Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 87

A vivid new telling of the herring farts / Soviet sub history

The story of how the sound of herring expelling gas through their rear ends became mistakenly taken, by Swedish government officials, as evidence of invading Soviet submarines, gets a new, beautifully stylish telling a new episode of the RadioLab podcast:

Red Herring

It was the early 80s, the height of the Cold War, when something strange began happening off the coast of Sweden. The navy reported a mysterious sound deep below the surface of the ocean. Again, and again, and again they would hear it near their secret military bases, in their harbors, and up and down the Swedish coastline.

After thorough analysis the navy was certain. The sound was an invasion into their waters, an act of war, the opening salvos of a possible nuclear annihilation.

Or was it? …

Magnus Wahlberg and Håkan Westerberg, the scientists who discovered that the supposed submarines were in fact herring were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize, together with a group of scientists in Scotland and Canada who had independently been researching the ways of herring. The prize centered on the biology of the discovery.

The submarines aspect of the story was top secret at that time, and only years later was revealed to the public. The first public presentation of the submarine facts happened at an Ig Nobel event at the Karolinska Institute in March 2012, with Magnus Wahlberg and Håkan Westerberg, aided by a dead herring, demonstrating the biological mechanism that produces the sound.

That Ig Nobel Prize

The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize for biology was awarded to Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the , Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden’s National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.

Here are the research studies produced by the two groups, cited when the prize was awarded:

“Sounds Produced by Herring (Clupea harengus) Bubble Release,” Magnus Wahlberg and Håkan Westerberg, Aquatic Living Resources, vol. 16, 2003, pp. 271-5.

REFERENCE: “Pacific and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds,” Ben Wilson, Robert S. Batty and Lawrence M. Dill, Biology Letters, vol. 271, 2003, pp. S95-S97.

Magnus Wahlberg has since done several other public talks about the incident. Here’s a TEDX talk he gave in 2012:

 

 

 

 

The Reason You Will Spill Coffee, No Matter How Careful You Are

When a person walks while carrying a full cup (with no lid) of coffee, it is almost inevitable that some coffee will spill. Two Ig Nobel Prizes have honored research that analyzed why. Small Expedition Room produced this video news report [in Korean] about the phenomenon:

Those Two Coffee-Spill Ig Nobel Prizes

The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for fluid dynamics was awarded to Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

They describe that research, in the study “Walking With Coffee: Why Does It Spill?” Hans C. Mayer and Rouslan Krechetnikov, Physical Review E, vol. 85, 2012.

The 2017 Ig Nobel Prize for fluid dynamics was awarded to Jiwon (Jesse) Han, for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee.

He describes that research, in the study “A Study on the Coffee Spilling Phenomena in the Low Impulse Regime,” Jiwon Han, Achievements in the Life Sciences, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 87-101.

Surgical Robotics via Internet: What could go wrong?

That’s the title of a talk being given tomorrow by Blake Hannaford (pictured here). Here’s some detail:

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
PAUL G. ALLEN SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING RESEARCH SEMINAR

SPEAKER:   Blake Hannaford, University of Washington
TITLE:     Surgical Robotics via Internet: What could go wrong?

DATE:      Thursday, February 18, 2021
TIME:      11:30 am
HOST:      Shyam Gollakota

ABSTRACT:
The vision of a remotely operated surgical robot is surprisingly old. The first remotely operated surgery on a human was performed by Dr. Jacques Marescaux between New York and Paris in 2001 via a hardened ISDN connection. Internet-based approaches must confront the realities and stochastic guarantees of the modern internet (I’m looking at you Zoom calls.) Although bandwidth and latency of the internet are now sufficient for remote surgery, guaranteeing a safe outcome for the patient requires robust automation added to teleoperation which can guarantee the robot and patient go into a contextually dependent safe state upon loss or degradation of the connection. Most of the cybersecurity issues are similar to other high stakes domains like banking, but there are a few that are especially important to consider for surgery.

Shake Hands with Danger: A Peculiar Safety Video

Caterpillar, a big company that manufactures big construction machines (and lots of other stuff), released this intentionally peculiar safety video in 1980:

Podcast Episode #1055: “The Best Life” Opera (Act 1)

In Podcast Episode #1055, Marc Abrahams presents the first act of “The Best Life”, a mini-opera which debuted in 2015 at the 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Ceremony.

