Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 29

Jan Philipp Röer joins the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ (LFHCfS)

Jan Philipp Röer has joined the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). He says:

Hair plays a very important role in my research, specifically the hair cells of the inner ear. I’m interested in what makes a sound attract our attention and the mechanisms we have in place to prevent irrelevant sound from doing so.

Jan Philipp Röer, LFHCfS
Professor of Experimental Psychology
Witten/Herdecke University
Witten, Germany

Jan Philipp Roer & Steven Pinker (both LFHCfS members)

The special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine

The special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine (volume 29, number 6) has just gone out to subscribers. It’s got copious details about the 2023 prize winners and the ceremony. And more. Lotsa stuff that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.

The magazine is in PDF format. You can buy a copy, or buy a subscription.

The Nostril-Hair / Air-Pollution Campaign

The awarding of the 2023 Ig Nobel Medicine prize for research on nostril hairs revives happy memories of a publicity campaign mounted a decade earlier by the organization Clean Air Asia. That campaign introduced itself by saying:

The campaign seeks to highlight, humorously, that urban populations should not adapt to worsening air quality but actually do something about it. The campaign shows a hair sculptor who creates masterpieces from nasal hair illustrating that more hair in noses filters the increasing amount of pollution.

The campaign included this evocative short video:

 

The Prize for Nostril Hair

The 2023 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize was awarded to Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils. (They documented their research in the study “The Quantification and Measurement of Nasal Hairs in a Cadaveric Population,” published in the International Journal of Dermatology.

Nostril Hair at a Public Event

On Saturday, November 11, 2023, prize winners Christine Pham and Natasha Mesinkovska will take part — together with most of the other 2023 Ig Nobel Prize winners — in the Ig Nobel Face-to-Face event at the MIT Museum, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Damage by Screw Working Bodies

Slightly-intriguing study title of the month:

“Damage to Seeds by Screw Working Bodies,” Mayya Sukhanova, Eduard Khasanov, Alexander Butenko, Shamil Fayzrakhmanov, and Rinat Fayzullin, Heliyon, 2023, article e18973. The authors explain:

“The occurrence of mechanical damage to seeds caused by the operative components of agricultural machinery…”

The image you see above is from the study.

Northern vs. southern hair whorls, Sun & Shine, Quantum depression

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

Southern hair whorls — Three northern hemisphere scientists – Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq and Roman Hossein Khonsari in Paris, France – teamed up with a southern hemisphere scientist – Juan José Cortés Santander in Santiago, Chile – for a study they call “New insights on the genetics of hair whorls from twins and the southern hemisphere”. “We obtained unexpected results,” they say. What they found, should it prove accurate, adds a twist to earlier research about how, and maybe why, hair swirls this way or that on a person’s scalp…Come rain or shine — Though produced in a land famous for damp and gloomy weather, the UK-based Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society is not without Sun and Shine. Steve Rothman alerted Feedback to the cheery fact that in 1994, the journal published a paper by two scientists at the University of Reading, UK. The paper is called “Studies of the radiative properties of ice and mixed-phase clouds”. The scientists are called Zhian Sun and Keith P. Shine. It is a classic case of nominative determinism. Feedback notes that eight years later, another Sun and another Shine shed light on a different subject….Quantum thinking — The field of psychology has a basic problem: almost no two psychologists seem to agree on an exact definition of “a thought”. Or an exact definition of love, happiness, sadness, hate or other main concepts – call them “states of mind” – that psychologists study. Because of that, no two psychologists can be confident that when they use the same word, they are both talking about the same thing. That has always made it difficult for psychologists to use maths or physics to analyse, with much precision, almost anything about how people think and feel. The difficulty hasn’t delayed them from trying….Quantum depression — “We believe that our study will serve as a reference for researchers studying similar topics,” say the authors of a physics preprint called “Using quantum computing to find out why students are depressed”. They may be correct.

Ig Nobel Prize Winner Boris Johnson’s Life & Death Influence: New Info

Historians are coming to further appreciate the life-and-death influence of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson — influence that earned Johnson a share of the 2020 Ig Nobel Medical Education Prize.

BBC News reports (on October 31, 2023) some new, pertinent information:

Boris Johnson agreed with some Tory MPs who thought Covid was “nature’s way of dealing with old people”, the inquiry into the pandemic has been told. [This information] comes from diary entries by former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance…. In August 2020, Sir Patrick wrote that Mr Johnson was “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going”.

The 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education was awarded to Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, 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.

NOTE: That was the second Ig Nobel Prize awarded to Alexander Lukashenko. In the year 2013, the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Alexander Lukashenko, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.

The Predatory Behavior of the Ogre-Faced Spider

Happy Halloween. We suggest you recite this paper to any guests who may come seeking thrills:

“The Predatory Behavior of the Ogre-Faced Spider Dinopis longipes F. Cambridge (Araneae: Dinopidae),” Michael H. Robinson and Barbara Robinson, American Midland Naturalist, 1971, pp. 85-96.

 

 

Facts That Are Not Facts: Momofuku Ando’s Triumph on Facts.Net

Some things that are labeled as being facts are not facts. A good example appears on the web site called Facts.net, which says (as you can see in the screen grab displayed here):

Momofuku Ando was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
In recognition of his contributions to world peace through his invention of instant ramen noodles, Momofuku Ando was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, a satirical award that honors unusual achievements that make people laugh and think.

But in fact — real fact — Momofuku Ando was never awarded an Ig Nobel Prize.

If you are interested in facts:

For real facts about Ig Nobel Prize winners, see the official list of all the real Ig Nobel Prize winners , none of whom is named Momufuku Ando.For facts that are not facts, mixed in with some facts that are facts, see the Facts.net web site.

Demonstration: How to make bland food taste salty

Electrified chopsticks, soup bowls, and other eating implements can make bland food taste much saltier — much tastier.  The technology was honored with the 2023 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize. The prize, awarded to Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for their experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

This short video shows Homei Miyashita answering questions from a man who benefitting from the technology as he eats bland ramen:

NOTE: Homei Miyashita will be part of the Ig Nobel Face-to-Face event at MIT on November 11, 2023.

The next video shows Ig Nobel co-winner Hiromi Nakamura giving a TEDx talk about the research:

Interview with the Ig Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the Stanford Toilet

Dr. Seung-min Park was awarded the 2023 Ig Nobel Public Health Prize for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis 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.

Arirang News sat him down for this deep-ranging video interview: