or a bribe to encourage lots of mating. That we see this in a number of different um insects, typically the spiders too, like they are the spiders that create

a wrapped up gifts. The males bring them to the females to encourage mating, though sometimes they bring them something empty to trick them. So this is essentially like an inverted vagina dentata, you can think of it that way. Yeah, so the would it be inverted, would it be an extroverted vagina dentata? Maybe that's yeah, that's probably the correct terminology.

It's probably not, by the way. Also, vegina dentata is something that we've covered on the show separately, that that that that was a joke that's not actual like biology. I guess that you would say it's kind of aversion I believe diverted. Yeah, it was like turning the turning out of a pocket, and yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking of. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's very complicated to try and sort of fit the the tetris equation here in one's mind, genital tetris. Now that that act

of gift giving that we're talking about the nourishment. The researchers have argued here that this is likely what drove the evolutionary development of the female penis. The dinosame here to begin with, again getting into this phallic arms race. Now, why is it funny? I think that's pretty obvious because it is a study that involves sex and the idea of a female organism penetrating a male organism. So sex t Yes, basically, that's that's it. It's it's beenign violation.

Well yeah, as long as you're not one of the male cave fugs, right yeah, but but yeah, it's it's basically just a a funny sex headline, right, but it is still important. It's u it's I think it's such a startling rever hursal of everything we've come to expect from sexual reproduction. And as their researchers point out, the reversal here is in the quote rapid evolution and diversification unquote of genitalia. So male genitalia is usually the one

to develop quote coercive adaptations, while female genitalia remains relatively simple. Plus, it's the females doing the competition here for males and their seminal gifts. So the biological reversal results in a very robust behavioral reversal. So perhaps with this particular species, there's more females than males, or there's some kind of a I don't know if sociological is the right term, but there's a there's a set up in which like they have to compete for the the attention of the

males in order to reproduce. Well, it sounds like the females would be the ones doing the courtship activities. Yeah, and it's it's interesting to to look at that. It's like to say that the biological reversal and then that

reverses the behavior as well. Uh. I really like this because I think flipping things around like this, it shows us that sexual reproduction is all about just the combination of these two things and the form those things take, and all the behavior and culture associated with it is merely a product of natural selection. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting and it makes me sort of think, like where's it going as well, not just with insects, but with like

all species. You know, although for the most part, I mean for the last like millions some odd years, most of our species have stayed the same reproductive wise, but things can change well, and it especially when we start changing ourselves. It's also one of those studies that just raises the possibility like what if what if things had

gone the other way? What if we were in a world where the vast majority almost all organisms that engage in sexual reproduction entailed at the female penetration of the male and uh and we were looking at a weird cave bug that did the opposite, right, Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it does put it all into perspective. Yeah, alright, we're gonna take a quick break and we come back. We have one more study here for you from the two thousand seventeen Igno Bells. Thank you, Thank alright, we're back.

So I'm gonna take us from inverted genitals to an entirely different place. This is the Peace Prize for the Igno Bells this year. Uh and it revolves around the Dijury Do you guys familiar with the dijury do? Oh? Yes? Yeah, I'm actually can our producer Alex insert the sound of a Dijury do in here so that our audience kind of gets an idea of what we're talking about. No, wait, that was a digury don't. Here we go, and if nothing else, I think everybody should recognize that sound from

any like Australian exploitation film or something mystical. Now, was there a bunch of digury do and howling three the marsupials? I feel like there was. I mean, if there wasn't it was that was a colossal failure on their part. Well, if there was, those marsupials would sleep better than most people. No way. Yeah, we've got some facts here. Folks did red playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnea syndrome in a randomized control trial. That is the paper that

I'm talking to you about today. The essential idea here is they demonstrated that regular playing of the dig Rey Do is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnea and snoring. So do either you guys snore? Do you have sleep apnea? I don't have apnea. My dad does, but I snore a decent amount I have. I have relatives who have snoring issues. But yeah, I don't have it myself. So have you ever thought to yourself, like, what if I just played the Digrey Do a little bit more? Would

that make it better? Science says yes. So this is the the play that like you're playing the DIGITALI do music to settle down for the evening. Are you listening to it or you just have having it in your life. It doesn't even have to be right before you go to bed. Explain Okay, So these researchers, they took twenty five patients who had apnea or hypopnia in an index between fifteen and thirty. That's you know, a measurement system

