Catching Up with the Ig Nobel Prizes

is all about. Over the last few weeks, I've done two other episodes about this, but you know, the Nobel Prize is all about celebrating human achievements that generally benefit all of humanity in some way. That's the idea behind those The ig Nobel Prize launched out of a satirical science journal, and they continue on today but as an

offshoot of a different satirical science journal. To learn all about that, just find the first part of this series, and they acknowledge projects and people who have achieved something perhaps maybe at least on the surface, a little less lofty than something that benefits all of humankind. The general description is that the ignobl is for something that first

makes you laugh then makes you think. Some of the awards celebrate the absurd, some of them are actually more of a way to cast shade at people and projects that probably deserve it. Now in the line of Ignobel Prize as we are up to the year twenty thirteen, and that year there was really only one Ignobel Prize that was awarded for a category that relates to tech, because they give them out for all sorts of different

categories and technology doesn't factor into all of them. In fact, I'm only talking about a very small number of prize winners overall, because lots of awards went out to all sorts of wacky and weird scientific endeavors. This year it was for the field of safety engineering and the award went to Gustano Pizzo and the patent that he received, which was for an anti hijacking system for aircraft. This

was not a new patent. I should add the Ignobel Prize doesn't necessarily celebrate something that happened in that year. Sometimes someone will uncover, you know, a ridiculous thing from years and years ago, and then they'll award the Ignobel Prize well after the event happened. But the same thing is true about the Nobel Prize. So I think it's fine anyway. Bitso's initial filing for this patent dated all the way back to November second, nineteen seventy two, and

remember the prize went out in twenty thirteen. The Patent Office actually granted his patent on May twenty first, nineteen seventy four. So this wasn't just a patent application. The US Patent Office actually approved the patent. Now you have to understand why was there a patent for an anti hijacking device in the first place. Well, in the late nineteen sixties and into the early nineteen seventies and beyond, actually there were several instances of planes being hijacked or

attempts at people hijacking planes. There were several that involved people hijacking a plane in order to travel to Cuba, with the phrase take this plane to Cuba becoming something of a meme back in the day. You'll occasionally hear that in comedy sketches. I remember there was a comedy sketch where a hijacker is not able to get onto a plane, and so it gets on a bus and says, take this bus to Cuba. The infamous case of dB

Cooper happened in nineteen seventy one. Now, if you don't know about the dB Cooper case just to do a web search on D. B. Cooper to read up a one of the more outlandish acts of thievery in US history. But let's get back to this invent. So what was

Gustano's solution toward stopping a hijacker from taking over a plane? Well, according to the patent quote, a partition or barrier located immediately aft of the pilot's cabin is adapted to be raised, dividing the aft section longitudinally into port and starboard areas, the floors of which are dropped on command to lower the hijacker into a capsule in the belly of the plane.

The capsule is releasable through opened bombay doors, having attached there too a parachute for safely returning the hijacker within the capsule to earth end quote. So, imagine that you've got X ray glasses on, and you're standing in the aisle of the plane, and you're looking toward the cockpit.

You would see that beneath the floor right in front of the cockpit there are first there's a partitioned wall that can come straight up out of the floor and thus cut the cockpit into left and right halves, or the aisle into left and right halves. On that left and right half, you would see underneath the floor there'd be a couple of capsules. The patents sketch actually showed them as nets as opposed to capsules, and the floor

itself is just a trap door. So his invention was a cartoonish trap door built into the body of a plane, two trap doors actually, and it would be hijacker would presumably fall through the trap door into the net or capsule below. The plane would then open up doors below the capsule so on the bottom side of the plane to eject the hijacker, and a parachute would deploy so that authorities would be able to retrieve. Then ne're do

well once they landed on the ground. The other part of the invention that dividing wall that would move into place and bisect the area behind the cockpit. That would serve both to nudge the hijacker in the right position, because you know, this invention only works if the hijacker's

actually standing on top of the trap door. I'm reminded again of comedy sketches where a villain wants to throw a switch and open a trap door under someone, only they're not standing on the trap door, so the villain keeps on like suggesting, why don't you move just a little bit more to the right. It feels kind of like that. It also would serve as a barrier to

prevent hijackers from opening the cockpit door right. It almost sects like like an obstacle that way, because it would come up right up against the door and keep the door secure, and thus the hijackers would not be able to gain access to the pilots. I don't know why companies like Boeing and Airbust didn't go to the trouble of building trap doors and bomb bay doors on commercial passenger jets. Clearly this was worthy of an Ignobel prize.

