Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 27

“Why are they using SALIVA to clean works of art?”

“Why are they using SALIVA to clean works of art?” is a short video in the Química por aí series. It explores the Ig Nobel Prize winning research about using human saliva — spit — to preserve and repair valuable paintings, sculpture, and other art works:

 

The 2018 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize was awarded to Paula Romão, Adília Alarcão and the late César Viana, for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces.

They documented their research, in the study: “Human Saliva as a Cleaning Agent for Dirty Surfaces,” by Paula M. S. Romão, Adília M. Alarcão and César A.N. Viana, Studies in Conservation, vol. 35, 1990, pp. 153-155.

The flexible power of statistics

Statistics can be used in intensely creative ways, especially in the business world. A CBC news report (on December 19, 2023) tells how this is visible in the automobile industry:

New Kia vehicles that have arrived from overseas are sitting on a storage lot in Wolverton, Ont., purposely locked up even though customers have been waiting months and months — some well over a year — to get their vehicles.

The new cars are being withheld from Kia’s Ontario dealerships — and reportedly from many more across the country — as part of a controversial plan by Kia Canada to game the number of sales in the last six weeks of the year….

He said there was concern that if sales continued to go well, headquarters would decide Canada didn’t need marketing support in the new year and would cut back on that…. An auto expert says it’s a very unusual move for Kia Canada. “It is normal for automakers to use creative strategies at the very end of the year… Usually, those strategies are to help increase sales, not reduce them,” he said.

Assessment of the value in a professor’s testimony

In some cases, a professor’s legal testimony can be very valuable. A judge has now stated on the record exactly how valuable.

A December 18, 2023 Associated Press report, headlined “Judge criticizes Trump’s expert witness as he again refuses to toss fraud lawsuit“, says:

Judge Arthur Engoron issued a written ruling Monday… Engoron wrote that the “most glaring” flaw of Trump’s argument was to assume that the testimony provided by Eli Bartov, an accounting professor at New York University, and other expert witnesses would be accepted by the court as “true and accurate.”

“Bartov is a tenured professor, but the only thing his testimony proves is that for a million or so dollars, some experts will say whatever you want them to say,” Engoron wrote.

Bartov, who was paid nearly $900,000 for his work on the trial, said in an email that the judge had mischaracterized his testimony.

A prize-winning client

Trump (pictured here on the right) is Donald Trump, co-winner of the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education (for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can).

A professor of firm value

Professor Bartov (pictured here on the left) is co-author of the study “Corporate Social Responsibility and the Market Reaction to Negative Events: Evidence from Inadvertent and Fraudulent Restatement Announcements” (published in The Accounting Review, vol. 96, no. 2, 2021, pages 81–106). The study says:

we show, in contrast to prior research, that depending on management conduct leading to the restatement, a company’s Corporate Social Responsibility performance may destroy, not necessarily enhance, firm value.

(Dangerous Bits of) Moon in the Sky

LIttle things complicate humans’ attempts to explore places other than the earth. Here’s a study about a small example:

“The Damage to Lunar Orbiting Spacecraft Caused by the Ejecta of Lunar Landers,” Philip T. Metzger, James G. Mantovani, arXiv.2305.12234, 2023. The authors explain:

“This manuscript analyzes lunar lander soil erosion models and trajectory models to calculate how much damage will occur to spacecraft orbiting in the vicinity of the Moon. The soil erosion models have considerable uncertainty due to gaps in our understanding of the basic physics. The results for ~40 t landers show that the Lunar Orbital Gateway will be impacted by 1000s to 10,000s of particles per square meter but the particle sizes are very small and the impact velocity is low so the damage will be slight. However, a spacecraft in Low Lunar Orbit that happens to pass through the ejecta sheet will sustain extensive damage with hundreds of millions of impacts per square meter: although they are small, they are in the hypervelocity regime, and exposed glass on the spacecraft will sustain spallation over 4% of its surface.”

The image you see above is from the study.

Scientific Dining Review: Eating at CERN

Mark Benecke, forensic entomologist and international theatrical star, sends this review of the dining facilities at CERN, the vast particle physics laboratory located on and under both sides of the Swiss-French border, partly in Geneva. [This continues a long AIR tradition of reviewing dining facilities at science research facilities.]

Two of the restaurants (for U.S. Americans: “cafés”) at particle accelerating and detection facility CERN stand out: The nameless main eatery for staff and the public Big Bang Café.

In the main eatery, vegan food is available and much requested but the math somehow does not work out: The plant-based items are sold out often whilst the non-vegan food is plentiful. Staff could not yet figure out how to change the imbalance — observations are clear but a solid theory or algorhytm seems to be missing. Is antimatter involved? (CERN is the only place on earth where anti particles are produced.)

Prices in the eatery are comparably low; a dish that would cost four-fold in Geneva — the next large city — is sold here for a fourth of the price.

The public eatery is much smaller but due to it s catchy name pulls a crowd, too. A posh menu on the wall shows a receipe of how to “bake a universe”. It is done by mixing 27% dark matter with 68% dark energy and 5% atoms or “ordinary” matter. Further instructions read: “While the space expands very rapidly, the cosmic soup starts to cool.”