that they use for like how bad these conditions can get. Uh, And they had them do did red lessons for four months and the participants played did you red for about six days a week for about twenty five point three minutes a day, and it's significantly improved both there and their partners. Sleep disturbances. Now we might wonder, like what's the biological function here, like what is going on? Well, okay, sleep disorders of this type, they're caused by the collapse

of the upper airway. So the most effective intervention is usually what's called positive airway pressure therapy. So that's like when you see people who have the masks, they go to sleep with positive pressure. Yeah. To be honest, like when I have sinus problems, what I end up doing is just pushing on my my sinuses round my nose. I think it's a similar effect, but this is obviously

like more methodical than what I'm doing. Okay. Uh. For some patients though, that's not suitable, so they need other interventions. The researchers involved in this experiment they had heard just heard from a Digredo instructor. He said, hey, um, my students and I we've had a complete reduction in our snoring and we're not sleepy during the daytime after we've been practicing digre Do for several months. And they thought, wait a minute, is this because digre do is training

the muscles in their upper airways? So okay. They set up this methodology and they recruited patients at study centers in Switzerland. Then they randomized these patients into an intervention group and a control group. And then they excluded candidates who are currently trying out that positive airway pressure therapy and any drugs that act on the central nervousism, as well as anybody who was trying to lose weight or way too much or drank too much alcohol, as all

these things could be contributing factors. The patients in the intervention group took the dig red classes and they learned the following things. I've never played a Digury do before, so I didn't this was new to me. Uh. Circular breathing is a technique that enables you to maintain sound for a long period of time by inhaling through your nose while maintaining airflow through the instrument itself and use

your cheeks as bellows. Okay, so this is like the first kind of important part of this, and then the second is to optimize the complex interaction between your lips, your vocal tract, and the circular breathing I just mentioned, so that the vibration in the upper airway is more readily transmitted down to the lower airway. Well, I guess one thing to keep in mind here is that with dig redo music, you don't hear a bunch of a staccata. You don't hear you don't heart, you hear long droning tone.

It's sustained. Yeah, yeah, exactly, which I imagine also helps contribute to this. Right now, I've got a question, are there any drone or doom metal bands that incorporate digury Do they have to be there have to be I'm almost positive there is. Yeah, And but do you think

they're from Australia or somewhere else? I don't know. You get into an interesting area where it would be like a like a an aboriginal uh subset of drone music, kind of like traditional drawne music, like what happens when you run a digury do through an R and JAMP. I mean, I have to admit, like most sun Oh records sound like they have digitally do in the background anyways.

But so here's the thing, how do you measure this? Well, it turns out there's several indexes to measure the effect on sleep, and so they brought these patients in, they gave them these indexes as surveys, and then they used cardio respiratory sleep studies on them, and finally they gave the patients just a generic health and quality of life survey just to find out, you know, what's all going on,

making sure everything's working the right way. They found this The patient's quality of sleep actually didn't differ significantly between the people who played Didjury Do and the people who didn't, but their partners reported less sleep disturbance. They also observed a significant effect of the digury Do playing on apnea or hypopnia. Uh. And so actually when they compared this to the positive airway pressure therapy, they found they're similar,

but the dijury Do has a slightly smaller effect. But essentially, like if you're out there and you're listening and you're like, oh, this is a problem for me, maybe you have to wear one of those masks at night or something like that, Maybe play digury do instead, Like you know what it reminds me of, Well, we would say, obviously, following your doctor's recommendation, but yeah, give dijury do a try. Yeah, yeah, do do both well and then imagine how well you

sleep if you do. One of the great things about the digury Do that I've I've picked up on is that even if you don't play it, or you never play it, uh, it still looks great propped up in a corner. Always. Discussion started, well, I was thinking about how this reminds me of. This leads us back to cats.

We've done some research into cats before on this and on brain stuff, talking about cat purring and the function of cat purring as like a method of healing both the cat and maybe people who are on the cat or like the cats laying on or something like that. So the digury Do kind of made me think the same thing, like, there's something there's an act of the vibration that's that's working on here. But obviously also they're building up actual muscles and responses inside the respiratory system.

