The 2020 Ig Nobel Prizes

And I'm not joking because granted, these are awards that that's that celebrate and highlight studies that may seem a bit absurd and a bit a bit comical, but generally speaking, we're dealing with with with with actual research that doesn't at least in some way expand our scientific knowledge of the world. Right, even if it's funny, you can usually learn something interesting from it, right. So the basics on

the Igno Belt obviously it's a play on the Nobel Prize. Uh. These have been awarded each year since nineteen by the Annimals of Improbable Research, which is a publication that uh, you know, prides itself on seeking out the absurd and the humorous and the whimsical within the realms of legitimate scientific research. The purpose of the award, according to the editors UH is to quote to honor achievements that first

make people laugh and then make them think. Furthermore, they stressed that the ten prizes aren't necessarily meant to pass judgment on the winners. Instead, the official website emphasizes that the prizes quote celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people's interests in science, medicine, and technology. And the key individual in all this is editor Mark Abrams, who again has been heading this up since now. In some previous years we've covered all of the prizes awarded. We're

not going to be doing that this year. We just wanted to pick out a selection and focus on a few of them that seemed fun or interesting for one episode this year. We might come back with multiple parts in future years, but this year we're just sticking with the one right and if you want the full list of winners then you should go to www dot Improbable dot com. Now, this year's ceremonies happened entirely online on Thursday, septe um and uh yeah, let's let's dive right in.

Let's see what which one are we going to discuss first? What we've We've got to start with a knife made of feces, because that seems like the perfect metaphor for the year is just being menaced with a blade of of excrement, blade of excrement, it shall be. This was the Materials Science Prize and it does concern a frozen

feces knife. Um. Now to to put this in the correct um, you know, frame of reverence, so to really prepare you for what we're specifically talking about here, I'm going to read a segment here from Shadows in the Sun Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire. Uh is a book came out by Wade Davis, a Canadian US

Colombian cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author and photographer. Quote. There is a well known account of an old Inuit man who refused to move into a settlement over the objections of his family. He made plans to stay on the ice. To stop him, they took away all his tools, so in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their iglue defecated and honed the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva.

With the knife, he killed a dog using its ribbed cage as a sled, and it's high to harness another dog. He disappeared into the darkness. WHOA, Now that's that's that's a pretty awesome little tail there. That's beyond Rambo levels of of improvised tools. I mean, that's that's good stuff, beyond the Giver, beyond Rambo. Yeah, so this is this is the account or one of two accounts that the study we're gonna get to is going to deal with.

I do think that I thought I would point out though for long time listeners of the show, you might recognize the name Wade Davis. Davis has written no numerous books over the years, but he was perhaps most famously the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow um, which, as we discussed on the show before, put forward the hypothesis that tetrato toxin is linked to the zombie legend

and Haiti hypo and a hypothesis that proved somewhat controversial. Uh. This is a nonfiction book, but it served as the inspiration for the West Craven film, which was just an infamously troubled production filmed on location in Haiti, starring Bill Pullman, uh Paul Winfield and I can't remember if there was anybody else really have note in that. But um Shadows of the Sun, on the other hand, collects various essays by Davis concerning various parts of the world, including the

innuits of the Arctic Circle. But let's get back to this poop blade, so material sciences aside. We'll get into the material sciences here. This seems like a perfectly great legend of a man so rugged and committed to life on the ice that robbed of his tools, he will forge a blade from his own excrement and use it to cut a sled and harness from one dog, and then lash that sled to another dog and then just escape into the wilds. Right. It's sort of the ultimate

story of of self reliance and resourcefulness. But it does raise the question is this possible? Could you actually do this right? Because what works in legend doesn't necessarily work in the real world. But that's where this study enters the picture to shed light on the legend and see if it melts or see if it holds its form um. So I'm not going to read the entire title of the paper just yet because it gives away the answer.

But essentially this was looking to it was. It had to do with experimental replicate replication of a knife made from frozen human feces, and it was by Aaron at All, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in October of twenty nineteen. Uh. That is meeting I Aaron, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Archaeology at Kent State University. UH. He's the key investigator in this. He's also the one

who's poop they will use. Now, this is interesting because it ties into some stuff we've talked about on the show recently. For example, in the Pike Create episode PI Crete is. If you didn't check that one out yet, that was a lot of fun. But it's a story about an attempt during World War Two to manufacture a sort of floating armored aircraft carrier out of what would

have been a mixture of wood, pulp and ice. And it kind of gets you considering the different possibilities of what kinds of tools and even structures or vehicles you can make out of various types of frozen material, because the material properties of water with saturated wood pulp in

it are are very different when frozen than just plain water. Yeah, and and really that the work we did researching PI cret I mean it makes you think, well, maybe this could work, right, because what is fecal matter, But you know, it has water and it obviously, but it also has these these different depending on the diet. Yeah, there's gonna be some other stuff in there that could potentially add

to the structure and keep it from shattering. H um. Yeah, I mean it's one of these things that sounds potentially plausible. And and again that's where the experiment comes into play. I mean it does make you wonder what should you eat if you want your fecal matter to be the

most knife ready. Yeah. Of course. It's also we mentioned I think Mortal Kombat Sub Zero, the the character the warrior in the video games and the movies that that the in addition to freezing people solid and shattering them, also crafts magical weapons out of out of magical ice. Uh So really this is this is essentially fodder for a new Mortal Kombat character, like the poopier version of sub zero. Okay, I gotta know the answer, all right, Well,

let's work our way up to the answers. So, as the author's point out, Davis's account in the book was attributed to one Olayuk nar Quitarvek, who who said this about his own grandfather in the nineteen fifties. Um, I mean the grandfather would have lived in the nineteen fifties. That's the idea here now. Davis himself admitted that he initially took the story as a humorous one and admits

that it might well be more legend than reality. But it was subsequently repeated in various texts and uh and David. But Davis did say that, well, okay, there is an account we can look to that could potentially back this up. And it's an account by Danish explorer Peter Frutchen, who lived eighteen eighty six through nineteen fifty seven, and uh Fruction claimed to have used a similar tactic. His account was that he dug a pit to sleep in this

is in the Arctic, and awoke to find himself snowed in. So, remembering seeing frozen dog extreument that looked pretty solid, he he got an idea. He decided to defecate in one hand, shape it into a chisel and then wait for the fecal matter to freeze hard enough then to use that chisel to dig his way out. I don't I mean, I don't know, but for some reason, my my skeptical antennae or sort of perking up that something about this story seems wrong, I too, am doubtful. I was doubtful

as well. So basically this is where the this is where the experiment comes in. Because again, just because you have these two cases, one is is more presented as a legend and one also might be an exaggerated or simply made up account. Uh, there's just no way of knowing. It's not like in either case someone kept the poop dagger and it was you know, presented, So that means you've got to make your own poop a dagger. And that's exactly what they did in this um uh, this

kid State University study. So first of all, I just want to want to just let everybody know, no dogs are cut up in this experiment. They use pig hide muscles and tendons to stand in for dog fl but the poop, well that's a little too essential to the experiment. They had to use actual human fecal matter, but they also needed to make sure it was fecal matter in keeping with the diet of an Inuit living on the ice in the nineteen fifties. Oh okay, So what would

this diet most likely consist of. Well, this is what they say in the study quote, in order to procure the necessary raw materials for knife production, one of us, and then they include the in parenthesise m I E for meat and I Aaron the again the Associate professor of Anthropology and director of Archaeology, I can't state, went on a diet with high protein and fatty acids, which

is consistent with an Arctic diet for eight days. The Innuit do not only eat meat from maritime and terrestrial animals, and there were three instances during the eight day diet that M I E ate fruit, vegetables, or carbohydrates. Okay, so this is a diet that is not exclusively meat based, but is largely meat based, right, Yeah, more and more beat based than and um than Aaron would usually UM engage with. So on the fourth day he begins the

collection process and this continues for five days. The fecal samples were formed into knives via ceramic molds, but they were also molded by hand into quote hand shaped knives, and all of these were stored in a freezer, hopefully clearly marked who molded them by hand. I don't know that the study was specific on that matter. I I'm a I'm assuming that it's m I. E. Him self that is doing most of the molding and the handling of his own poop blades. Um maybe this is unreasonable

taboo enforcement. It seems like weird to make somebody else handle your frozen feces. Yeah, yeah, I would agree, But I don't know in the name of science, you know, with with you know, appropriate scientific restraints in place, you know, it might be okay. So when it came time to put the knives to the test, they were taken out of the freezer, they were sharpened once more, and then they were turned to even older temperatures via dry ice

to ready them for the task. And and part of this is really as um as the investigators went onto to state like this was trying to create the best possible conditions for this uh test to potentially work, Like really to give just make sure everything was just as frozen as possible. Um and uh. And so that they decided.

Then they put them to the test. They started with the toughest challenge, however, and that's the hide, because they figured, well, if the knives failed to cut through the hide, you can basically go ahead and call it a day because it doesn't matter. They can cut through fat, etcetera. Here's what happened. Both varieties of fecal blade. That means, the ones that were just put in the mold, the ones that were formed by hand. Both of them failed to cut the hide. Oh, your knife sucks. Now, I know

what you're thinking. Maybe they got the poop consistency wrong. Well, they thought of that they had forged a blade from Western diet poop, but that failed as well. They also went ahead and tried the blades out on a layer of fat underneath the hide, and quote, only the shallowest of slices could be produced and the knife edge still quickly melted and deteriorated. Yeah. I would imagine that this would be a problem that uh, that it just melts

too fast to be effective at cutting. I mean, I bet you probably could get a somewhat sharp edge on it, but how would you hold the edge for very long, because as soon as you start sewing into something, it's probably just gonna get heated up by friction and then melt away and be blunt. Yeah, because I mean, because that's that's the one of the keys here is that the legend is not a story of someone who stabbed

somebody in the eye with an icicle, you know. It's the story of someone who butchers a dog and processes its body to make raw materials. Now, the researcher stress that by depending again on very cold materials instead of fresh kills, uh, they gave the experiment the best chance of success, but the blades still failed to match up

to the legend. Now that, they also drive home that perhaps additional test with additional fecal matter samples would be ideal if anyone else wants to continue this this great work. But you know, I don't know, like what would be the additional um, you know, dietary um uh formula for fecal matter that would make a better poop knife. I

don't know. I mean, honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, I don't even know if like you could make a very good knife out of pike crete, right, because a knife depends so much on having a very sharp blade

to work very effectively. And while pike crete is really good at preventing cracks from propagating across the length of it, and it's pretty good at melting more slowly than regular ice, I still think the sharp edge of a pike crete knife would probably melt pretty quickly, too quickly to be useful. So it seems like you'd be better off if you

made a pike create or a frozen poop warhammer, right right, yeah, okay, Um. Now, the in addition to you know, contemplations of regarding different diets, uh, they also contemplate, you know, the idea that, okay, you have this saliva aspect of the original legend, right, that he sprays saliva onto the poop knife and then forges it. But they're doubtful that that would really make a difference either.

They point to the work of McCall and Telton from two thousand ten, who looked into the idea of whether humans and cold regions used flaked and chipped ice for butchery tools, and they too found that melting occurred with these when these objects came into contact with warm bodies,

and that they also melted during use. So um, you know again you're coming down to I think in a case where if you're talking about creating something out of out of ice or frozen poop and you're attempting to use it as a butchery tool, um, you're just asking too much of the material For frozen material. The effectiveness

of a knife blade depends on it being very thin. Basically, the extent to which it's effective is based on its thinness, and being thin would make any frozen material likely to melt because you know, it's harder to maintain the cold temperatures. It's just gonna acquire heat from the environment from friction too fast. Now you might ask yourself, okay, but seriously, why was this necessary research? I think they have a nice uh summary of this in the paper itself. I

just want to read this quote. Societal narratives and policies are often constructed from anthropological and scientific claims. While the narrative that indigenous and prehistoric people are technologically resourceful and innovative is widely supported, these narratives suffer when an untested

claim is used to support it. If one untested claim is used to support a stance, even if that stance is otherwise supported, ethical, or just, then there is no logical reason why a second untested claim cannot be invoked. The use of untested claims then becomes the norm and can be used to support stances that are beneficial to

society as well as those that are harmful. Anthropologists must actively seek out unsupported claims, assumptions, rumors, and urban legends, and by testing them, ensure any narratives that follow are as sturdy as possible. Right, So, there are enough true stories about resourcefulness and ingenuity among the Inuit people's that you don't need like physically impossible stories gunking up the works, right, And by investigating a story like this, you can you

can make that that decision. Okay, looks like we file this more under legend and mythology as opposed to a true tale of survival. Right, So that's the poop knife. I thought that one was really entertaining, and again it does feel kind of fitting for but also it's just a really cool story. Uh. And and I do encourage anyone out there who has a dungeon master or or a Dungeons and Dragons player keep this story in mind. I think this one will prove useful, especially if you're

adventuring and somewhere like ice wind Dale or something. Um you know, usually try and use the poop knife. Maybe your dungeon master has heard this episode or has read this study follows the Ignoble Prizes, and they'll shoot you down. But you know, dungeons and dragons is a legendary environment, so maybe you'll get away with it. You have acquired the blade of Latrinius. Alright, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll

discuss another selection from the Ignoble Prizes. Thank alright, we're back. What have you got for us, Joe? Okay, it's time to talk about professional entomologists who are afraid of spiders. So this winning article, this was from the Entomology Prize. It's by Richard S. Vetter, called arachnophobic entomologists when two more legs makes a Big difference, published an American Entomologist

in Now. The author of the study, Richard Vetter, is now retired, but during his career he was an entomology research associate at UC Riverside and a quick look around the internet at photos of this guy and interviews with him suggests that he has some kind of arachnophiliac. He clearly loves spider as I found a picture of him with a spider crawling on his eye and he's got this big smile on his face. I generally thought this was a picture of Dennis Hopper when I first saw it.

I thought it's like a younger Dennis Hopper. Yeah, he's a warrior poet in the classic sense. So this paper is about arachnophobia, the fear, sometimes irrational fear of spiders, which is very common phobia. And I've read a couple of articles featuring interviews with the vetter and he sort of tells some personal stories that got him thinking about the subject of arachnophobia among entomologists. So a few of

these stories. For one thing, he tells a story of one time sitting down at a lunch table with colleagues and producing a brown recluse spider that was sealed in a plastic bag, and he says one of his colleagues, an aquatic entomologist, absolutely quote vaporized, just gone from the room all the way down the hall in five seconds.

And then he says another time he was with an entomologist colleague, and he opened the lid on a specimen jar that had a black widow in it, and he said that this guy in the room literally jumped backwards quote, like the spider was going to decapitate him. Now, this is kind of surprising to me because you would sort of expect that entomologists would be pretty much immune to irrational spider fear. Uh. Now, quick note on the terminology.

Entomologists are a specialized branch of zoologists. They study insects. The researchers who specialize in arachnids like spider's ticks and mites are called arachnologists. But I think there's clearly some crossover, Like it looks like Vetter was technically an entomologist by title at his institution, but his passion seemed to be with spiders. And uh, I think you just kind of assumed that attitudes about insects and attitudes about spiders, since

they're both small arthropods, would be pretty correlated, right. Yeah, I mean, I guess I have two minds on this because, on one hand, yeah, it just seems like if you're cool with devoting your life to to one variety of creepy crawley. Then you're good with all creepy crawleys. But then I think to my on my own self, and I'm like, well, you know, I'll get down and look at something like, you know, a centipede or even a spider, but I'm a little wigged out by something like a

palmetta bug or a roach, you know. So, yeah, this is interesting. There's somebody who I think is the inverted version of you in this study. Oh really yeah, so we'll get to that in just a minute. But anyway, I can think of at least a couple of reasons, at least for me, why why I wouldn't really expect

entomologists who have powerful, irrational fears of spiders. One is self selection in the profession, right, Like, how many people with an existing overwhelming fear of tiny arthropods would go into a research field where you handle tiny arthropods all the time. And then the other thing I would just think of would be conditioning. Even if you start off kind of afraid of spiders, wouldn't constantly working with insects and various types of small arthur pods just sort of

blunt that fear over time. Yeah, it's kind of hard to imagine like a Dickensian tale where uh this, uh this, this kid enters entomology, but he's just following in the in his father's footsteps. It's just the family business of studying insects, right in a weird way. That almost does seem like a Dickensian kind of comic character, like entomologists who's terrified of of insects or something. But anyway, there is a different Spiders are not exactly insects, So uh so,

let's let's pursue this a little farther. So Vetter, based on these anecdotes from his colleagues, he decided to conduct a survey that was open to professional entomologists, and he solicited responses from self declared a rack no adverse researchers from the readership of the journal American Entomologists. So it's very worth noting that this is not like a huge

random sample of the field. This is self selected. This is a self selected sample of researchers who were like, yes, you know, I raised my hand, I'm afraid of spiders. So important to keep that in mind. This is not going to be like indicative of the field as a whole, but at least, it's showing you what some people in

the field are thinking. And this survey included a standardized psychology test known as the Fear of Spider's Questionnaire or f s Q, as well as qualitative reports where people could explain their experiences in plain language, and the top line result of the survey was like, Yeah, there are some professional entomologists who are terrified of spiders. Uh So, first, I just want to talk about a few general findings from the existing literature on irachnophobia, and this is something

that Vetter summarizes later in his paper. So one of the things is that arachnophobia, usually in in the general public, starts in childhood, though it's at sometimes different stages depending on who you ask. If you ask parents about their children, it seems to start in girls at an average age of four point seven. And this research was specifically in girls. I don't know if it would be different or the same with boys, but if but however, if so, parents

say it starts at four point seven. If you ask adult women about their own arachnophobia when that started, they tend to give an average age of nine point four years, but with a pretty big margin of error. So if those numbers are at least somewhat accurate, that's kind of interesting because it might mean that people display fear of spiders that like can be observed by others, that parents can observe before they themselves recall being aware of the phobia.

Though qualitatively, many arachnophobes cannot recall an age when their fear began. A lot of them just say I've always been afraid of spiders as long as I can remember. You know, there wasn't an inciting incident, though for a few For a few cases in this survey, there was a reported conditioning of end. On average, women are more likely than men to report aracnophobia, and the intensity of arachnophobia tends to be higher in younger people than in

older people. I thought that was kind of interesting. Spider fear is higher in people whose parents also had spider fear, and it's especially correlated between mothers and daughters. And many arachnophobes rate high on measures of disgust sensitivity, which is

an interesting psychometric category. It's basically like how easily you get grossed out by various kinds of things, and that that trait is seems to be interestingly correlated to all kinds of other stuff, you know, even like political psychology and stuff. Now, there's a lot of interesting speculation as to why spiders trigger fear reactions and so many people, when in reality spiders don't usually represent much of a threat to survival. There are relatively minor threat as far

as animals in the environment go. UM. We've talked about some of these speculations about causes for acnophobia before UM. But interestingly, some research has tried to understand not just a ragnophobia itself, but which particular features of spiders trigger it the most, because they're different spiders with different characteristics physical and behavioral, So like what kinds of spiders are

the worst and which features of spiders bother people the most. Uh, And studies have found that the things people really don't like about spiders when they don't like them is unpredictability, So there's this perceived lack of control over spiders. H. People really don't like the fast, jerky movements and their

ability to suddenly appear in places where they weren't seen before. UH. There was one entomologist actually in this study that Vetter did, who said that they would rather quote scoop up a handful of maggots with an ungloved hand than get close enough to a spider to kill it. And now you might wonder why they're, Well, they give a rationale. Actually, this respondent said, maggots don't sneak up on you and jump in your hair. Now, I would say probably spiders

don't usually do that either. But I guess the thing that causes the fear here is that they, at least in theory, could Yeah. I mean, you're you're generally going to encounter maggots in in exactly one type of place. Um where Yeah, if you're more you're more likely to encounter spiders at various parts points in your house. Uh, they're they're they're more likely to be on the move. Maggots, they're not going to be on the move, that's right.

And and the last things about spiders that people disliked the most were physical features, including the number of legs. For some reason, people don't like the number of legs. They don't like they don't like hair nous, and they don't like having fangs or being able to bite. Uh. And then furthermore, Robbi just included for you to look at here a chart of within Vetters survey. He charted respondents scores of likability for a variety of different animals.

