The 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes, Part 1

to the Ignobel Prizes early November. It's kind of like a post Halloween detox to get away from a lot of the spooky stuff and into some other topic areas. But this year is a little different. I mean, last year was a little different because Joe, you're on parental leave, so our former producer Seth had to pop in and sort through these with me. So this year, we're back, and we welcome me back. But also this year we're actually ahead of schedule and hitting the egg Nobels before October.

for the ig Nobel Prizes. Their stated purpose is, quote, do honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. If you want to learn more about them, go to Improbable dot com. You can find out more about the magazine. You can see they have a wonderful list of all the winners going back to the very beginning of the whole project.

raiology of cats. Raology being the study of how materials flow, and so the idea is like, you know, our cat's a liquid or a solid, So you know, that is a joke, but also there was some interesting stuff to

ponder in that paper, and the the pattern continues. Most of this year's winners are regular scientific studies published in academic journals, but the for example, my selection for today is more of a historical interest paper that leans on a subject that was I think intended to be selected because it was funny.

what makes this funny? Any kind of point to the obvious, you know, it maybe say a study that has to do with, say, you know, flatulence or something, and it's pretty obvious why that's funny. But then there is also the follow up question why is it important? And in all cases there's something there, there's some way to answer that,

like it's the study involved. You know, it may seem like, you know, it's the pure shrimp on a treadmill territory, where like this is how does this possibly benefit anything? But it is benefiting our scientific understanding of ourselves or the world to some extent. And I always say, the other cool thing about it is that, yeah, I mean, it inevitably draws attention to some of these smaller studies and the work of professional researchers and scientists. So it's all good.

think that's one of the reasons it really zings. So the author's touch on biomemicry, which as you probably know, refers to the idea of turning to nature to help solve engineering problems, because why spend a few years trying to solve a problem that nature already solved over the course of evolutionary time.

fully reverse engineered yet. But there are lots of other sort of simpler biological mechanisms that we have been able to look at and say, ah, okay, yeah, here's how that works, and we could actually we could make technology that does the same thing.

materials directly into engineered systems, so a kind of cybernetic approach. Really. Now, it's my understanding that biohybrids in general covers a lot of things that are maybe less necro in flavor, such as biohybrid materials that contain both a biopolymer and a

synthetic polymer. But that's just one route. As for biohybrid robots, you can, yeah, you can think of him in general as somewhere on the same slider with the concept of a cyborg, except more of a robot that's made with some organic materials or parts.

a lot more. But in this particular case, this idea of the biohybrid robot, it's you know, imagine that it's not so much the robot is covered in the skin, but the robot then actually uses human skin in various places, is to help move better, to perform its functionality better, et cetera.

a jellyfish robot using rat heart muscle cells. And then they later worked in a kind of like swimming ray using some of the same technology.

We've talked about this numerous times in the show in the past, using bits and pieces of animals, using all of the buffalo in some cases, to create various bits of human ingenuity, various tools, materials, clothing, etc.

is chrome, you know, everything is metallic, et cetera. This seems to run counter to that, and in some ways because they're asking you to imagine a robot that reaches out to you, not with a metal hand or even a metal hand that is covered with like some sort of plastic substance that is like a that is kind of like human skin. No, it is reaching out to touch you with a hand that is a dead tarantula.

sort of grotesque mechanism. No, they're saying, like you actually would have to do less to take advantage of this fewer steps in the production. I love this, They write, quote The unique walking mechanism of spiders relying on hydraulic pressure rather than antagonistic muscle pairs to extend their legs results in a necrobotic gripper that naturally resides in its

closed state and can be opened by applying pressure. The necrobodic gripper is capable of grasping objects with irregular geometries and up to one hundred and thirty percent of its own mass Furthermore, the gripper can serve as a handheld device and innately camouflages in outdoor environments. Okay, the last sense, I don't know why that part is important. Do we need a stealth hand that grab things one hundred and

thirty percent of its own mass? I don't know, but it does give us more horror movie ideas, I suppose.

than how say, mammals would move their limbs. Mammals, as it says, move their limbs with antagonistic muscle pairs, so you know, muscles contracting or relaxing in order to bend the skeleton of the joints, whereas with spiders it has to do with an internal hydraulic pressure state to cause the legs to extend. And so when the pressure is relaxed that is when the legs close, which I guess makes sense because when you see a dead spider, it tends to have its legs curled up exactly.