So why is it funny? Well, because the sound and the look of the instrument is abusing. Everybody giggles at the dig re Do, right, because but why is it important? This is an actual thing that can relieve a disorder that many people suffer from. You know, most people would go that's a ridiculous thing. Why would we Why would re research that? If the dig rey Do instructors said hey, this may actually have some benefits to your pati most

people would just go, oh yeah, sure, that's anecdotal. But they did the research and they found out that it's a real thing. Well it comes back around the idea of of science as the slime mold. You know, opening every cabinet and even the cabinets that seem a bit silly that we seem reluctant to, you know, to to to give much credence to the science, is going to look in there and see if there's anything worth happening.

You know, this makes me think we could do probably whole episodes on the medical science of wind instruments, Like we gotta go from this to bagpipe long right, you know the the inverse is that a condition like I'm suffering from bagpipeline. Oh man. So you're a bagpipe player and you maybe it's actually not funny because this is

literally killed people. But yeah, bagpipe along is a thing that where your bagpipe becomes infested with fungus without you realizing because you're continually, yeah, as you as you're continually experiencing this constricted airflow through this fungus filled cavity, you are feeding all of these these horrible particles into your lungs and people don't realize what's going on, and it can kill you. Oh man, that sounds like a great idea for an episode. Not to be a downer, guys,

remember that they can help people. Good ay mate. If you play bagpipes, also play the digit do I don't think. I don't think that they reverse the conditions. But you'll feel better about one thing while you're feeling worse about the other. Al Right, we actually have one more before we close out this installment of our two thousand seventeen Ignobell series, and it is the fluid dynamics prize that sounds exciting. Wait, we already did fluid dynamics with those

cats somehow. I guess rayology is slightly different than fluid dynamics, or maybe fluid dynamics is a is a larger subset category.

I know fluid dynamics is. Certainly it's an area that always intrigues me because for starters that they do have a at least one huge conference a year, and you see a lot of cool papers coming out of it, and it ranges tremendously because, for instance, one of the best fluid dynamic papers and the most enthralling that I came across, was a paper that dealt with how uh nuclear fallout moves through a metropolitan environment, you know, with

like flows of radioactive material hitting buildings like cascading up buildings and so forth, and how we might be able to to map the flow of these materials. Yeah, hey, I got a fun footnote to that. The most expensive book in the world is a book that was written by Leonardo da Vinci and it's owned by Bill Gates, and it's about fluid dynamics, and it's written backwards. You have to you have to read mirror to left. It's well, yeah, it's written so that you have to use a mirror

to actually read it. Wow. Yeah, it's impressive. Well you should ask Bill Gates sometime. Yah. Sounds point and the whole things actually standing on well you know. But but one of the great things about fluid dynamics is that, yeah, it certainly touches on some some rather grandiose topics, but it also is just everywhere around us. Like I I have not looked up a study about this, but every time I'm making a smoothie in the morning in the blender,

I think about fluid dynamics. Somebody out there has surely applied some serious scientific thinking to what's going on with my blender, Like how how the stuff blends or in many cases doesn't blend. How you end up with that section of smoothie on the top that's doing nothing while the bottom part is swirling around. I would imagine they

need a better blender or whatever. Those like chains are like those smoothie kings, the one we have here and with the big square looking they must have like scientists on their teams whose whole job is to figure out like how well these things can come up through straws. I've read about this. I think the best solution is to stick your hand down in there while it's going. Yeah, well, that's what I was thinking. You were going with the

cat thing. Don't follow my advice, folks. All right, Well, this particular study is titled A Study of the Coffee Spilling Phenomena in the Impulse Regime. So are we in the low impulse regime right now? I think we're in the high impulsori. I love that that phrase of the low impulse regime sounds like a band. I would be really into it. It sounds like something Captain Piccard would say.

So basically, this paper asked the question, from a fluid dynamic standpoint, why does spillage occur with coffee also with wine? And how might we limit it? This is the great thing about the papers. It touches on a universal experience. I am the guy who inevitably always spills coffee on themselves. I don't know what it is A trail of brown

look like. And to the point where my wife like knows when I've bought coffee and have been driving in the car because she's just like, there's coffee stains everywhere. What is wrong with you? I eat like a raccoon, and apparently with coffee, I just like throw the cup at my face. I guess I don't know, but yeah, even just like when it has a lid on it and I move it around, it somehow gets everywhere. This

is one of my favorite features of classic animation. If you watch old Disney movies, they're always depicting cups of liquids sloshing around crazily while people are consuming them. You know what I'm talking about, Like people swinging a beer stein or a wine glass or something like that, and it's just splashing and slashing all over the place. When that kind of movement tends to uh, it tends to be everywhere in these old cartoons, like the people are

kind of slashing back and forth. The action is kind of slashing. I guess animation historians have probably have a have some terminology to throw behind them. Yeah. I would imagine it has something to do with like the form at the time that like the animators and illustrators are probably trying to figure out how best to render liquid in cartoon format, same as like with c G. I like when it's super impressive how great water is rendered.

I guess part of what I'm thinking of is that it's always like in classic animation, actions and the themes they signify or exaggerated. Like if you watch old Disney movies, whenever somebody's drinking some thing, usually it's in some kind of feast scene that's signaling gluttony or something like that. And so there's all this depiction of excess, and maybe the slashing is one aspect of that. I immediately thought

of Fantasia and Mickey carrying. So this particular paper is a South Korean paper and it was published in Achievements in the Life Sciences, and it's by you On Han from two thousand sixteen. And I'm not going to summarize a lot of the paper because a lot of the paper is just sort of breaking it down in from a fluid, dynamic standpoint, what's happening with a slashing cup of coffee or a slashing goblet of wine. But the fun part is that this article doesn't just doesn't just

describe what's happening. It presents solutions. So wait, you're telling me I might have some solutions from my coffee problems. Yeah, I'm saying that when you when we're done with this section, you will have new ideas to implement in your coffee consumption. And you're handling of a coffee mug apart from sippy cups. Um, basically, well, they get there in a way. There's sort of the cipy cup. They do recommend you could you could hold the coffee mug with a like a small plate on

top of it, just cover the coffee mug. That seems obvious. You don't a scientist to point that out. But yeah, maybe if we didn't have an open container of liquid, we wouldn't have to deal with sloshing. But I assume solutions than that. They well, we'll see if you think

they're better. Uh, here's a quote from the paper. Moreover, we showed that either walking backwards or holding the cup the cup with a claw hand posture lead to significant changes in the driving force frequency spectrum, suggesting a method to suppress residents. So one of the ideas here is, yes, simply walk backwards with your coffee mug. But the other is that I have a feel like I would spell

even more with that, but okay, I'm listening. The other is to have your make a claw with your hand and hold the coffee mug top down, not bottom up, so you're holding your coffee like you're some sort of like a cartoon vampire carrying it around from the top. Crane game. Yeah, it's like the crane game where instead of grabbing a bunch of like cheap stuffed animals, you're grabbing a single coffee mug. I know this is a better method. It makes you look kind of stupid, but

it is a better method according to the scientific data. Now. I know, Robert, you haven't seen the new season of Twin Peaks. Joe, you have, right. No, actually, okay, so neither of you going to don't spoil it. I'm just gonna say it. There is a character named Dougie in it, and Dougie holds coffee in the claw method, but he does two handed claw where he grabs it from the side and he holds it with both of his hands

are clawed and he holds onto it tightly like that. Man, I have a totally different idea of the claw hold, and it comes from my day's serving in restaurants. Where the claw was. How you fit three water glasses in the same hand. You've got this clutch, but it's underneath, right, Yeah, from the bottom where they each like they fit between the first finger and that. Well, I'm not going to describe all that, but yeah, you can get three water glasses in one hand if you use the claw. What

was the spillage like with that? Not too much? Actually, okay, it might have hit on a similar property. But that's the other thing that comes to mind. In the service industry, you can't really use the top down claw method to bring someone their coffee at a restaurant. They're going to think you're yeah, they're gonna say, take that back. You're you're basically sticking your hand in my beverage. But it looks like here that they have come up with a

design that could fix that problem. Yes, let's carry it in your mouth and then spit it out into the cup at the table. Well, at least it would be closed, right, and then you're prepared for a wonderful cinematic response to any jokes that that the customer may may share. But now, in addition to providing new ways to carry existing coffee mugs, this study does present an alternate coffee cup design. Quote.

