Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 55

H-Less Gherkin: “Parsing Sage and Rosemary in Time”

One would do well to know that Gerkin is not a gherkin, if and when one reads the study “Parsing Sage and Rosemary in Time: The Machine Learning Race to Crack Olfactory Perception,” by Richard C. Gerkin, Chemical Senses, volume 46, 2021, bjab020.

(Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.)

About the Title

The paper title chosen by Gerkin (who, let there be no doubt about it, is not a gherkin) alludes to this song, which is familiar to generations of older people:

A Pickle

It must not go without mentioning that Gerkin, who has had to go through life with strangers almost immediately making old, too-familiar remarks about pickles, has published at least one paper that specifically mentions a pickle. See table 2 of Gerkin’s 2017 paper “Improved diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease from a detailed olfactory phenotype.”

British Surnames and Health Outcomes

What’s in a surname, if one wants to see portents about the medical fates of persons who have those surnames? This study aims to answer that question, focusing on :

“British Surname Origins, Population Structure and Health Outcomes—An Observational Study of Hospital Admissions,” Jakob Petersen, Jens Kandt, and Paul A. Longley, Scientific Reports, vol. 12, no. 2156, 2022. (Thanks to Tony Tweedale for bringing this to our attention.) The authors report:

We coded hospital admissions of over 30 million patients in England between 1999 and 2013 to their British surname origin and divided their diagnoses into 125 major disease categories… with ubiquitous English surnames such as “” as reference… The results were scanned for “signals”, where a branch of related surname origins all had significantly higher or lower risk. Age- and sex-standardised admission was calculated for each signal across area deprivation and surname origin density quintiles. Signals included three branches of English surnames (disorders of teeth and jaw, fractures, upper gastrointestinal disorders).

Podcast Episode #1092: “The Bacteria in Discarded, Chewed Chewing Gum”

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.

In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. We released these lectures one at a time.

In Podcast Episode #1092, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for Ecology winners Leila Satari, Alba Guillén, Àngela Vidal-Verdú, and Manuel Porcar. They received the prize for using genetic analysis to identify the different species of bacteria that reside in wads of discarded chewing gum stuck on pavements in various countries.

REFERENCE: “The Wasted Chewing Gum Bacteriome,” Leila Satari, Alba Guillén, Àngela Vidal-Verdú, and Manuel Porcar, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. 16846, 2020.

The video for this lecture—graphs, charts and all—can be found online at www.IMPROBABLE.com.

Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Podcasts, AntennaPod, BeyondPod and elsewhere!

Prize-winning Duck Biologist Quacks at Rotterdam Ban on Feeding Bread to Ducks

The city of Rotterdam plans to prohibit people from feeding bread to ducks. The news organization NRC reports, on April 7, 2022, about the pushback on that, especially from the city’s most eminent duck biologist. Here is a machine translation (into English) of that report:

Doubts in Rotterdam about the usefulness of the ban on feeding city birds.

FEEDING BAN: A ban on feeding city birds in Rotterdam should prevent the animals from getting sick. Among the ducks near a canal, biologist Kees Moeliker is critical of the measure.

As soon as Kees Moeliker catches sight of ducks, he takes black, folding binoculars from his bag. Through the lens he studies the group sitting further down in the grass along the Rotterdam Westersingel. “They are mallards,” Moeliker says. He is a biologist and director of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam. “I’m glad we found them so quickly, because the mallard is in bad shape. The numbers are declining, by as much as 30 to 40 percent. Duck lovers are very concerned.”

From his shoulder bag, Moeliker, who became world famous as the duck man through his study of homosexual necrophilia among drakes, takes a bag with leftover bread. A corn sandwich is cut into neat cubes. “I got this off the breadboard this morning. Shall we see if we can tempt the ducks for a quick bite?”

He throws a handful of pieces of bread into the water. A flying seagull discovers the loot first, but continues to circle above it without fishing the bread out of the water. As a result, the ducks’ attention is quickly aroused: two drakes – drakes – rise from the grass and swim towards the leftover bread.

