Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 379

Cryptococcus in bagpipes: The great debate

The most famous debate about cryptococcus in bagpipes occurred in 1978 in (some of) the pages of the medical journal The Lancet. The debate began with this report from Australia:

“CRYPTOCOCCUS IN BAGPIPES,” R. Cobcroft, H. Kronenberg, T. Wilkinson,The Lancet, Volume 311, Issue 8078, 24 June 1978, Pages 1368-1369. The authors, at the Royal Prince Albert Hopsital, Sydney, Australia, write:

In February, 1978, while the patient was still in complete remission [from lukaemia], a chest X-ray, done because of a persistent cough, revealed bilateral basal round opacities 5-10 cm in diameter.

Sputum culture grew Cryptococcus neoformans and this was also cultured from the bag of his bagpipes…. The bagpipes’ ancient design differs from that of other musical instruments… [it] acts as a very good fungal culture medium. Fungal spores in the air of the bag reach the player’s mouth because of some back-flow through the mouthpiece valve which occurs at the time of maximum inspiration, probably carrying the spores into the lungs in much the same way as sodium cromoglycate inhaler deposits particles into the bronchial tree.

Whether the patient was infected from the bagpipes or the bagpipes were secondarily infected, can never be known, but since fungal infection of the lungs is a severe life-threatening condition, particularly in immunosuppressed patients, bagpipe playing should be avoided in such patients.

The debate continued, a few weeks later, with this observation from England:

“CRYPTOCOCCUS IN BAGPIPES,” David Stevenson, The Lancet, Volume 312, Issue 8080, 8 July 1978, Pages 104-105. The author, at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, writes:

Dr Cobcroft and others may be overdogmatic in their warning of the dangers of playing the bagpipe. That fungal spores in the bag reach the player’s mouth by back-flow through the mouthpiece valve is a supposition for which they offer no evidence. In any case, valves vary greatly in efficiency. Some pipers use the tip of their tongue instead of a valve, which may virtually eliminate back-flow. Pipers may be classified into “wet” and “dry” blowers….

BONUS: This video shows part of a documentary about how bagpipes are made:

A luxury gift for hawking

Ornithologists are people, too. They enjoy luxury items, especially luxury items advertised in videos stocked with furniture, a hooded hawk, a fashion model, and children’s music.

This video, in which (if you watch it) you can hear children’s music and see a fashion model, a hooded hawk, and furniture, seems to have been made with ornithologists at least distantly in mind:

(Thanks to investigator Vaughn Tan for bringing it to our attention.)

Insatiable Birdies of the Second Kind

A new variant of the famous ‘Drinking Bird’ has been developed at Kent State University, Ohio, US. But first, some background on the the ‘Drinking Bird’ a.k.a. the ‘Insatiable Birdie’ …

A version [* see note below] of the ‘novelty device’ first received a US patent in 1946, inspiring many to endeavour to explain how it works. Here’s a recent examination from professor Manuel Fiolhais and colleagues of the Centre for Computational Physics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. See: J. Güémez; R. Valiente; C. Fiolhais; M. Fiolhais (December 2003). ‘Experiments with the drinking bird’. American Journal of Physics 71 (12):

Shortly afterwards, in 2004, a new variation of the birdie was presented by researchers Nadine Abraham and Peter Palffy-Muhoray of the Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, Ohio.

“Experiments with our prototype indicate that, with an adequate water supply, such a dunking bird is able to do work indefinitely. Our device is slower than dunking birds of the first kind, with a period of hours rather than seconds. It nonetheless demonstrates the possibility of extracting mechanical work from water in an environment where the relative humidity is less than 100% without using a heat engine.”

See: ‘A dunking bird of the second kind’ American Journal of Physics, Feb. 2004.

* Note: It seems that previous embodiments of the Drinking Bird were around at least 20 years before the US patent was granted. Einstein himself having encountered one, it’s said, in Shanghai circa 1920. [source]

EXTRA: A premium giclée reprint birdie cartoon (from The New Yorker, by Michael Shaw) produced on thick (310 gsm), textured watercolor paper made from alpha cellulous [sic] wood pulp that is acid free is available here, $139.

 

The Ig Nobel Cookbook, volume 1

Inspired by the theme — FOOD — of this year’s Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, we have assembled a new book. It’s available now on Amazon.com, and soon in bookstores and other good places. Here, below, is the table of contents:

The Ig® Nobel Cookbook
Volume 1

Corky White, Gus Rancatore, and Marc Abrahams

illustrations by Marian Parry

Delicious and other recipes invented, inherited, devised, and/or improvised by

• winners of the Ig Nobel Prize

• Nobel laureates

• and organizers of the Ig Nobel Ceremony

Contents
Whatzit

Foreword (and Whodunnit) by Marc Abrahams

Introduction by Corky White and Gus Rancatore

Recipes

Igduck, Fried in Butter by Kees Moeliker, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Delicious Cake with Cream from Contented, Named Cows by Catherine Douglas, Ig Nobel Prize winner

A Bladder-Filling Drink by Peter J. Snyder and Paul Maruff, Ig Nobel Prize winners

A Treat to Eat When You Rent Liechtenstein by Karl Schwärzler, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Murphy’s Toast by Robert Matthews, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Elemental (Liquid-Nitrogen) Ice Cream by Theodore Gray, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Baked Beans on Toast by Rich Roberts, 1993 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine

No-Brainer Salmon by Craig Bennett, George L. Wolford II, and Michael Miller, Ig Nobel Prize winners

Romantic, Lovely Torciglione by Donatella Marazziti, Ig Nobel Prize winner

The The The Thé by Glenda Browne, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Emerald Bread by Shinsuke Imai, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Daniel’s Chocolate Chip Cookies by Daniel Rosenberg, Ig Nobel Prize ceremony performer

CANBESMART Curry by Dr. Yoshiro NakaMats, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Cherry Chocolate Chip Cookies for Mandelbrot by Deborah M. Geisler, Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Journalism, Suffolk University, and wife of Ig Nobel Prize ceremony photographer Mike Benveniste, whose cousin, Jacques Benveniste, was awarded two Ig Nobel Prizes

Breakfast for Diamond Makers by Javier Morales, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Green Pea Soup (Creme Ninon) by Johan Pettersson, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Professor Lipscomb’s Tea by Jean Evans, the merry widow of Professor William Lipscomb, 1976 Nobel laureate in chemistry

A Rollercoaster Martini by Ilja van Beest, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Vivian’s Spaghetti Casserole by Martin Chalfie, 2008 Nobel laureate in chemistry

Fartless Herring by Magnus Wahlberg, Ig Nobel Prize winner

Whereszit

Index by Glenda Browne, Ig Nobel Prize winner

The influence of homosexual necrophiliac ducks on popular culture

The influence of Kees Moeliker‘s Ig Nobel Prize-winning study “The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)”spreads and spreads.

This past March saw the premiere, in London, of “The Homosexual Necrophiliac Duck Opera.”

More recently, the world was treated to the video called “Scientifically Accurate Duck Tales“, which is based both on the Moeliker paper and on the theme to the old TV program “Duck Tales“:

 

“Scientifically Accurate Duck Tales” draws heavily, also, on the work of duck genitalia researcher Patricia Brennan.

(Thanks to Io9 for bringing this to our attention.)

Misheard Song Lyrics (computerised)

As enthusiasts of kissthisguy.com  (* see note below) will know, the task of correctly identifying pop music lyrics is not always 100% straightforward. Here’s one to try . . .

Difficulties arise not only for human listeners, but also for computerised speech-recognition systems. In spite of, or perhaps because of its inherent complexity, there are quite a number of academic papers on the subject, some of which can be read in full online. May we recommend. :

• Rhyme, Rhythm, and Rhubarb. Using Probabilistic Methods to Analyze Hip Hop, Poetry, and Misheard Lyrics

• INTERLINGUAL NEAR HOMOPHONIC WORDS AND PHRASES IN L2 LISTENING: EVIDENCE FROM MISHEARD SONG LYRICS

• SOLVING MISHEARD LYRIC SEARCH QUERIES USING A PROBABILISTIC MODEL OF SPEECH SOUNDS

* Note: The name of the website derives from the lyrics of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix

– specifically line 4, “Scuse me, while I kiss the sky” – which Jimi himself occasionally amused himself by mis-singing as “Scuse me, while I kiss this guy”

MOOCs for marmosets, sort of, on branch if not online

Marmosets learn skills from watching instructional videos, at least some marmosets do, provided that someone does show them instructional videos, and further provided that those videos show tasks of interest to the marmosets. Such was the conclusion drawn by humans who did an experiment described by Davide Castelvecci in Nature News:

Marmoset see, marmoset do

Monkeys in the wild learn skills by watching instructional videos.

Marmosets in the wild can learn new behaviours from strangers — monkeys of the same species but who are not part of their social group — as this video shows. Such a feat had so far only been seen in laboratory conditions.

Tina Gunhold, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna, and her collaborators got wild marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) from the Pernambuco region of Brazil to learn how to open a box (and get a reward) from watching videos of other marmosets.

The researchers first trained two captured marmosets to get their treat out of the box in two different ways…

The report includes a video, of which this is one frame:

 

Whither Dickkopf

Investigator Ken Gorelick is much taken with the title of this new study, which has an unusual interplay of German and English meanings:

“High serum levels of Dickkopf-1 are associated with a poor prognosis in prostate cancer patients,” Tilman D Rachner, Stefanie Thiele, Andy Göbel, Andrew Browne, Susanne Fuessel, Kati Erdmann, Manfred P Wirth, Michael Fröhner, Tilman Todenhöfer, Michael H Muders, Matthias Kieslinger, Martina Rauner and Lorenz C Hofbauer, BMC Cancer, 2014, 14:649.

BONUS: Dickkopf-1

A Suggestion that Wearing a Bra Does Not Cause Cancer

Researchers in Seattle are directing your attention to bras. Their new study focuses on an occasionally purported danger of bra-wearing:

“Bra Wearing Not Associated with Breast Cancer Risk: A Population-Based Case–Control Study,” Lu Chen, Kathleen E. Malone, and Christopher I. Li, Cancer, Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, epub September 5, 2014. The authors, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington, report:

Despite the widespread use of bras among U.S. women and concerns in the lay media that bra wearing may increase breast cancer risk, there is a scarcity of credible scientific studies addressing this issue. The goal of the study was to evaluate the relationship between various bra-wearing habits and breast cancer risk among postmenopausal women. We conducted a population-based case–control study… No aspect of bra wearing, including bra cup size, recency, average number of hours/day worn, wearing a bra with an underwire, or age first began regularly wearing a bra, was associated with risks of either IDC [invasive ductal carcinoma] or ILC [invasive lobular carcinoma].

Melissa Healey interviewed lead author Lu Chen, for the Los Angeles Times:

“Given how common bra-wearing is,” said the study’s lead author, epidemiology doctoral student Lu Chen, “we thought this was an important question to address….” The authors were prompted to undertake their study not just by “lay media” concerns, but by a 1991 European study, which reported that among premenopausal women who wore bras, rates of breast cancer were twice as high as those among younger women who did not. That study, concluded the authors, suffered from serious methodological flaws.

If these new findings prove accurate, they further boost the argument for women to wear an emergency bra. The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for public health was awarded to Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander. [The device is patented: U.S. patent # 7255627, granted August 14, 2007, “Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks.”]

This video shows Dr. Bodnar accepting the Ig Nobel Prize, and performing the first public demonstration of how to deploy it:

BONUS: This video shows Dr. Bodnar, who was born and raised in Ukraine [as a young physician there, she treated victims of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown, an experience that later led her to invent the emergency bra], translating the poetry of English-speaking Scotsman William Topaz McGonagall into Ukranian, assisted by Terry Jones, a Monty Python:

Insights, scientific and dashcam, into road rage

Road rage, as the world boasts ever more automobiles but not as many more roads, is a puzzlement.

The video above, recorded by the dashcam of a Russian driver, demonstrates one of the surprising ways road rage can manifest. Watching, you might be tempted to say that it demonstrates man’s animal nature. (Thank you to Adam K. Olson for bringing it to my attention.)

Researchers here and there have been trying to get a better feel for who’s prone to bouts of road rage, and who is not….

So begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.