Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 413

Hydraulic invention: No need to clamber for theater seating

Next time someone disrupts your evening by clambering in or out of a nearby theatre seat, remember: it needn’t be this way.

In 1924, Louis J Duprey of Dorchester, Massachusetts, patented a system that “permits any patron of the theatre to enter or leave his place without at all disturbing other patrons”. You, the patron, entered vertically, though a trap door, already ensconced on a chair. When you wanted to leave, a discreet twist of a knob activated the machinery in reverse, causing the chair, and you, to quietly sink back down, and out.…

—So begins this month’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

Elvis Mouse Not Dead (never alive)

Rumours that Elvis’s DNA lives-on in a race of genetically engineered mice have been greatly exaggerated. Back in 2012 there were a flurry of mainstream (and sidestream) news items covering Koby Barhad’s project ‘All that I am‘.

[Please note that some links below, from Archive.org are slow to load, but given time, they should]

At the time, it was implied (by some) that Mr. Barhad had created Elvis Mice – by genetically incorporating DNA extracted from Elvis’s hair. For the avoidance of doubt, an archived page from Koby Barhad’s website at KN Studio, Israel, clarified matters once and for all :

Important Notice:

The project is being published in various news blogs and deferent [sic] articles as if the mice where actually produced.

Just to make things clear:

The project is a suggestion for a possible scenario.

Except of buying the hair of Elvis Presley and testing the ability to sequence any human hair (not using the original), the project is completely speculative.

BONUS : Another project from Koby (Yaacov) Barhad, in association with Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, which performed a series of experiments which had the attribution point : “How do I know what I think, until I see what I say?”

 

You Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

A single question can arise in different contexts, and have different answers. Here’s an example — a study and a book both written in the late 1960′s:

“The influence of vocal behavior on the performer’s testicular activity in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus),” Barbara F. Brockway, The Wilson Bulletin (1967): 328-334.

and

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou, 1969.

Finger-Lengths Pointing at Academic Performance, They Say

A further advance in the campaign to find meaning and importance in a person’s relative finger lengths:

“2D:4D Asymmetry and Gender Differences in Academic Performance,” John V.C. Nye, Gregory Androuschak, Desirée Desierto [pictured here], Garett Jones, Maria Yudkevich, PLoS One. 2012;7(10):e46319

“We provide the first evidence of a non-linear, quadratic, relationship between 2D:4D [the relative length of the second to fourth finger lengths] and academic achievement using samples from Moscow and Manila. We also find that there is a gender differentiated link between various measures of academic achievement and measured digit ratios. These effects are different depending on the field of study, choice of achievement measure, and use of the right hand or left digit ratios. The results seem to be asymmetric between Moscow and Manila where the right (left) hand generates inverted-U (U-shaped) curves in Moscow while the pattern for hands reverses in Manila. Drawing from unusually large and detailed samples of university students in two countries not studied in the digit literature, our work is the first to have a large cross country comparison that includes two groups with very different ethnic compositions.”

Detail from the study:

BONUS: One man’s view of his relative finger lengths:

 

Comparative death counts: Marijuana vs. water

There’s news about the literally grave danger that a feared drug might pose for someone somewhere some day. Details are in a new study. The study describes two persons who died from no obvious cause, and who—the doctors conclude — therefore must have died from the unknown amounts of marijuana that they are likely to have consumed at some point in the minutes, hours or days prior to their death:

“Sudden unexpected death under acute influence of cannabis,” Benno Hartung, Silke Kauferstein, Stefanie Ritz-Timme [pictured here], Thomas Daldrup, Forensic Science International, vol. 237, April 2014, pp. e11-e13.

“We describe the cases of two young men who died unexpectedly under the acute influence of cannabinoids. To our knowledge, these are the first cases of fatal cannabis smoking where full postmortem investigations were carried out…. After exclusion of other causes of death we assume that the young men experienced fatal cardiovascular complications evoked by smoking cannabis….The absolute risk of cannabis-related cardiovascular effects can be considered to be low…. Nevertheless, it is impossible to predict….”

The marijuana danger is comparable, in some ways, to the danger-of-death posed by another feared drug. This study describes four persons who died after ingesting extremely large amounts of water in a very short time:

“Forensic aspects of water intoxication: four case reports and review of relevant literature,” Nemanja Radojevic, Bojana Bjelogrlic, Vuk Aleksic, Nemanja Rancic, Mira Samardzic, Stojan Petkovic, Slobodan Savic, Forensic Science International, vol. 220, nos. 1-3, July 2012, pp. 1-5.

“Water intoxication (WI) is a rare condition that originates from over-consumption of water, with a potentially fatal outcome. Increased water intake (polydipsia) is followed by urination of high amount of diluted urine (polyuria) which are the main initial symptoms of WI. We present four case reports of WI.”

BONUS: A New Scientist report about the marijuana report: “Cannabis can kill without the influence of other drugs“. Also, a Daily Mail report.

BONUS (possibly related):

“Acute water intoxication during military urine drug screening,” M.A. Tilley, C.L. Conant, Military Medicine, vol. 176, no. 4, April 2011, pp. 451-3.

“Random mandatory urine drug screening is a routine practice in the military. The pressure to produce a urine specimen creates a temptation to consume large volumes of water, putting those individuals at risk of acute water intoxication. This occurs when the amount of water consumed exceeds the kidney’s ability to excrete it, resulting in hyponatremia owing to excess amount of water compared to serum solutes. The acute drop in serum osmolality leads to cerebral edema, causing headaches, confusion, seizures, and death. There has been increasing awareness of the danger of overhydration among performance athletes, but dangers in other groups can be underappreciated. We present the case of a 37-year-old male Air Force officer who developed acute water intoxication during urine drug screening. Our case demonstrates the need for a clear Air Force policy for mandatory drug testing to minimize the risk of developing this potentially fatal condition.”

 

‘A Video Lesson on the Price of Movie Popcorn’

Richard B. McKenzie is the Walter B. Gerken Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society at The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. Here he is presenting ‘A Video Lesson on the Price of Movie Popcorn’

Also see: ‘Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies’ by Richard B. McKenzie and Gordon Tullock,  The New World of Economics, 2012, Part 4, Chapter 14, pp. 219-234,

“ […] because theaters cannot be owned by movie producers and distributors (because of a series of court orders that date to the late 1940s), theaters have an incentive to hold down (relatively speaking) all ticket prices in order to increase the demand for popcorn (and other concessions), thus allowing theaters to hike their prices on popcorn and other concessions and their profits.”

 NOTE: Paul Merage co-invented the Hot Pocket microwaveable turnover.

How much does the Air Force annoy livestock?

After years of defending legal claims from farmers and others who believed their animals had been adversely affected by sonic booms and other aircraft noises, the United States Air Force sought to find out whether the scientific evidence might be starting to go against them. Bioacoustic experts at the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, though their expertise was mostly in aquatic settings, were commissioned to review all available studies on the effect of aircraft noise on domestic animals.

This required an exhaustive analysis of papers with titles like “Effect of Simulated Airplane Sounds on the Reproductive Functions of the Male Domestic Chicken”, and “Electrophysiological Correlates of Behavioral Temporary Threshold Shifts in Chinchilla”. The authors incorporated the data from the original studies, got unpublished information from veterinarians and Brooks Air Force Base’s Occupational and Environmental Health Laboratory, and constructed a model of the situations under which animal husbandry is most likely to suffer from low-flying aircraft.

The results were published as “The Effects of Aircraft Noise and Sonic Booms on Domestic Animals – A Preliminary Model and a Synthesis of the Literature and Claims” (1990), an official 200-page report from the USAF Research Laboratory credited to Ann E. Bowles, Pamela K. Yochem, and F. T. Awbrey. From the introduction:

 Studies have focused on the effects of sonic booms and aircraft noise on domestic animals since the late 1950s (Cottereau, 1972). Originally, these studies were motivated both by public concerns about what was at that time a relatively novel technology, supersonic flight (see, for example, Shurcliff, 1970), and by claims leveled against the U.S. Air Force (USAF) for damage done to farm animals by very low-level subsonic overflights. Since that time over 40 studies of aircraft noise and sonic booms, both in the U.S. and overseas, have addressed acute effects, including effects of startle responses (sheep, horses, cattle, fowl) and effects on reproduction and growth (sheep, cattle, fowl, swine), parental behaviors (fowl, mink), milk letdown (dairy cattle, dairy goats, swine) and egg production. Several reviews of earlier work have been published (e.g., Dufour, 1980; Bell, 1972) but these do not include a number of significant foreign studies, including recent, detailed work by the veterinary school in Hannover, nor do they attempt to develop a theory for how noise affects domestic animals.

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“Crazy little thing called science”

Jutland Station published a photo/video essay called “Crazy little thing about science“, about the recent Ig Nobel show at the University of Aarhus.

BONUS: Lab Times published an essay about the Ig Nobel show at the University of Copenhagen.

Where am I (exactly)? In search of the “egocentre”

If you have a GPS-enabled cellphone, it might be able to tell you (and some other interested parties) where you are, down to a metre or so. But for more accurate estimations of exactly where ‘you’ are – in the perceptual consciousness sense – there’s a new research project which may help. It was undertaken by Dr. Adrian John Tetteh Alsmith (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen) and Dr. Matthew R. Longo (The Body Representation Laboratory, Birkbeck, University of London). Their experimental study asked ten participants to attempt to locate their ‘Egocentre’ using a specially designed rig. Here is Dr.Alsmith trying to pinpoint himself :

The study : ‘Where exactly am I? Self-location judgements distribute between head and torso’ (in : Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 24, February 2014, Pages 70–74) found that :

“Participants most frequently chose to point to one of two likely regions, the upper face or the upper torso, according to which they reached first. These results suggest that while the experienced self is not spread out homogeneously across the entire body, nor is it localised in any single point. Rather, two distinct regions, the upper face and upper torso, appear to be judged as where ‘I’ am.”

The paper may be found in full here:

Note: Based on the famous Five Ws, the study prompts Improbable in the direction of four other highly perplexing (as yet possibly unresolved) questions

• Who am I?

• What am I?

• When am I?

• Why am I?

Also don’t miss : Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 13, No. 4, July/Aug 2007. The ‘Where in Your Head’ issue.

Banana Equivalent Dose (BED)

Michael Blastland writes, for the BBC:

How much easier if our exposure to the hazards of radiation could all be reduced to . Actually, it can, sort of. Welcome to the Banana Equivalent Dose or BED.

Bananas are a natural source of radioactive isotopes. True, there’s not much in one banana. But enough, according to Nuclear Threat Initiative- a security-minded think tank – for a few bananas to trigger radiation sensors used at US ports to detect smuggled nuclear material.

The standard measure of the biological effect of radiation is the sievert. One sievert is a heck of a big dose, but one tenth of a millionth of a sievert, or 0.1 micro sieverts, is roughly the dose from eating one banana.

So we can use one banana as our basic unit and convert other radiation exposures to so many bananas….