It looks like just a few dozen random animals, including like butterfly, horse, snake, mouse, earwig, mosquito, spider, and you can you can really see that the worst thing, even worse than a spider, and I think I would agree, is a tick. Oh yeah, I were very much on the same page there as far as ticks go. Um, far worse than a spider. Uh, Like the tick is actively seeking you out, trying to to attach to your body, drink your blood, and potentially share some pathogens with you

at the same time. Um, you know, moments like the mosquito that that ranks beneath the spider. But yeah, it's an interesting chart to look at because you think see things in there that I, you know, certainly would expect to see, like the cockroach for example, Um, the slug. I guess you know. I I've made my piece with slugs, but I used to find them more repellent. Um. But then eels, like people really grossed out by eels. I

guess they're kind of weird looking. Well, I mean, this is a small survey of people who self selected as saying they were afraid of spiders or disliked spiders. So why is the squirrel so high on the list? Like, the squirrel is rated um worse than a bear, worse than a or let's say, or is that worse than a um, worse worse than an earthworm? I mean, more disliked than a bear. But once you get into all of the like mammals down here, except for the rat,

they're all on the positive side of the scale. So like the halfway point of the scale, the only things that on average were hated more than half were maggots, scorpions, rats, mosquitoes, spiders, and ticks. But one thing you all say about hating ticks is that I think that's an important case where like your gut level discussed also lines up with your rational knowledge, because I bet a lot of these entomologists hate spiders, but they know it wrong to hate spiders.

They're like, you know, I can't argue with my gut feelings, but I just know that I shouldn't hate spiders. They're not actually bad with ticks. I mean, the heart in the head are in the same place, right, There are just a lot of legitimate, um scientifically proven reasons to to not be crazy about ticks. But anyway, so to get into the results of vetter study, how do these self reported araq no adverse entomologists UH differ from the general public in terms of spider fear? Well, actually, there

are a lot of similarities. So he found that for the general public and for these arachno adverse entomologists, the arachnophobia begins in childhood, generally before respondents have even considered entomology as a career path, So these people are not like acquiring spider fear in adulthood. UH. Vetter says that the fear of spider's questionnaire scores between the genders were not statistically significantly different. UH didn't seem to be a

major gender difference among the entomologists. Araq noo adverse entomologists seem to dislike spiders for most of the same reasons as general arachnophobes do. That don't like the hair, nous, the fangs, the number of legs still on the number of legs eight is bad, unpredictability, and fast sudden movements, but also interestingly better believed that there is a lower

prevalence of disgust reactions to spiders among entomologists. Uh, the entomologists who don't like spiders are afraid, but they're not as gross stout as the general public. And then to read a couple of his final observations quote. One difference from general arachnophobes that may have been present but not specifically documented in the classic literature is that several entomologists mentioned being tormented by family members who capitalized on the

respondents fear of spiders. That's that's not nice. Don't don't torment your family members with spiders. Um. Another is uh quote.

Another difference is that arachnophobes in the general public assign thropomorphic cognitive behaviors to spiders, such as vengefulness or purposeful surveillance, Whereas the general impression I received from the iraqno adverse entomologists was that they realized their fears or dislikes were paradoxical, even though they could not explain the reasoning behind them. And this gets this gets to the you know, the

the non rational aspect of phobia. I imagine here, you know that the idea that it's on one hand, you can you can rationally discuss why you shouldn't feel this way and yet still have these feelings. Yeah, totally. And now there was one last thing that I noticed, or I at least thought was interesting. Vetter did not draw attention to this himself, but it stuck out to me. Some of these iraq noo adverse entomologists seemed to display what I would guess is an unusually high level of

affinity for certain insects. For example, one reported having owned a Madagascar hissing cockroach as a pet when they were a child, which is probably not normal for many kids, but you can kind of see how a kid who has a cockroach as a pet might want to grow

up to become an entomologist. And other ones rated animals like cockroaches and maggots among their most liked animals in that big list of animals we were just talking about, uh, And in the averages from all the respondents, the top three most liked animals of the entire list, even out performing dogs, horses, porpoises, and other commonly charismatic animals. Uh. The top three were all insects, butterflies, dragonflies, and ladybugs. The entomologists in this survey hated spiders but love those

three insects. So could it be that some of these entomologists are also influenced to dislike or be afraid of spiders because they're so fond of the spider's prey animals. I wonder that is interesting, um, because when you watch a spider do its thing that is, how do you

emotionally respond to that? Because I think I may have showed this something the show already, But a few weeks back, maybe like a month back, Uh, there was this enormous spider web on my front porch and I was enjoying watching and watching the spider set up shop there and

repair it. And then I happened to go out there and find some manner of a little stink bug on the pillar right next to the to the web, and so on a on a whim, I flicked it into the web, and then instantly the vibration strength of the web, the spider rushed out and immediately wrapped up the struggling bug inside the you know, the binds of the of the spider web. It was fabulous to watch, uh, And and that was my emotional reaction to it. It was like, oh,

this this was great. I got to sort of engineer this situation that may well have occurred anyway, and get to watch this in real time. But on the other hand, other people have a different emotional response to seeing something like that. You end up empathizing and humanizing the victim of the spider, right, and you think, oh, what a horrible thing happen, What a horrible experience to have to go through. Yes, totally, so, I have no proof of that of a correlation there, but I do wonder about that.

I feel like that could possibly be playing some role. Um we end up siding with the prey animals as opposed to the the predators, because that's the other way I always think about spiders in my home, or even like a centipede in the home. I think, good, you're doing the lord's work, sir or madam, keep at it.

Probably the spider, right, yeah, yeah, But anyway, so Vetter concludes by saying, despite the assumption that entomologists would extend warm feelings towards spiders because of their habituation to arthropods in general, arachnophobia does occur in some members of our profession. For these people, two more legs makes a big difference. Why is it the number of legs. That's the thing that people consistently call out as disliking about spiders, like too many legs, but they like a ladybug has only

got two less. You know, I was thinking about this this This may have no connection, but um, we're putting together some notes for an upcoming edition of our our Friday night show Weird House Cinema, where we talk about weird films, and I started thinking about a genre of film subgenre uh that entails crawling disembodied hands and how spiderlike they are. Uh. And I but I began to wonder, like which, like, which is the predominant fear or maybe

it's more on an individual level. Is it that the disembodied hand is like a spider or is it that the spider is in some way kind of like a human hand, you know, something, the way that it's often bunched together, you know, in a way that you you you typically won't see with with insect legs. Yes, well, well you see you see spiders kind of working things with their legs in a way that you don't usually see insects doing. I mean, I guess sometimes you kind

of do. But I feel like insects are more likely to manipulate things with their pincers. You can really see a spider using the tips of its legs like fingers to like roll something up. Yeah, creepy. Yeah, alright, live, Why don't we take another break and when we come back, we'll discuss another award winner. Thank thank alright, we're back, Robert. I gotta admit this next study. I wonder if they are drawing a spurious correlation. Yeah, I I had a

hard time with this one, but it was their psychology prize. Uh, so we're we're gonna discuss it. It is eyebrows Q Grandiose Narcissism by Miranda Gia Coleman and Nicholas o' rule, published in the Journal of Personality back in May. All right, let's hear it. So the basic idea is this, Okay, narcissists can be charming, but narcissists are often, uh you know, in many cases, horrible people best avoided. As such, it

pays to be able to identify them. Pastas have linked viewing a person's personal appearance as a means of determining narcissistic qualities, and this study look to isolate the exact facial features, and eyebrows became the focal point in this particular study. It's interesting. I mean, obviously people do. You could say fairly or unfairly, but I mean certainly, at least most of the time unfairly judge other people's character by the way they look. I wouldn't have expected eyebrows

to be the most salient thing here. Yeah, I I didn't either. I mean they make they make an interesting case. Uh. Here's the basic summary. In study one, we explored the faces features using a variety of manipulations, ultimately finding that accurate judgments of grandiose narcissism particularly depend on a person's eyebrows, and studies to A through to C, we identified eyebrow

distinctiveness thickness density as the primary characteristic supporting these judgments. Finally, we confirmed the eyebrows importance and Studies three A and three B by measuring how much perceptions of narcissism changed when swapping narcissists and non narcissist eyebrows between faces. So, at least, according to their conclusion, eyebrows are not just something that people use to conclude that someone else is narcissistic,

but to some extent are accurate identifiers. Yeah, which again I I just found I've read this, and I was thinking, could this, Could this possibly be right? Because when I think of big bushy eyebrows, I think of uh natural, big bushy eyebrows. I think of say, actor Peter Gallagher for some reason, like he instantly comes to mind as having like big, full, beautiful eyebrows. But at the same time, I don't. I mean, I don't know enough about Peter Gallagher to really chutch him one way or the other.

But I don't think narcissist. I don't look at him and think, oh, there's a narcissist right there. I was trying to think, what do I know him from? He was in that spy movie with Bill Murray, and then he's been in an like a million TV shows, always in Mr Deed's Great Great film? Is that an eight movie? No? Okay, what am I anything? You've done some checks? We should

keep all this. He tends to not play narcissists like you would think if if his eyebrows were we're we're we're queuing us into narcissism, And he was legitimately narcissist narcissist himself like he would play a lot of narcissists on the screen. I know what I realized. I know him from American Beauty, in which I think he does play a narcissist. But also I think that movie is narcissistic. Okay.

Um Now, now, speaking of of movies, the other thing I think of when I think of big bushy eyebrows are the extreme eyebrows that the Mintats boast in David Lynch's Dune. Um. Now, I don't tend to think of of the Mintats is especially narcissistic, but I guess it doesn't really make any sense because those are like clearly just added to the character to give the some sort

of distinctive visual flair for the viewer. Surely through Fear how what has has appropriately gone through ego death in order to become the human computer who's playing through Fear how Loud and the new one. It's Stephen McKinley Henderson. Um. He was most recently, I believe in that that Hulu series Deaths. He's he's really good. I'm looking forward to checking out his performance. Oh I know him. Oh he's great. Yeah, Yeah,

he's a wonderful actor. I was trying to remember what I recently saw him, and I think he has a small part in Ladybird. Ah. Yeah, well, I don't know if he's gonna I don't think he's gonna have giant eyebrows in the now delayed film adaptation of Dune. But the thing is, now that it's delayed a year, they've got time to go in and digitally add crazy eyebrows to all the mentats. Anyway, back back to the study here, So they use neutral expression portraits of thirty nine students

at the University of Toronto. Twenty six female is, thirteen males, thirty two white, seven non white, average age twenty one, and the thirty nine subjects took a standardized narcissistic personality test. Then twenty eight virtual volunteers looked at the portraits and rated in them on a scale from one not narcissistic

at all to eight extremely narcissistic. They also flip the images upside down, as this has been shown to allow humans to better focus on particular features of the face rather than the face as a whole, and the eyebrows, according to the study, were always the giveaway. Distinct eyebrows

