Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 33

The 2023 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony: Countdown, and where to watch!

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The 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will happen entirely online on Thursday, September 14, 2023.

The webcast begins at 6 pm (U.S. eastern time) and will be available for viewing on the ceremony page.

Ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners will be introduced. Each has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.

Nit-picking Robinson Crusoe; Wrong cocktail; Baby radar; Much-lettered

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

Nit-picking literature — Little things bother some people. Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace wonders why little things failed to bother Robinson Crusoe, the hero of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, who spent 28 years documenting his plight as a castaway on a tropical island. “[W]here are the mosquitos, the wasps, the worms, or the pests that should be ravaging Crusoe’s island?” asks Wallace…Wrong cocktail — When is a cockatiel a cocktail? When it is a typographical error. This particular error – Feedback trusts it is an error – occurs in a study called “Avian gastric yeast (macrorhabdosis) in cockatiel, budgerigar and grey parrot: a focus on the clinical signs, molecular detection and phylogenetic evaluation” published in the Iranian journal Veterinary Research Forum….Baby radar — Adults who know that radar tracks aeroplanes and missiles might be delighted to learn that sometimes radar is used to track babies. Human infants.Zheng Peng and his colleagues at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands took a look at the newest techno-methods…Generously lettered — Astronomers are known as a generous bunch. Astronomer Virginia Trimble was moved by the implied plight of the unnamed person, mentioned in Feedback on 15 July, who is known to list these credentials with his signature: BSc (Honors), MASc, PhD, MTMS, MGDMB, MCIM, MSME, MAIST, MISIJ, MSigmaXi, MIFAC, MACS, MASM, MMRS, MACerS, MECS. Trimble writes: “He is missing (at least) one distinction…

How a Leak Can Stop Itself

Willfully or not, some leaks can under certain circumstances stop themselves. This study explores that notion:

“How a Leak Can Stop Itself,” Caroline D. Tally, Heather E. Kurtz, Rose B. Tchuenkam, and Katharine E. Jensen, arXiv:2202.02644, 2023. The authors explain:

We often consider how to stop a leak, but here we ask a different question: how might a leak stop itself? We experimentally study leaking flow transitions from continuous drainage to spontaneous arrest. High-speed imaging reveals that fluid breakup events generate droplets whose Laplace pressures oppose the leak. Early droplets grow unstably, but a final droplet equilibrates to a stable spherical cap via lightly damped harmonic oscillations. A total energetic theory shows that inertia plays a key role in the leak-stop mechanism.

 

Texting & falling, Many-Lettered, Autophagy for all, Jarring, Pleasing

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

Down, with texting — Want to guess what might happen if someone walks while texting? If you prefer a formally educated guess to an autodidactic supposition, Paulo Pelicioni and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales, Australia, can supply it…. They tell the story by implication – note their efficiency in choosing the word “impact” – in the title of their study: “Impact of mobile phone use on accidental falls risk in young adult pedestrians.” …Man of more letters — The lengthy list of 16 academic abbreviations attached to a person’s name, as noted by Feedback last month (15 July), failed to impress Ian Glendon. He says: “Your correspondent’s piffling 16 post nominals falls short of those in correspondence I had with an erstwhile colleague at the end of 2022 – who may have added more since – but who had these 22 at that time…Autophagy for all — Some guidelines are brief, others a lot less so. A research journal article called “Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)” is less so. The article is 382 pages long. It includes a reference list that has 4068 items. It also has approximately 2930 co-authors. (Feedback counted them, but isn’t confident in the accuracy of that count….A jarring superpower — Ken Bradley adds a numberific trivial superpower to Feedback’s ever-expanding catalogue. He says:”Two years ago, our 9-year-old grandson J., at his school in Australia, won no less than four competitions for the best estimate of the number of sweets (or, in one case, pencils) in a large jar. This month, now aged 11 and at school in England, he again won a prize, at a summer fete, by estimating that there were 584 sweets in a jar….Pleasing everyone — “You can’t please everyone,” says a report (“Remove, reduce, inform: What actions do people want social media platforms to take on potentially misleading content?“) by Shubham Atreja, Libby Hemphill and Paul Resnick at the University of Michigan School of Information. Their conclusion echoes many conclusions, from many times, about many subjects. The lament always reduces to those same four words: “You can’t please everyone.” Is the statement true? …

If You Soak Your Dentures in Coffee…

This experiment perhaps applies most to people who soak their teeth (dentures, or in-jaw teeth that include artificial elements) in coffee:

“Does hot coffee or cold coffee cause more discoloration on resin based composite materials?” Bilge Ersoz, Elif Aybala Oktay, and Numan Aydin, Serpil Karaoglanoglu, European Oral Research, vol. 57, no. 2, 2023, pp.103-107. The authors report:

A total of 48 cylindrical samples, 24 of which were prepared from 2 composite materials… The samples were divided into 3 subgroups as distilled water, hot coffee and cold coffee. During the 7th and 30th days, the samples were immersed in the solutions for 15 min every day. Color measurements were repeated on the 7th and 30th days….

Conclusion: Hot drinks had a more coloring effect…

 

Japan’s Ig Nobel Prize Winners, Celebrated

Nippon.com is running an ongoing series of profiles of Ig Nobel Prize winners. They say:

‘The Ig Nobel Prize recognizes scientific research that “makes people laugh and then makes them think.” Japanese researchers have consistently been among its recipients since 2007, including a Bandai employee who won the illustrious prize for developing the Tamagotchi and the president of Takara (now Takara Tomy) for inventing the BowLingual dog bark translator. In this series, we look at some of the 28 Japanese Ig Nobel winners to highlight the spirited approach they bring to scientific exploration.’

Al’s AI ailment, Tooth charcoal, Orthodontist and Éclairs, Lambe to slaughter

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

Al’s AI ailment — AI spells trouble for all the Alanas, Alannas, Alannahs, Alainnas, Alans, Alains, Allans, Allens, Alens, Alins, Aluns and other persons whose names begin with the letter pair “A then L” or the pair “A then I”. The eye-ell typography equivalence problem ails them all. Alan (Al) McWilliam tells Feedback about his personal distress from reading about artificial intelligence: “I would like to draw your attention to a concerning issue where, in the majority of typefaces, the abbreviation for artificial intelligence (AI) looks alarmingly like the shortened version of my (and many others’) name, Al. Imagine my trepidation opening the 29 July issue [of New Scientist] with the title ‘Living with Al’! The issue includes ‘What Al can do to make your life easier’, ‘Why Al is about to transform the economy’ and ‘The biggest scientific challenges that Al is already tackling‘. Finally, the most concerning: ‘Can Al ever become conscious?‘” ….Pulling teeth — If you first take 33 teeth – each removed from its original home inside some human mouth – then stain every one with coffee, then, finally, on each tooth apply either a “charcoal-based tooth whitening dentifrice” or a “non-charcoal-based whitening dentifrice” to try to remove the coffee stains, you will discover something. Aldridge Fernandes and Rupali Agnihotri, both at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India, did those things. They discovered, they say, that “a charcoal-based tooth-whitener does not make a tooth appreciably whiter than a non-charcoal-based tooth-whitener”….Sweet treat — A piece of i-candy – intellectual candy – is the first thing you will see when you read a paper called “Corrosion resistance of orthodontic wire made of Gold 18K alloy in artificial saliva in the presence of éclairs milky candy“. Written by a team in India and Serbia, it appears in the International Journal of Corrosion and Scale Inhibition….Lambe to slaughter — Nominative determinism sometimes leads to poignant explorations. Pam Ross alerted Feedback to the existence of Nicola Lambe, who does research on sheep breeding. Lambe’s latest publication explores a potential future happy phase of life for lambs: motherhood. But the report’s title also obliquely mentions a grim alternative fate: dinner. Lambe’s study is called “Genetic associations of ewe body condition score and lamb rearing performance in extensively managed meat sheep“….

Coca-Cola in a Cat

This month’s selected study about Coca-Cola in a cat is:

“Endoscopic administration of Coca-Cola for medical management of a wedged intestinal trichobezoar in a cat,” Savanah Wilson, Devin Dobbins, Lukas Kawalilak, and Joseph C Parambeth, The Canadian Veterinary Journal, vol. 64, no. 8, 2023, pp. 747-752.

 

Suspicious eyes, Dad’s superpower, Poo proofs, Apple-a-day

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

Suspicious eyes — In the year 2001, US president George W. Bush foreshadowed a hope that decades later would pervade the robotics industry. Bush stood next to Russian president Vladimir Putin at a press conference in Slovenia and said of him: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy… I was able to get a sense of his soul.” In the period since then, roboticists have theorised that putting eyes (or at least things that look like eyes) on robots would induce people to trust those robots. Trust them more, that is, than they would trust an eyeless counterpart. Now, Artur Pilacinski and his team of robot researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and the University of Coimbra, Portugal, have tested the eyes/trust assumption….Whom Dad saw— Tom Marinov adds spousal-history detection and discernment to Feedback’s growing record of trivial superpowers….Poo-pooping proofs —The year 2023 has already produced three, maybe four scientific papers that – by existing – pooh-pooh the notion that all scientists are prudish. The journal Molecular Ecology Resources gives us: “The proof is in the poo: Non-invasive method to detect endoparasitic infection.” Researchers in Illinois present their report…Apple appeal— Does an apple a day keep diseases away? There had never been a clear answer agreeable to the whole medical profession. Now, maybe there is….

A Dr. Seussian Medical Journal Article Title

Sixty years ago, the title of this medical article (the article was published this year, 2023) might have made it seem a companion piece to the children’s book The Cat in the Hat, by Dr. Seuss:

“Evaluation of a Smartphone-Based Colorimetric Method for Urinalysis Dipstick Readings in Cats,” Vincent Leynaud, Candice Gillet, Rachel Lavoué, Didier Concordet, and Brice S. Reynolds, Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, vol. 25, no. 5, May 2023.