engineered system. And again, there's nothing creepy about a spider handed necrobot at all, so we shouldn't, you know, act like it is. But I included images, and I imagine these images can be I think the paper itself is not behind a paywall or anything, so folks can pull

this up. You can find a link on the eight Nobel Prizes website, but they show exactly the steps that are involved, and it involves first of all, euthanizing the spider and then a fabrication, a step that requires just one thing to be done, and that's quote, inserting a needle into the prosoma region of a deceased spider and fixing the needle to the spider's body. With glue to form a hermatic seal.

the dead spider yourself. You have to make it dead yourself. Now, why is it important this study? Well, you know again, I think the idea of you know, of just necrobotics in general, it's it's nothing to scoff at. You know, we might consider a kind of post synthetic or beyond that synthetic material science of the future. You know, well, machines of the future will continue to have synthetic parts.

What if biotic and even repurpose tissues play on an important role in at least key parts of the design, particularly where you need some sort of like, you know, a mechanical interact to take place, and you could either, you know, you could fine tune some sort of artificial system and gears and three D printed pieces, or you could turn to pre existing structures and materials, be it the muscles of a rat's heart or the you know, the fantastic limbs of a spider.

Stratigraphy is the subdiscipline of geology that's focused on understanding geological strata, meaning the layers of rock in Earth's crust, how they form, how they're ordered and structured, and so forth. It's also worth flagging, as I mentioned earlier, that usually the winners of the Ignobel Prizes are studies published in scientific journals. This is not one of those. This is instead a sort of historical interest feature about, as the

title says, eating fossils and congrats to Zowachevitch. Because I loved this article, so I'm going to start just by reading the opening passage. The rock lying by the roadside did not look like much of interest at first, a rather nondescript limestone with little more to show to casual observation than a few vague blotches. Anyway, old habits die hard, so I picked it up, licked the surface, and put it and my hand lens to my eye. Now, okay, so half of that picture makes sense to a non expert.

As a non geologist, I might expect a geologist to pick up a rock and use a magnifying lens to look at it. But licking the rock is that part of the standard geology modus operandi.

that is really interesting. I think many of us will have noticed that a wet rock looks very different than a dry rock. A wet rock has you can see some of the textures and the grain more sharply. Some of the structure of the mineral is revealed. And of course, if you know, don't have like a I don't know, like a bucket of water with you, you of course have some water in your mouth, you can lick the rock or spit on it, put some sali on it, and see that grain and structure with more clarity.

all bound together in a chunk of calcite. So, having established that the main purpose of licking the rock is to be able to see it better, you still might be wondering what does a collection of fossilized for aminifera taste, like Zawachevich writes, quote, the taste now was likely merely

registered as generically slightly dusty and then instantly forgotten. I had always thought it entirely superfluous to identification, but perhaps not so as we contemporary types develop capabilities in one direction, we might be entirely losing them in another. Go right back to the beginnings of our science, and our ancestors and their senses were attuned to different settings. One could, then, it seems, literally develop a taste for stratigraphy.

These periods he called the primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary, and these categories have been majorly revised and refined by modern geologists, but the basic principle still sticks that you can identify sedimentary rock layers and correlate them with different historical periods in which they were laid down. So Sawichewitch describes Arduino as quote a busy man who had to be everywhere at once. This guy apparently worked as a mining engineer and as a surveyor, but was also just

an all purpose freak for rocks and fossils. He ravenously collected and studied them from all over the northeast of Italy, from the Alps down to the Po River delta around Venice. And he called himself a mineralogist, meaning he was into all different types. He was into fossils, sediments, springs and all that stuff, everything about the earth. Now, the interesting thing is that despite his importance in the history of this branch of geology, Arduino was in some sense an amateur,

and he did not publish his theories in books. Instead, they appeared in letters that he sent to a friend of his who was a professor at the University of Padua, who in turn published Ardueno's letters in a Venetian journal, which then filtered out to other scholars who took the ideas and refined them further, and they ended up morphing into the ideas we have today in stratigraphy. But here's where we get back to the flavor of rocks and fossils.