 “With small pieces of bread you can feed in a targeted manner,” says Moeliker as he squats down by the water’s edge. After a few bites, the ducks climb ashore and snatch the bread from his hand. “This is the fun of feeding ducks, the direct contact with the animals. And there is much more bird life to discover.”

Ban from 1 July

Whoever wants to feed bread to the ducks must hurry. From 1 July, the municipality of Rotterdam wants to ban the feeding of urban animals, following a motion by the Party for the Animals (PvdD). The decision still has to be approved by the city council in June, but that will probably not be a problem.

The feed ban is intended to prevent city birds from becoming ill or dying earlier due to bread and other food residues, the municipality writes in the statement.press release . The measure also prevents nuisance from pests that come to the food leftovers – in 2020 there were four thousand reports of rat nuisance. “Because these problems affect the entire city, the municipality has opted for a city-wide feed ban,” says a spokesperson for Stadsbeheer.

Moeliker shows himself critically among the ducks along the Westersingel. “The municipality uses the argument that bread is unhealthy for ducks. That is partly true: bread contains salt and is an unnatural food. If ducks only eat bread, it’s bad for them. Combined with other foods – the insects and aquatic plants they normally eat – it’s not much of a problem. That’s how ducks live in the big city.”

The just-fed ducks set a good example. After a few bites of bread they switched to the duckweed that floats along the bank. Then they dive back into the water and start ‘gobying’ just before the bank: head in the ditch, butt just above the water’s surface and kicking with the orange legs.

“This is how ducks get their food from the water,” says Moeliker. “Because of the treading water and rooting with the beak, the bottom clouds up and all kinds of things – water snails, crustaceans, seeds – come up to eat. So you see that after the sandwich they switch back to other food. Ducks take care of their own disc of five.”

No scientific evidence
Moeliker is not worried about duck deaths from bread: “I have not seen any scientific evidence for that. The current decline in the mallard population is not due to food, but to high chick mortality.” Ruud van der Velden, leader of the Rotterdam PvdD, cannot provide scientific evidence when asked, but does not agree with Moeliker. “We do see deaths from eating too much or unhealthy food. We are drawn to this by residents, for example in the Bloemhof district. The Bird Protection also says that bread is bad for ducks.”

Rotterdam is not the first city to introduce a ban. As early as 2016, the De Dommel Water Board banned feeding ducks in a pond in Vught in Brabant, after whole loaves of bread were thrown into the water a few times. This was followed by Amsterdam, The Hague, Leiden and Utrecht. The amount of the fine varies between 70 and 140 euros. According to Stadsbeheer, the fine in Rotterdam will be 100 euros.

“Sin,” says Moeliker. “The feed ban of the municipality of Rotterdam is actually a ban on dumping food leftovers.”

He walks to a pile of white rice further up in the grass, right next to a large black rat trap. Four ducks, an Egyptian goose with a crippled left leg and a city pigeon take turns pecking at it. “This inverted pan of rice, you have to provide information about it. That is not good for the birds and attracts vermin. But feeding sliced ​​pieces of bread is quite different from overturning a supper.”

Van der Velden does not want to distinguish between feeding children and people who dump leftover food. “All feeding is bad for the animals.” The municipality does not intend to make any exceptions. “A ban is a ban,” says Stadsbeheer.

According to Moeliker, the municipality ignores the educational function. “Feeding ducks is an accessible way in which city children come into contact with nature. You can count ducks and other birds, discuss their behavior and view the different species. It’s basically biology class in the middle of the city – thanks to a crust of bread. We shouldn’t ban that.”

The Duck Guy

There is a sentiment expressed in the Christian bible: “Man does not live by bread alone.” Moeliker is pointing out that neither do ducks.

Kees Moeliker is, as the NRC article mentions, director of the city’s natural history museum. In 2003 he was awarded the Ig Nobel Biology Prize, for publishing the first scientifically reported case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.