In twenty fourteen, the Ignobel Prize for Art went to a project that includes lasers, Which is why I'm mentioning it in this episode because, as it turns out, this really isn't that much about tech at all, but lasers do play a part, and I love lasers, so tech was really just a way to facilitate part of this experiment. So the winners of the prize were Marina di Tomasso, Michelle Sadaro, and Paolo Livrea for their scientific paper titled

esthetic value of Paintings affects pain thresholds. So the basic hypothesis was that your threshold for pain, or maybe your perception of pain, depends in part on circumstances that are outside of the actual incident that's causing the pain. So in other words, if everything around you is pretty nice and you're kind of distracted because of how pretty everything is, then if you stub your toe, you might not perceive it as painful as if you were in an unpleasant

or scary situation. I'm kind of reminded did of doctors who will distract a child before the child gets a shot so that the child doesn't really perceive the pains as acutely. So that's kind of what the basic hypothesis was, Well, how do you test that? How do you test if someone feels pain at a different level based upon what

they're experiencing. So the researchers gather together a group of folks and they had these people look at different paintings, and each participant was to give their opinion about which paintings they thought were beautiful and which ones they thought

were unpleasant or ugly. So that's the first step, you know, and they would the researchers would write down, okay, you know, subject A thinks paintings one, five, nine, twelve, sixteen, and twenty are all pretty and all the rest are ugly, and they would just keep those as two separate groups

for the second part of the experiment. And the second part was they had the participants stare at the paintings they found beautiful and then they hit the back of their hand with a laser, a laser that was strong enough to create a point of pain by heating it up. And they did the same thing with the ugly paintings, right or the ones that the particular subject found were ugly. And at the end they said, so how bad it

hurt this time? So, yeah, the laser was just strong enough to heat that tiny point on the back of the hand without actually causing damage. It caused discomfort and then pain, but not it wouldn't, you know, actually hurt the person. So they asked how bad was the pain when you were looking at the ugly paintings and how bad were was the pain when you were looking at the pretty paintings. And they concluded that quote pain may be modulated at cortical level by the esthetic content of

the distracting stimuli end quote. So again not super tech heavy, but it had lasers in it, so I had to talk about it. Next up, we need to go to twenty sixteen's Egg Nobel Prizes and the prize in chemistry that year covers a topic that we've talked about on Old Tech Stuff podcasts, and that is Diesel Gate, aka

the Volkswagen emissions scandal. All right, So, as I'm sure many of you know, in lots of places around the world, there are laws that restrict the amount of emissions a vehicle can make of certain types of emissions, and if a vehicle exceeds that limit, then it's not really legal to drive that vehicle on the roads or to sell

that car in those places. So here in the United States, one of the emissions the Environmental Protection Agency looks out for is nitrogen oxide, and vehicles that have diesel fueled engines can release nitrogen oxide. But as long as those emissions are under a legal limit, everything's copasetic, at least from a legal standpoint. The searchers found something curious when they were testing some Volkswagen vehicles that run on diesel. In the lab, the vehicles operated under the legal limit

for nitrogen oxide emissions. Everything's fine, But then in a live road test, some researchers found that two Volkswagen vehicles running on diesel were actually exceeding the accepted levels of nitrogen oxide emissions. A further investigation found that Volkswagen had installed software in their diesel powered vehicles, and that software would detect when a car was put into emissions testing in a lab and would essentially throttle the vehicle's performance

so that nitrogen oxide emissions would be below normal. But if you were outside of a testing environment, when you were actually using the car for its intended purpose to take you from place to place, it would switch to normal operations, and that meant the engine would be generating more power, but also you would get more nitrogen oxide emissions. Essentially, Volkswagen was cheating on an environmental test and this was a huge scandal, and it led to recalls and fines

and plenty of other costs. And these were not puny little fines either. In the United States alone, the estimation was around twenty five billion with a b dollars in fines. Volkswagen would later claim it cost the company more than thirty one billion euro. So clearly this is a case of throwing some shade on an Ignobel winner. The prize said it went to Volkswagen quote for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically electro mechanically producing

fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested. End quote. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more Ignobel Prize winners to talk about. All right, we're back, and we're up to twenty seventeen. We actually have a couple of entrees that Merritt mentioned on a technology podcast, although the second one is well, it's going to be a challenge for me not to

make some jokes. Remember, Jonathan, this is a serious business. Okay, all right, we'll start with the easy one first, and this one went to a brain activity study that used fMRI analysis to study a version, particularly in the form of food disgusted. And as the researchers point out in the abstract of their paper, some people are disgusted by cheese, and so in their paper, quote, the neural bases of

disgust for cheese end quote. The researchers describe how they found out that, based on fMRI data, a higher percentage of people are disgusted by cheese than by other types of food, So that's why they chose cheese out of everything else. More importantly, they say that those who have no desire to eat cheese, or perhaps even an outright aversion to eating cheese, they observed more activity in the basal ganglia, which I could have sworn was a nightclub

I once walked past in San Diego. So the researchers were studying how the brain reacts when someone feels discussed. Essentially, and I will remind y'all that one of the earlier Ignobel prizes went to some researchers who showed that equipment meant to study brain activity and the statistical analysis that's used along with it, which primarily focuses on fMRI machines.

Those machines are extremely sensitive and the statistical methods are extremely it's easy to insert errors, either intentionally or otherwise. Talked about this with David Eagleman recently, and they showed that by showing that the fMRI study could be done to apparently measure brain activity in a dead salmon, which is clearly impossible, right, And the reason I bring that up is I now, I'm always worried that perhaps any study that uses FMRII fails to follow very strict controls.

There's no reason to suggest that that's the case here, because, as David pointed out, it is entirely possible to get strong, valid, reliable results with fMRI, but you have to be very careful, which is true about all science. But we can often just assume that everyone did everything correctly, and then next thing you know, you find out that the conclusions you have drawn aren't based on anything anyway. The whole study was a pretty amusing way to measure disgust, but it

wouldn't work on me because I love cheese. Still, I thought it was interesting. They thought, we need to figure out disgust, But we need to figure out how people experience disgusted in the brain without introducing something that is genuinely upsetting or dangerous. Right. We don't want to cause

psychological harm by presenting something that's disgusting and disturbing. So where do we find an item that can create the feeling of disgust without it actually causing harm and cheese was what they settled on, and I just think that's great. And now for the other twenty seventeen prize, this one was awarded in the field of obstetrics, and it went to researchers who published a paper titled and I Am not making this up Fetal facial expression in response to

intra vaginal music emission. So, in other words, the study looked at how a fetus reacts in the form of the fetus's facial expression when the fetus encountered music coming from inside the mother's vagina. Holy cats, y'all, Oh many jokes. I mean, the music is coming from inside the vagina is just one of them. But I will do my best to stop myself from reverting to a juvenile sense

of humor. So the study compared fetal responses to music that was played through quote emitters placed on the mother's abdomen end quote which I'm guessing is kind of like, you know, having a couple of little speakers that are attached to whatever the music device is and putting the speakers sort of face down on the mother's abdomen and then the baby can listen to music that was sort of the control group, and the other was applying musical

stimuli intravationally. Now I only read the abstract of this paper. I did not pay to get access to the full paper, so I am not exactly sure how they did that. I wasn't really brave enough to read the full study, if I'm being totally honest. But I imagine that however they did it didn't involve John Cusack in a boombox.

The researchers then used ultrasound and they captured images of the fetus, and they looked for facial movements such as mouthing and tonguing, and they observed that a fetus that was older than sixteen weeks typically did seem to react more to the intravaginal music stimulation than that that was coming from outside the mother. And you might be thinking, why even study this, Well, the researchers actually had a

couple of good reasons for it. For one, they found that most of the fetuses that they tested this with reacted to the intravaginal music more than the alternatives, and this in turn suggested that the neural pathways associated with hearing and motor responses that are connected to hearing form

earlier than perhaps we previously believed. So it gives us more information on the actual development of a fetus in the womb, and that by knowing this we could potentially develop new methods for things like prenatal hearing screening, among other things. So again, on the surface level, the study sounds at least a little bit bizarre, but through that bizarre study, we learned things that potentially could have a

significant impact on people in the future. All right up to twenty eighteen, we got our second Ignobel Prize awarded to researchers who found a medical application for roller coasters. Now, if you've listened to the other episodes I've done about the prizes, you might remember that way back in twenty ten, some researchers looked at how positive forms of stress, you know, like thrilling kinds of stress use stress, in other words,

can help alleviate symptoms of asthma. Well, in twenty eighteen, we had a related idea, except this time it was the use of roller coasters as part of an effort to help patients pass a kidney stone. Y'all, I've had kidney stones twe and it was agonizing both times, and I can't even imagine being able to sit still long enough to ride to the closest amusement park, which is about a half hour drive from where I live, and then make my way through the park to the closest

suitable roller coaster to pursue this kind of treatment. But then again, when I'm in the throes of agony, perhaps I'd consider trying it anyway, because any relief would be more than welcome. The researchers, Mark Mitchell and David Wardinger published their findings in a paper has a title that includes words that I absolutely cannot pronounce, but essentially a validation of a renal model for the evaluation of renal

calculi passage while writing a roller coaster. And it almost feels like they were doing the whole thing as a gag right from the start with that kind of title, But it does get better. So, first off, the researcher has created a simulation to stand in for a patient.

They needed to have some sort of way to measure this, and it would not be practical or ethical to seek out people who were in the midst of trying to pass a kidney stone to stand in and help out with this, so they needed something to simulate a patient with a kidney stone, and that makes sense to me.

The simulations were based off actual medical cases of kidney stones, so they relied on tomography that was gathered during various patients treatment to determine things like the size of kidney stones and where in the renal system they were at the time of the patient seeking treatment. So the researchers would suspend the stones or calculi in other words, quote in urine in the model. End quote you. Then they

would take this model on a roller coaster ride. So you had researchers carrying the simulation of a human renal system filled with urine and kidney stones, or a simulation of a kidney stone onto a roller coaster, and not just any roller coaster, but the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad

roller coaster at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. YEA, all that happens to be one of the few roller coasters that my partner will go on because she does not like thrill rides and Big Thunder is just at her threshold for thrill rides, so I can't wait to entertain her with trivia that the ride has also been used in a study about kidney stones with a simulated model of a renal system filled with p So what

did the researchers actually find. Well, it all depends on where you sit, I guess, because they saw that when they took the model on rides and they sat near the front of the train, they observed a passage rate of four times out of a total of twenty four rides, so they rode twenty four times, and four times of the ride they saw that the simulated stone had passed at least a little bit further down the renal system,

and the other twenty times it didn't. But when they rolled in the back of the roller coaster, they saw a passage rate of twenty three times out of thirty six attempts. They also saw that the passage of the calculi depended a bit on the calosseal location of the stone itself. And I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation of these things. I ran into so many medical terms and I just am not familiar with them. Anyway, think of the renal system as having an upper, middle, and lower section.

The stone would pass through the upper section one hundred percent of the time. So if that's where they started where they put the kidney stone in the upper part of the renal system. It would pass out of the upper system, possibly just down into the middle or lower section, but it did it every single time. The middle section it would pass through fifty five point six percent of the time, and the lower section of the renal system

simulate a renal system forty percent of the time. I don't know if that means the model peed itself and passed the stone while on the ride. I'd rather not know. I will say knowing that some scientists carried a model filled with urine on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at least sixty times does make me look at the ride a little differently. Now, Okay, we're going to take another quick break.

When we come back, we've got some more Ignobel Prize winners to talk about, and hopefully we're done with the pee for now. Okay, we're back. So twenty eighteen saw another prize winner wasn't just about kidney stones and riding roller coasters. The Ignobel Prize for Literature went to a research paper that confirms what I think most of us probably innately know or least suspect on a subconscious level. The paper is titled life is Too Short to RTFM

how users relate to documentation and excess features in consumer products. So, for those innocent summer children among you who do not recognize the initialism RTFM, it stands for read the freakin' manual, only most of the time folks will use a more vulgar F word in that one. So this paper observes that with more complex consumer products, people are less likely to bother flipping through the pages of a manual before trying to suss out how it works. Which, obviously that's

like counterproductive, right. You've made a product that is more complicated, the person is more likely to need instructions, and yet they're less likely to actually read them. And the more complicated it gets, the less likely people are to read the manual. It seems like a paradox, right, So how do you get around this and why is it? Well, often it's because the more voluminous and convoluted instructions are, the more discouraging it is to try and read them.