Zawachevich describes these letters that Arduino wrote to his friend the Professor, which were only translated into English and published in full the year before this article, So I guess that would have been twenty sixteen. And Zawachevich says that these are fun reading, full of enthusiastic conversational style, and also just full of gushing about crushing. And all of Arduino's crushes are rocks and minerals and mineral springs awesome. So I want to read a passage here where Sawichevich

is setting up and quoting sections of these letters. So this is Sawaichevitch writing it first. Quote Fossil shells in a mud rock, for instance, and coal fragments, when burned, leave an ash that quote. As soon as it is placed on the tongue, it burns like fire and leaves a flavor equally bitter and urinous. When spat out, it leaves a certain sweetness and a skinned tongue. Springs that emerge from a stratum full of marquesite and coal quote

have an acid, spicy flavor. Vitriolic, yes, but with a certain pleasantness that I cannot describe, like the acidity of wine. These waters quote made me far less nauseous than did the waters from the same source that I have tasted here in Vincenza and at the skio. The white and micacious sediment from one stratum has no taste in the raw state, he said, but one's burnt quote acquired a flavor as well as a caustic quality from the calcining of the spar This man loved rocks. He loved to

collect them. He wanted to understand them, and he wanted to know which ones tasted like pea, and which ones were spicy, and which ones tasted like a fine montepulciano.

detailed scientific analysis. You know, he's making an interesting point that without the modern equipment that we use for chemical analysis of minerals, information about taste and smell was actually very useful data to log which would maybe help us better understand what these minerals were. In a way, the tongue could be seen as like the chemistry lab of the body. I think you could argue that it exists primarily to do fast chemical analysis on anything that is

about to enter the digestive tract. And this would be both for screening purposes, so to reject chemicals that could hurt us, but also for conditioning purposes to cause immediate pleasure when we're eating something nutritionally desirable, to sort of condition our brains to repeat the behavior that got that substance into the mouth.

used to understand and catalog the world. It reminds me a bit of I think we talked about this in the past when we were talking about mushroom foraging that experienced foragers, and I want to underline that experienced foragers will sometimes taste but not consume taste and then spit out portions of fung guy that they're in the process of identifying, and they'll utilize that additional sense data into

their identification process. Again, experts not eating the mushrooms. Don't attempt this if you if you were not an expert, don't eat any mushrooms because you listen to this podcast, et cetera. All the standard disclaimers, but examples of you know this sort of you know older way of using all the senses to try and understand bits of the natural world.

and it could very well be dangerous. But given those caveats about safety, especially if you don't have to do this to the eighteenth century mineralogist trying to understand the mineral world with a comparatively limited toolkit, tasting sediment and rocks and fossils and spring water makes a lot of sense. Those flavors are potentially useful information. Yeah, all right, So that's the first subsection of Zavachevic's essay here about eating fossils,

but there are more. He next goes on to talk about the story of the nineteen fifty one Explorers Club dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, which famously, or maybe better to say, infamously, served attendees a meat dish that the host of the event originally claimed was the meat of Megatherium, an extinct genus of giant groundsloth. The later reports in the media, I think specifically in the Christian Science Monitor, claimed that the meat had actually

been from a wooly mammoth. In both cases these animals, the animals in question were long extinct. So the story went that the meat served at this dinner had been excavated, frozen from a site at the Aleutian Islands, and held in stock by a man named Father Bernard Hubbard, popularly known in the media as the Glacier Priest. This sounds more and more like a D and D scenario to us.

Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, preserved somehow. I don't know if they packed it in formaldehyde or whatever, but they somehow preserved it and had it there at the museum.