The Rightness of Americans

Rightness is big in America, suggests this study done two decades ago:

“Right-Handers and Americans Favor Turning to the Right,” Angelique A. Scharine and Michael K. McBeath, Human Factors, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2002, pp. 248-56.  The authors, at Arizona State University, report:

“We tested a finding by E. S. Robinson (1933) that people have a bias to turn right upon entering a building. We hypothesized that this bias is attributable to learning derived from traffic rules that specify driving on the right side of the road and that it also could be related to handedness. We tested participants in both the United States and England in a simple “T-maze” task in order to compare their directional preference. Handedness was the best predictor of participants’ directional preference. However, U.S. participants also were statistically more likely to turn right than were English participants. The preference to turn right was not found to be significantly related to eye dominance or reading direction of the primary written language of the participant, although in the case of reading direction, the sample size of right-to-left readers was too small to be conclusive.”

 

 

 

Acoustically Goosing a Moose

Moose news in a master’s thesis:

“Evaluating the Behavioural Response of Moose (Alces alces) to Acoustic Stimuli,” Denice Lodnert, master’s thesis in biology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 2021. (Thanks to Sven Swahn for bringing this to our attention.) The author reports:

“In this study, I investigated how wild moose (Alces alces) that visited saltlick-stones in the forest responded to different acoustic stimuli: dog barking, human voice and bird calls (owl at night and woodpecker at daytime), compared to when moose are undisturbed by acoustic stimuli….”

“When exposed to any of the three acoustic stimuli, moose took significantly longer to return to a site compared to when they were undisturbed. Longest time to return was after human stimuli. These results suggest that acoustic stimuli may be used in management situations where the aim is to evoke a quick flight response. Acoustic signals may hence serve as a potential measure to prevent ungulate-vehicle collisions.”

Additional details can be skimmed in a August 5, 2020 news report in Öp. 

A Face that Is Begging to Be Slapped

Words can be used to describe things. A study published in 2019 presents a striking example:

“Transformative resources of the terminological internationalization (on the material of German and English),” Vladimir V. Elkin [pictured here], Elena N. Melnikova, and Anna M. Klyoster, in The International Conference Going Global through Social Sciences and Humanities, Springer, Cham, 2019. pp. 343-356. The authors, at Pyatigorsk State University and Omsk State Technical University, Russia, explain:

“Here are some examples of German compound words belonging to the thematic group Expression of Thoughts, Feelings and Emotions and already, though not quite extensively, used in English context: Abgrundanziehung (The pull of the cliff edge.), Allgemeinbildung (everything that any adult capable of living independently can reasonably be expected to know), Backpfeifengesicht (A face that is begging to be slapped.)”

Modeling What Happens to Frozen Rotating Lasagna

Things take a turn in this roundabout technical study of lasagna:

“Multiphysics modeling of microwave heating of a frozen heterogeneous meal rotating on a turntable,” Krishnamoorthy Pitchai, Jiajia Chen, Sohan Birla, David Jones, Ric Gonzalez, and Jeyamkondan Subbiah, Journal of Food Science, vol. 80, no. 12, 2015, pp. E2803-E2814. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of Nebraska and at ConAgra Foods, report:

“A 3-dimensional (3-D) multiphysics model was developed to understand the microwave heating process of a real heterogeneous food, multilayered frozen lasagna.”

Which Saint to Pray for Fighting Against COVID-19? [research study]

“Which Saint to Pray for Fighting Against a Covid infection? A Short Survey” [by A. Perciaccante, A. Corallic, and P. Charlier, Medicine and Public Health, vol. 18, September 2021, 100674] is one of the studies featured in “Viruses Research Review: Group Sex, Singer, Saint, Count“, which is a featured article in the special Viruses and Pandemics issue of the magazine—Annals of Improbable Research.

Podcast Episode #1091: “Hula Hoop Syndrome”

In Podcast Episode #1091, Marc Abrahams shows an unfamiliar research study to psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason. Dramatic readings and reactions ensue.

Remember, our Patreon donors, on most levels, get access to each podcast episode before it is made public.

Jean Berko Gleason encounters:

“Hula-Hoop Syndrome,” Zafar H. Zaidi, Canadian Medical Association Journal, vol. 80, no. 9, May 1, 1959, pp. 715-716. 

Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Podcasts, AntennaPod, BeyondPod and elsewhere!