The regular food offers sound exotic and include the Little Neutron menu (staff did not know if this means Neutrinos) with apple sauce as well as cosmic cups, for example a glass of milk with a cookie or 300 milliliters of ginger syrup.

The time at Big Bang Café is give by an original Rolex timepiece. It is mounted under the ceiling, probably so that it may not be easily snatched.

If you found this review interesting, check my ‘scientific dining’ column in Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 7(4): 19-21 (2001).

Holiday abdominal perimeters, Snakebitten on the toilet, CEO holiday recitations, Muddy White Christmas

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Increasing perimeters — Some people are big on holidays – bigger than they were before those holidays. A team at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and the University of Valladolid, Spain, sized up some first-year undergraduate nursing students, then wrote about it in a paper called “Preliminary study of the increase in health science students’ body mass index during the Christmas holidays“….A small holiday bite — Little things that happen during any holiday can, thanks to the timing, be especially memorable. So it is with the case of the snake that bit the genitals of a defecating man. G. H. Dijkema at Rijnstate hospital in the Netherlands and colleagues lay forth the details in a report called “Scrotal necrosis after cobra (Naja annulifera) envenomation“. Essentially, this is a simple tale….A new holiday tradition — Some families like to gather to read aloud holiday stories, especially the Christmas tales written by Charles Dickens. But families who are tired of hearing the same old words year after year do have alternatives. Maybe the most profitable is to take a businesslike approach. Yukyoung Kim has identified a heap of stories that – because no one is stopping you – you and your family can read to each other as you anticipate the arrival of New Year. Kim compiled the material as the main chunk of a master’s thesis at the College of Liberal Arts and Convergence Science in South Korea, giving it the title “Study on CEO New Year’s address: Using text mining method“. “CEO”, as most holiday revellers know, is an acronym that stands for the phrase “chief executive officer”….Muddy White Christmas — In contrast to snow blanketing the land in chilly climes, having a White Christmas in some warmer places is a matter of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) precipitating in balmy waters. The CaCO3 drops to the sea floor, coating it with thick, white lime mud. Sam Purkis at the University of Miami, Florida, and team published a study about this, titled “Always a White Christmas in the Bahamas: Temperature and hydrodynamics localize winter mud production on Great Bahama Bank“….

Ambiguous Title of the Week: Coffee and Failure

This week’s Ambiguous Paper Title is:

“Coffee and heart failure: A further potential beneficial effect of coffee,” Anna Vittoria Mattioli and Alberto Farinetti, Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases, 2023.

Fake car transmission, Beer foam stink, Amusing the patient, Ducks versus monkeys

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Gearing up for happiness — … The news headline says it all: “Toyota has built an EV with a fake transmission, and we’ve driven it – Five minutes behind the wheel, and you’ll be a believer.” This is for customers who love the ancient experience of driving with a gearstick. Toyota’s new car has a joystick and a clutch pedal. Neither is connected to the car’s actual transmission….A stink about beer — Beer enthusiast Bernd-Juergen Fischer of Berlin is peeved. He tells Feedback: “Your paragraph on beer foam aroma sceptics [21 October] set my head spinning…Medical amusement— An old saying, iffily attributed to Voltaire, explains that “the art of medicine consists mostly of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease”. Feedback invites any reader who is a practising, licensed physician to say whether – in your professional experience – that is substantially true. Send your note, accompanied perhaps by a few words of personal professional recollection, to “Medical Amusement”, c/o Feedback. Please, for context, identify your own branch of medicine (family doctor, surgeon, cardiologist, neurologist, otolaryngologist, whatever).Future for ducks — … What is currently bad news for the ducks could lead to catastrophically worse news, instead, for the monkeys. The report is a stark warning to any brown capuchin monkey who might find a way to read it – and a source of at least some hope for readers who are Muscovy ducks. It explains that, by preying on the ducks, the monkeys might bring on “retaliation” by the humans who traditionally raise and devour those ducks….

A visit to the lab of Ig Nobel Prize winner Homei Miyashita

Titled “Shingo Fujimori has a shocking taste experience! What is the laboratory of Professor Homei Miyashita, who won the Ig Nobel Prize?”, this video shows a visit to the lab at Meiji University.

Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura were awarded the 2023 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

They documented that research in the study “Augmented Gustation Using Electricity,” Hiromi Nakamura and Homei Miyashita, Proceedings of the 2nd Augmented Human International Conference, March 2011, article 34.

A visit to the lab of Ig Nobel Prize winner Yoshiaki Miyashita

Titled “Shingo Fujimori has a shocking taste experience! What is the laboratory of Professor Yoshiaki Miyashita, who won the Ig Nobel Prize?”, this video shows a visit to the lab at Meiji University.

Yoshiaki Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura were awarded the 2023 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.
The documented that research in the study “Augmented Gustation Using Electricity,” Hiromi Nakamura and Homei Miyashita, Proceedings of the 2nd Augmented Human International Conference, March 2011, article 34.