Just to note that it is apparently more difficult to do DNA testing on older remains, and also more difficult to do DNA testing on meat that has been cooked, but they did succeed at testing it. This is from

their abstract quote. We sequenced a fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome B gene and studied archival material to verify its identity, which, if genuine, would extend the range of megatherium over six hundred percent because if it actually came from the Aleutian Islands or from the Glacier, priest no idea that giant ground sloths were living there at any point. But anyway, they say, if it actually was genuine, it would extend the range of megatherium over six hundred percent quote and

alter our views on groundsloth evolution. Our results indicate that the meat was not mammoth or megatherium, but green sea turtle Chelonia midas. The prehistoric dinner was likely an elaborate publicity stunt, now specifically the green sea turtle. This is sad. I should add that this animal is considered endangered today. I don't know what its status was in nineteen fifty one. But I'm so confused because if you're doing a hoax, why would you try to pass off sea turtle as

extinct giant groundsloth meat? Why not just to use like beef for goat or something.

so long. That being said, it seems like, are there not multiple culinary methods you could use to sort of weirden up your meat and make it taste strange, like different marinades and so forth.

licking to see better. Numbulites are fascinating in their own right. So numulites are a genus of for iminifer dating back millions of years, notable for their disc shaped or lins shaped shells, which are found abundantly in fossil form. The organisms themselves are single celled protozoa and they form this protective shell on the outside called a test. These tests

or shells have been observed since ancient times. In fact, what's called numulitic limestone, which is that's sedimentary calcium carbonate rock from archaic seafloors, contain huge proportions of numulite fossils. Numbulytic limestone was what was quarried out by the ancient Egyptians and used to build the Pyramids of Giza. So the pyramids are made at least in part out of

fossil rock containing the shells of all these organisms. And these disc shaped fossils in the pyramid blocks were noticed by the ancients, people didn't necessarily understand that they were fossilized shells of you know, trillions of single salt marine organisms. I've read elsewhere that in the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus thought that these discs were lentils that

had turned to stone. So maybe like, ooh, the people who built the pyramids so long ago, they spilled some lentils all over the place while they were building them, and now these lentils turned into rocks. But in fact they are these protozoan shells, and these shells can grow to enormous sizes in some cases for some species, especially for a single celled organism. Zawichevich mentions that I guess

this would be the species. I don't know how to say this quite I think Numulitis milika put which means the thousand head nomulite. This can grow a shell sixteen

centimeters in diameter. That's for a single celled organism. Wow, and these really these tough outer shells, and the size of these organisms raise questions about like what in the ocean could actually successfully eat them, and this leads down another road where where Zawichevich ends up talking about a deliciously weird obsolete thesis from a nineteenth to twentieth century British zoologist named Randolph Randolph Kirkpatrick who worked at the

British Natural History Museum from eighteen eighty six to nineteen twenty seven, and in nineteen twelve Kirkpatrick published a book that was called the Numbulosphere, An Account of the Organic Origin of so called igneous rocks and abyssle red clays. And this book, while now regarded as totally wrong and based entirely on observational error and classification error in looking at the grain of rocks, seems nevertheless to hold an almost kind of cherished place in the hearts of many

geologists and paleontologists. In this essay he cites Stephen J. Gould as one of these people who, like everybody knows, this thesis is totally wrong, but there's something about it that they seem to find pleasant and amusing and almost almost sweet or cute. So what did Kirkpatrick argue, Well, I want to read here from Zawichevic's summary quote. The ocean, Kirkpatrick said, is full of organisms which efficiently extract calcium, carbon and silica from the seawater to create myriad skeletons,

which then go on to become geological strata. Look at thin sections of those ancient strata through a microscope and you will see traces of those skeletons, many of them, he went on to say, show the traces of the curved shells and chambers of numulites. These were not always obvious,

but could be detected with the trained eye. That trained eye then put other rocks under the microscope, with just a little more training, the same shapes could be detected in all of the specimens that Kirkpatrick looked at, including in lavas, granites, and even meteorites. The inference was clear. So what was that inference? It is that all the rocks on the surface of the Earth are numbulites. The Earth itself, Kirkpatrick thought, was essentially encased in a four

a miniferent test of its own. There was a shell for the planet made out of rocks that were made out of the fossilized, indigestible shells of marine organisms. From million, millions of years past, so like whatever other kind of rock you might think it is. Kirkpatrick was like, no, that's actually just a version of numulite shells that you know, looks different for some.

people became devoted to this idea. And yeah, and then on top of this, this whole idea of just geologists tasting rocks, how that factors into their you know, their their analysis of the geology.

a little what have you. But those core episodes are going to come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do a listener mail that your chance to write in and chat with us about past, current and future episodes. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode unless it's being preempted by something, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.