It is evident that a decrease in the radius of the cup can significantly increase the resonance frequency by dividing the cup into smaller cylindrical cells. So there's like, how this looks. It's like a coffee cup, but it looks like it's got a bunch of like syringes with the top sawed off inside of Its possible to drink out of. It looks impossible to drink off. It looks a bit silly for sure, I mean straw. Yeah, basically the picture looks like a glass like cocktail tumbler, and inside it

there are all of these glass vials. It's packed with test tubes. So imagine if you drink your coffee out of a bunch of test tubes that have been lashed together, as opposed to a single broad drinking vest. I mean, what this looks like is you'd be sipping out of the bottom two test tubes and the rest would just be pouring into your eyes. Yeah, exactly what. You couldn't throw it back, and that's for sure, and it would be really you would have to mix your cream and

sugar in a different cup. Entirely before you even pour it. The thing that gets me about this, really, both of these suggestions, both the coffee cup design and the coffee mug handling UH method, is that what if these what if this is the way? What if these are the changes we need for a better system of drinking and carrying coffee around. But we're ultimately going to just be too vain to to change, because, yes, drinking out of this bizarre contraption that looks like a bunch of test

tubes look silly. Carrying your coffee mug around with a claw hole looks silly, and but there are other things that we've seen in life where the sillier looking method is more successful and we don't do it because it looks silly. I'm gonna offer a really stupid method, but it's my method. I pretty much never spilled my coffee because I never fill my cup more than two thirds of the way, well, because I don't want to get

the fear. But the thing is, Joe, I I have there's been so many times where I've been coming in from my front porch, So I work on my front porch a lot. What I'm teleworking and I always have a coffee mug with me, and sometimes the coffee mug you know it's down to the last little bit, but you can still, trust me, you can still slash the heck out of a cup of coffee when you have

less than a fourth of a cup. Yeah. So if you're like trying to grab hold of a child or something like, yeah, or if you you know, you you have a laptop and you have the coffee mug of the laptop. But the thing that this reminded me of, and I am not a sports person at all, but but I heard it was either a radio lab or this American Lonfe episode in the last several years about the granny shot in basketball about how this is the most effective way to make a free throw. So describe

the granny shot. The granny shot is the it's generally associated with if you don't know how to bowl, or you don't know how to throw a basketball, you simply hold it in your hands and you just you sort of stand legs apart, legs of kimbo. Yeah, and you just dangle it down there between your legs and then throw it up underhanded, underhanded, a double handed, underhand throw with legs of kimbo so you're saying that people using this method to get a higher frequency percentage of shots

than people who don't use it. Yeah. Basically, the idea is that it's been proven that this is the most effective method even in the really especially in the NBA. UM and those who utilize this method um make more free throws. But it's pretty rare that you'll see this during a game because it looks stupid. Yeah, because there's this idea that if you throw the ball that way, you don't know what you're doing, that it it has

less than next to it. Even if it's more effective, even if it could ultimately, you know, make a difference in winning games, it's still something. It's a line that most basketball players are not willing to cross. Sounds like there's a window for somebody to come in and moneyball all this thing. I guess, Yeah, but but I wonder I'm sorry, I just use moneyball as a verb like I'm some ad executive. Well, let's quickly pivot away from

that and we'll move back to the Yeah. But but it it raises the question, what again, what if this is the best way, this is the scientifically verified way to drink coffee and We're just all going to ignore it as we've been ignoring it because, like I said this, this this came out last year and nothing has changed. Now that it's getting it's making the rounds with the Ignoble prizes, is it more likely that people will listen

to it? Will you? Will there be like one person in a given workplace that embraces the crazy test tube filled the coffee mug. If those tubes were available on the market and they weren't like prohibitively expensive, I'd give it a shot. Yeah, maybe we should. We could, we could be an experiment. Well, maybe listeners out there will try it themselves. If you don't try the test tube oriented coffee mug been, try the top down claw method of holding the cup and let us know how it goes.

All right, So there you have it. Four down, um, six to go. Yeah, So follow us on our next episode about Ignobles. We're gonna release this right one after the other, sequentially, I believe, is how they say it. But you know what, if you've got any questions for us about coffee mug or weird insect genitalia or how you make liquid cats, where can they get in touch with us? Joe, Well, you can go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, where you've got everything we do,

including Robert's excellent blog posts. He'll do some space music, he'll do some monsters. I don't know we're gonna get any monsters in November. Surely we will, even though we've just Yeah, surely I can find a monster too to throw in the November mix. But that's, of course where you can get all of our podcasts. But also you can go wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to us right now, so you probably know how to do that.

If you're not subscribe, subscribe and you can always email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com, November twenty four, Arro