And so if instructions were written in a very straightforward way, then perhaps people would be less disinclined to read the instructions when they get some new, complicated piece of equipment. But I'm sure y'all have all had the experience where you get something brand new, it's got lots of different features and moving parts or whatever. You open up the instruction manual and it might be five or six pages

before you even start getting to instructions. Everything before that are things like warnings and lists of parts and all that kind of stuff, and you're just like, I just want to use my thing. I just want to I got this brand new scientific calculator. I want to do some cool stuff. And again, while you might argue that the study simply confirms something that a lot of people know or at least suspect, you could say it also sends a message to inventors and to companies. There is

a challenge in writing good useful documentation. Companies will do everything they can to include in the manual all the stuff that could possibly go wrong, usually as a way to kind of shift accountability from the company to the user, you know, like, oh, no, we told you not to do that in the manual, so it's not our fault

that you didn't read it. But for those companies that really want to see consumers using their products, that research perhaps suggests that there are ways to create manuals that are more engaging and less frustrating, and by extension, more useful to the end user. And of course I have

seen this kind of thing. I'm sure you have to where you'll buy a new product and it'll come with two things, right, It'll come with a full manual that'll list everything, and there'll be like a quick start manual so that you can just get things set up and get things going. And I think that might in part be a reaction to this particular tendency in consumers. Now

we're in the home stretch. So in twenty nineteen, emman Fara Baksh received an Ignobel Prize in Engineering for his patent, which was awarded in twenty eighteen for an quote infant washer and diaper changer apparatus and method end quote. Now, if you're curious about this device, allow me to describe some of its features as laid out in the patent. It has a quote main chamber, a glass window, a seat, a leg holder, a safety belt, a diaper removing arm,

a sprinkler, and a dryer end quote. I also love the sentence from the abstract quote the main chamber is configured to receive an infant therein end quote. That just tickles me. But I'll say this though, the illustrations make the device look like a cross between a microwave oven and one of those claw machines you find in amusement

parks in arcades. Still, the patent points out that the quote changing diapers is an art that many parents or caregivers may find difficult to acquire or perform conveniently end quote. And I don't doubt that for a second. If y'all are so inclined to read up on this patent, you can find it in a patent search. The patent number is ten million, thirty four thousand, five hundred eighty two

dot B two. So yeah, if you look at the picture, you're supposed to lay the baby baby on a seat, secure the baby to the seat with a belt, and then these robotic arms are meant to remove the diaper, and then the sprinkler sprays the baby cleat, and the dryer tries the baby. But those arms are what just y'all, I just can't imagine using those near a baby. It's it kind of goes to like tech avery cartoon territory

for me, all right, just a few more. In twenty twenty two, the Ignobel Prizer Engineering went to a team of researchers who studied the most efficient way for people to use their fingers when turning a knob. So this experiment involved thirty two volunteers. They were told to turn a series of knobs clockwise, and the knobs ranged in size from seven millimeters on the small side to thirteen

centimeters on the large side. Now that's not that tech oriented yet, and in fact, the researchers contextualize their work as a way to create good products that are useful to society and easy to operate. In other words, make

sure your knobs are convenient for people to use. But I would also propose this sort of research becomes useful in fields like robotics, where you might design a general purpose robot that is meant to interact with different types of control systems that were designed for humans, and learning how humans tend to interact with controls can help inform roboticists when it comes to creating robots that are meant

to do similar things. It doesn't mean that the human method will always be the best one, but if you're trying to design a robot that can interoperate in a human environment, you have to first begin by understanding how humans move around in that human environment, and that to me makes sense, so I think it counts for the purposes on this show. Another Ignobel prize, this one for safety engineering, went to a Swedish engineer named Magnus Gens.

Why because years earlier Gens designed a moose crash test dummy. And that does sound a little odd on the face of it, but then consider this. Moose are very large animals, but they have bodies that have varying density, and as large and as heavy as they are, they aren't necessarily heavy enough to trigger a car's airbag system to deploy

in the event of a crash. And in some places, like say in the Northern US, in Canada, places like Sweden, crashes with large animal like moose or elk isn't unheard of, and so Jen's invention helped car companies run tests to create vehicles that would keep passengers safer in the unfortunate event of a collision with a large animal. So again, it's one of those things that seems a bit weird at first, but it makes sense as you think about

it more. And in case you're curious, the dummy consisted of a metal frame with large rubber plates that were slung over it to represent different parts of the moose's body. Now this brings us up to twenty twenty three. So this year we got a couple of awards that relate to tech stuff, not the podcast, but you know tech in general. For example, the award for Mechanical Engineering went to a group of researchers who purely by chance, started

to work with dead spiders. So they saw that when spy dye, their little legs curl inward, and that's because they have a flexer muscle that contracts the legs. But in order to extend the legs, spiders actually use hydraulic pressure. So when they die, there's no hydraulic pressure and the flexer muscles pull in and so all the legs curl in. And that means that the relaxed state for the legs

is a gripping motion. Eureka, they said, we could use dead spiders to grip stuff, or rather, they could create a gripping mechanism that they could base off the mechanics of a spider's legs and they called it a necrobotic approach. And yeah, I can imagine some use cases for a mechanism that remains in grip mode until activated to release something, right, I can think of some good uses for a gripper that its natural state is gripping. So that's pretty cool

and all because of dead spiders. Then there were a pair of Japanese researchers who are looking into how applying electrical stimulation to the tongue can change our perception of taste. They wrote a paper that was titled Augmented Gestation using Electricity. In the paper, they say that quote, we change and amplify the taste of soup by stimulating the tongue electrically. Humans can feel electric taste at the moment of electrical

tongue stimulation. Electric taste includes metal taste, saltiness, sourness, and bitterness. They claim that through this stimulation they can amplify certain tastes and totally alter others. Whether this means you're gonna need to plug in your chopsticks or your straws in order to charge them before you eat and drink, I can't say. And lastly, doctor Sung Min Park received the Ignobel Prize for Public Health in twenty twenty three I

for inventing the Stanford toilet. Now I should add that Park was just one of several people who worked on this project. Doctor Sanjeev Gambier, doctor David Wan, and doctor Brian Lee also worked on it. So what's so special

about this toilet? Well, as the ig Nobel Prize committee put it, the Stanford toilet is quote a device that uses a variety of technologies including a uranalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete end quote. So it's a toilet that can perform tests

on the stuff what you put in the toilet. In other words, Now, if you've ever watched Scrubs, the musical episode in particular, do you know that everything comes down

to pooh. It's not totally accurate, but analyzing the stuff we excreet can tell doctors a lot about what's going on inside us and helped narrow down parameters before anyone has to do some sort of like invasive exploratory surgery, So this toilet can check for disease markers associated with everything from certain types of cancer to irritable bowel syndrome to kidney failure. What's more, the toilet itself is a

perfectly ordinary toilet. The team just found ways to incorporate or invent various tools that could then be fitted inside a standard toilet and thus perform these tests. So you don't even have to build an entirely new toilet to do this. You can just incorporate this technology in existing ones. And the telecommunications link means the toilet can send results to a secure cloud based system so that doctors can access it and then start drawing conclusions. So doctor Park

attended the Ignobel Prize Sarah Money. Often the researchers who win these prizes do attend, whether in person or virtually. I assume that doctor Park was flush with excitement. For more potty humor, you should probably check out the Old Tech Stuff episode I did about toilets stuff you should knows Josh Clark was my co host for that one. So if you want to hear Josh and myself, do you want to hear us like make terrible toilet jokes.

That's that's the place to go. And that gets us up to date with the Ignobel Prize winners whose work relied at least in part on technology. There are plenty of other winners who did really weird stuff, but since their work wasn't really related to tech, not even like tangentially, I skipped them. But I do recommend checking out the

list of winners. Sometime occasionally it feels like someone was asked a question by a three year old and then they decided to do a whole scientific study on the thing, you know, like do people have the same number of nosehirs in each nostril? Like huh, I don't know. Let's get a whole bunch of people together and count nosehares and figure that out. And yes, one of the Ignobel Prizes did go to a study that looked into that.

All right, that's it. Thank you for joining me on this three part journey through the Ignobel Prize winners that relate to technology. It was fun to do this. I like looking at weird scientific studies that perhaps on the surface seem completely ludicrous, but upon further reflection, you think, well, not completely just a little kind of like me. No, I know, I'm totally ludicrous. It's fine. I hope you are all well, and I will talk to you again

really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.