were more likely to accurately identified narcissists. The inversion of the head thing is making me think of one of the most hilarious effects we've ever talked about on the show, which is the Margaret Thatcher effect, where when you flip a head upside down, you can invert the eyes and the mouth so that like they are actually opposite of the orientation of the head. But people don't notice it when they're looking at the head upside down. You should

look this up if you've never seen it before. It's really funny now, i'd actually the main purpose of eyebrows is to keep sweat, water debris out of your eye sockets. Um. But of course the human faces also, as we've discussed many times, a communications array, so we we can't dismiss the communicative qualities here. It may play into dog eyebrows, even as a two thousand nineteen University of Portsmouth study found that human preferences for expressive brows may have influenced

selection in domestic dog breeds. Does your dog have have nice eyebrows? He has the most heavenly eyebrows. They're very bushy and they are very expressive. See there you go. Also has pointed out in a two thousand eighteen University of York study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, highly mobile eyebrows in humans can be used to express a wide array of emotions that may have been key to human survival. Uh, they might even be key to our

ability to empathize and identify with the emotions of others. So, you know, think about like all the things you can say just with your eyebrows. It's all the even subtle um communicative cues you can pick up on with eyebrows. Sure so, fair enough. We we can imagine how more distinctive eyebrows might accentuate these communications. But how would that be linked to a personality disorder? You know again, it's it's it's the fact that they're distinctive thickness and density um.

In another experiment, they also gave narcissistic individuals new eyebrows, this was the eyebrow swap thing, and tested them out on people, and they found that they did rate them as less narcissistic, and putting more distinctive eyebrows and less narcissistic people produced the opposite effect. So it'll leads to

the big question, do narcissists have particular morphological characteristics. I guess this is the part I'd be more skeptical about than the idea that people think they can identify narcissists through certain facial characteristics. I'd be more surprised if it were true that they could, that they actually accurately were finding correlations there with facial characteristics. I guess it's not impossible, but I feel like I need to see really good

evidence of that. Yeah, I mean, I guess. Another thing to keep in mind is like this is a study that was asking people about narcissism in images of people, like is this a narcissist? That a narcissist? And I feel like, for the most part, this is one of just many questions we may ask about people that we encounter. You know, Uh, it's probably not your primary question regarding an individual like narcissist or not a narcissist. I don't

I don't know that. Maybe that's just me, um, because ultimately it comes down to them to like how would this work? What would be the tie? You know, obviously there's there's not like this, like the personality disorder would make your eyebrows grow more bushy, right, um, And it would have to be something more in terms of like it it changed. It affects the way that you interact with the world, and that and the way that you're received,

and that ends up nurturing a sense of narcissism. I don't know, possibly, I mean you could say that from like a developmental personality where I mean, I guess you could, though again, this is one of those things that seems very difficult to believe. I guess you could try to say that there's some correlated like genetic component that's like deeper back that happens to have both random effects like happens to give you more distinctive eyebrows and also happens

to make you more narcissistic. But again, uh, it seems kind of hard to believe that. Yeah, I mean, they bring up the idea of messing with your eyebrows, grooming your eyebrows, and how you know, you know, they basically they said quote though narcissism did not significantly relate to

eyebrow grooming. Here, grooming mediated how grandiosity related to perceived narcissism when controlling distinctiveness and femininity, and previous research found that eyebrow plucking relates to women's narcissism, But I don't know that doesn't really um, you know, provide a firm answer for me, like what what we're seeing when we see eyebrows that are somehow queuing us into narcissism? Like

I feel like I can. I can look at a photograph of someone who I either know or believe to how of narcissistic qualities, and I can often lean into this interpretation. I can say, well, I guess those eyebrows are pretty wild and thick, you know, Or well, those eyebrows are really well maintained. You know that. I guess there are there are things I can I can then pinpoint if I'm prompted, But I I just I don't. I just have a hard time with this one. I have to admit I have. I have a hard time

seeing the eyebrows as a window into the narcissistic soul. Yeah. I guess it's one of those things where it just it just seems kind of like surface level implausible to me. But I guess I don't know. It's one of those word if if I saw more evidence than I guess, I'd have to accept it. But yeah, I mean I do have to, you know, give credit to the whole argument of the eyebrows being key to the way we communicate with people, you know, like like in ways that

we often don't think about. Uh, you know, unless you're just really obsessed with eyebrows. Like you know, we are moving our eyebrows around a lot. They are, they are doing a lot to communicate how we feel about ourselves and about other people to the world. So I mean, on another hand, why not the eyebrow? Sure, we'd love to hear from from listeners on this one. What's your relationship with eyebrows? Do you see eyebrows as a as a as a clue to someone's narcissistic qualities? Um, we'd

love to hear from you. Are you a grandiose narcissist? Do you have really distinctive eyebrows? Yeah, let us know, measure them all right? Shall we move on to the final prize that we're going to discuss on this episode. Sure, this one will be pretty quick, but I thought this

was kind of fun. So you remember earlier this year when we were talking about snake pits, and in that episode I discussed research on the vocalizations of snakes like king cobras, how they're known, in fact, not just to hiss, but to actually growl. Yes, And one of the tests conducted in that study about King Cobra's and related snakes growling actually involved getting a snake to inhale helium and

talk like Donald Duck. And I thought that was a pretty great experiment, but it uns out this is a broader genre of scientific weirdness, as proven by this year's

Ignoble winner in acoustics. So this prize went to Stephen A. Rebber Takeshi Nishimura, Judith Yanish, Mark Robertson, and W two comes to Fitch And the study was called a Chinese Alligator in helios Format Frequencies and a Crocodilian and the Journal of Experimental Biology in uh so they the authors here start by saying that crocodilians are among the most vocal non avian reptiles. Not a lot of reptiles really make you know, voice sounds, but crocodiles do. Crocodilians do.

Both males and females tend to produce sounds called bellows, so they'll they'll kind of and this happens all year, but especially during mating season. And the question is what purpose do these bellows serve. Scientists aren't exactly sure, but they think they might be auditory ad atisements of body size. So, if you're a crocodilian trying to make you want to be large, the author's right quote, relative sized differences strongly

affect courtship and territorial behavior in crocodilians. Now, in mammals and birds, it has been documented that vocalizations are sometimes an honest signal, and that's a term in biology, and honest signal of body size, meaning an advertisement that is basically true. It's hard to fake because body size is related to what kinds of frequencies you can make when you issue a vocalization, specifically with reference to what are

known as formant frequencies or vocal tract resonances. And these are like sort of peak frequencies that you hit, say, when you're making certain kinds of vowel like sounds. Now, where does this study fit into everything I've just said? Well, the authors here say that format frequencies have never been documented before in a reptile, in a non avian reptile, and they say quote, formants do not seem to play

a role in the vocalizations of frogs and toads. Technically they're called a neurons, but that means frogs and toads. They write quote. We tested performance in crocodilian vocalizations by using playbacks to induce a female Chinese alligator or alligator sinensis to bellow in an air tight chamber. During vocalizations, the animal inhaled either normal air or a helium oxygen mixture known as helios, in which the velocity of sound

is increased. Although helios allows normal respiration, it alters the formant distribution of the sound spectrum. An acoustic analysis of the calls showed that the source signal components remained constant under both conditions, but an upward shift of high energy frequency bands was observed in helios. We conclude that these

frequency bands represent formants. So, according to their theory radical framework, they think this is a good sign that actually what crocodiles are doing, what crocodilians are doing with these bellowing sounds is actually advertising body size via these format frequencies in their vocalizations. And uh oh, and also because they say okay, so we've observed these format frequencies playing a role in like mating calls in birds and if it's

correct that they're doing a similar thing in crocodilians. And because birds and crocodilians share a common ancestor with all dinosaurs, they say quote a better understanding of their vocal production systems may also provide insight into the communication of extinct arcosaurians. So it's actually a really interesting study. I guess if you ask the question why is it funny, I guess

it's the helium giving healing crocodile. Also, I found it in the study there was a pretty funny illustration of the experimental setup that showed the croc goodisles in the sealed chambers either breathing air or breathing the oxygen helium mixture. It is. It is kind of a humorous illustration. I don't know why, but it's it's like a nice illustration it has. It's very colorful. The crocodile looks looks realistic. It's not a cartoon crocodile. But I don't know, it

does look a little awkward in there. It just makes me wonder how many different studies have made other animals in hale helium to see what their voices sound like, so we got snakes and we got crocodiles. Now, where where else has this happened? We're not crocodile? Sorry, this was an alligator, I guess, say, a crocodilian. Sorry, if I've been loose with that terminology. Well maybe, well we'll have to come back and do an episode on Helium

and discuss it. Okay, I'll meet you there all right. Well, like I said, we're not going to cover all the Ignoble Prize winners for We're just covering these four. If you want to check out the full list of winners again, go to Improbable dot com and you get to check out the list and see links to the studies. Um, it's it's always worth a read, just to see what they're they're highlighting from, you know, from from recent or not so recent scientific studies. Yeah, give him a look there.

There was another one that definitely raised my eyebrow this year, and it was about it was about looking into economic data via mouth to mouth kissing. Oh okay, yeah, that one looked good. There's also one about hitting man. Did you see that one? Yes? Yeah, it wasn't really contact. It was just like a news It was a funny

news report. Basically, it was a story from China where someone had taken out a murder contract that was just repeatedly subcontracted down to like five or six layers of of different people who were hired for successively smaller sums, and then the murder was never done. Yeah, it's it sounds like it would make a great Coen Brothers film, you know, like each one gets cold feet and they're like okay, yeah, yeah, until like basically they're just being

offered so little money it just doesn't get done. All right. Well, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you know where to find us. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We just asked that you rate, review and subscribe. You can always go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and that will take you right to our I heart listing. Uh. And you also see a button there somewhere on the page for store.

If you click on that, you go to our t shirt store. You can buy a T shirt or a sticker or a bag with our logo on it or some manner of monster. Uh. Pretty fun little place. We hopefully you're gonna get some new designs in there soon. Let's see what else. So yeah, our former co host Christian has a Kickstarter going right now for Corridor magazine issue number one. It's gonna be a whole bunch of of cool, weird art, short fiction, UH, comics, essays, uh

all together. If you're if you want to follow back a cool project, just go to Kickstarter and look up Corridor. You're in there, aren't you. Yeah. I've got a little story like a sci fi store with sharks in it, I said, I think listeners will enjoy, so yeah, and but then also just a whole host of other richly talented people. And it's from the images I've seen, it's just gonna be gorgeous cover to cover. So that that kickstarters ending soon. So if you want to be a

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