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

Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant

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

The translation of ‘oh’ in a corpus of dubbed sitcoms [study]

There have been several linguistic analyses of the use of ‘oh’ in English. See, for example, the work of Deborah Marjorie James (University of Michigan, US) in The Syntax and Semantics of Some English Interjections,

James’s work is referenced in a 2007 study which attempted to shed some light on the usage of the interjection oh in English and its translation into Catalan with relation to dubbed sitcoms.

“ […] according to James, oh1 indicates that one has become aware of something in general, of something one should do, or even of a strong emotion, either with an added element of pleasure or not. When it indicates pleasure, ah is also used as an alternative to this oh. On the other hand, oh2 is used to indicate awareness in all the three previous contexts, transmitting casualness or a decision process at the same time.”

See: ‘The translation of oh in a corpus of dubbed sitcoms‘ , by Anna Matamala (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain), in the Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 6, 2007, 117-136.

Research research by Martin Gardiner

Press Release of the Week: Gorilla Glue Hair Experts

Of the approximately 330 million people in the United States of America, only one is known to have personally applied Gorilla Glue as a hair-styling substance. After that person shared her innovation in a TikTok video which became very, very popular, one university showed public-spirited quick thinking.

Rutgers University issued a press release that immediately sticks in mind. It begins:

Rutgers Experts Available to Discuss the Use of Gorilla Glue as Hair Spray, Its Dangers

Rutgers toxicologists are available to discuss the dangers of applying ultra-strong adhesives on hair or skin, following a viral TikTok video about a woman who used Gorilla Glue instead of hair spray to style her hair.

Diane Calello, executive and medical director of the New Jersey Poison Center and professor at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and Bruce Ruck, managing director at the New Jersey Poison Control Center, give insights into the methods emergency room doctors may employ to help remove the product. They caution others to refrain from copying the viral incident as it could be dangerous to their health….

Study: Chocolate Might Substitute for Sex, or Vice Versa

The [A] drive to consume chocolate and the [B] drive to have sex are linked anew, in a published study, by the [C] drive to define and explain a relationship between chocolate and sex.

The study is: “Chocolate Consumption and Sex-Interest,” Beatrice A. Golomb and Brinton K. Berg, Cureus, vol. 13, no. 2, February 12, 2021, e13310.

The authors, at the University of California, San Diego, explain:

Seven-hundred twenty-three (723) Southern California men and women, age >20, completed surveys providing chocolate-consumption frequency and interest in sex….

Chocolate-consumption frequency was the strongest assessed predictor of sex-interest in women. A relationship was not observed in men… Chocolate might be postulated to spur interest in sex, by simulating love and stimulating the chemicals allied with it – with love, in turn, reported to increase interest in sex among women. Alternatively – analogous to methadone relieving the drive for heroin use – chocolate, by replicating the satisfactions and pleasures of sex, may obviate the need for it.

In short, chocolate might stimulate sex – or simulate it.

Improbable Research at AAAS—Thursday, Feb 11, 2021

If you’re attending the AAAS Annual Meeting this week, join us at the Improbable Research session, on Thursday, February 11, from 2:15 to 3:15.

(NOTE: The Improbable Research session is a public session, which means that you can probably watch it even if you have not paid to attend the entire Annual Meeting. You may have to register (at no cost) first.)

Nobel laureate Frances Arnold (seen here testing an innovatively engineered hat) and Ig Nobel Prize winner Damiaan Denys (seen here munching an apple) are two of the many stars of this year’s Improbable Research session at the AAAS Annual Meeting

In 1996 the AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science) asked us to do a special session—about Improbable Research—at their Annual Meeting. That session drew a crowd, rave responses, and press coverage around the world. We’ve done a special session there at every year since. “There” is a flexible concept here—the AAAS Annual Meeting bounces happily to a different North American city each year. Last year, 2020, it was in Seattle. In this pandemic year, though, the whole meeting is happening online.

This Year’s Session

This year’s Improbable Research session is a special presentation about the current crop of Ig Nobel Prize winners (and a look back at Dr. Elena Bodnar’s 2009 Ig Nobel Prize-winning Emergency Bra).

Catching a 1000-mile-per-hour baseball

SmarterEveryDay made a cannon that can fire a baseball into the heavens at one thousand miles per hour, then used that cannon to fire baseballs first into a dummy of a person, then later into a baseball glove, then later still (after finding that one baseball glove is insufficient to catch a 1000 mph baseball) into an array of nine baseball gloves arranged in a line along the flight path. The video-recorded the collisions (and most everything related to them) at high speed, which made it possible to them slow down the video replay and gawk at the destruction: