Awarded the Shnobelevka-2019
Cubes of wombats, washing machine, magnetic cockroaches…
How much saliva is secreted by a five–year-old child, how to train surgeons, from which country's banknotes you can catch an infection, how dead cockroaches react to a magnet, whether your mood rises from your own smile, and is there a G-spot for a miracle Indicator.Ru he tells about the laureates of the "Shnobelevka" awarded today.
Presentation of the Nobel Prize (Ig Nobel Prize) at the Sanders Theater Harvard University is an event that the public sometimes waits for no less than the Nobel Prize. It was founded by Mark Abrahams, founder of the journal Annals of Improbable research. The ceremony is unusual: paper airplanes are launched around the hall, laureates sing operas and dress up in ridiculous costumes, and scientists who have a "real" Nobel Prize are actively involved in the process and even present awards.
Among last year's winners of the pseudo-award this year are the recipient of tequila diamonds, inventors of a machine for interrupting human speech and other scientists. Violators of the regulations will also be interrupted: this honorable duty traditionally goes to an eight-year-old girl who will declare that she is bored.
However, it is difficult to fall asleep at such a performance: the laureates of previous years have proved that cats can be gas or liquid, black holes fit the role of hell by all criteria, people excite oysters, and sommeliers can smell that a fly has been in their wine. The theme of 2019 was habits, and the whole ceremony was organized in the form of the opera "Creatures of Habit", where the audience will be transported to the Museum of Bad Habits and think about the answer to the question why people can't (or don't want to?) resist them. By the way, the requirements for the audience are low: it is suggested to "wear clothes" (preferably multicolored) and bring paper with you ("because paper airplanes should be made of paper"). And they are even less to the readers. Let's get started!
Australian cubes, Iranian diapers
Last November, the whole world was shocked by the news about how and why wombats defecate cubes. For those who missed this important information obtained by Patricia Yang, Alexander Lee, Mile Chan, Ashley Edwards, Scott Carver and David Hu, we remind you: for blind wombats, cubic feces is one of the important ways of communication, including helping to mark the territory. The bizarre shape, which helps their works not to roll off twigs and stones, is achieved thanks to the elastic walls of the intestine. On the tops of the cube, the muscles of this organ stretch by 20%, and on the edges – by all 75%. Of course, the Nobel Prize in Physics could not ignore such a discovery.
Why physics? Ask the authors of the study that was presented to the scientific community at the conference on the dynamics of biological fluids in San Diego. In the same section, other noteworthy reports were made, for example, about why Ant-Man and Wasp need helmets for breathing and about an artificial substitute for mucus from dolphin blowholes, which will allow evaluating the effectiveness of autonomous devices that will collect samples of this substance.
Readers who found the study of the battalion commanders disgusting should be pleased with the engineering prize, which was awarded to the Iranian inventor Iman Farabakhsh. In 2017, he patented a machine for washing and changing diapers.
The child is placed in a cell behind a glass, where an automatic hand changes the diaper. For safety, he adheres with a belt. The machine can also wash the child and use powder.
"In a way, the device can be called automatic – in the sense that as soon as the child is placed inside, various steps can be performed automatically, without the need for the operator to touch the child," the author proudly stated in the description of his invention, suggesting that this will help improve sanitation.
Scrotum of mail sorters and baby saliva
If the eccentric intestines of wombats confused you, you will not soon be able to forget the Nobel Prize in Anatomy. It went to Roger Miesse and Burra Bengoudifa from France, who, in the best traditions of last year's winners in reproductive medicine, found a point of contact between the mail and the male genitals.
This time, the researchers measured the temperature on both sides of the scrotum every two minutes, intrigued by the fact that in previous experiments this indicator was either uniform over the entire surface, or for unknown reasons it turned out to be higher on the left – but not vice versa. It is curious, especially when you consider that this structure is needed to cool the testicles: for the formation of sperm, the temperature should be slightly lower than inside the body.
And so the scientists decided to put an end to uncertainty, because different results could depend on the posture during the measurement or during the working day. A special probe was used for the study, which stored data in a device tied to a belt. In the first experiment, eight naked male volunteers aged 20 to 48 years (who have at least one child) spent 15 minutes undressed in each of the poses: lying on their backs, standing, sitting with their legs spread and crossed. They repeated the same thing in clothes. In the second case, the probe was used by 11 mail sorters who spend the whole day on their feet, laying out parcels and parcels weighing up to five kilograms (the participants were from 26 to 45 years old, and they were all fathers). In the third experiment, 11 bus drivers from 28 to 52 years old (eight with children and three without) measured the temperature during the working day in a sitting position. As a result, the left side of the scrotum turned out to be warmer (we are waiting for a bonus for those who will find an explanation for this phenomenon), but only for clothed men. In the nude, the left half cooled faster, so that in the end the temperature on the left was even lower than on the right. In a sitting position, it is easier to keep warm, so the scrotums of drivers on average warmed up better than postal workers.
It would seem that physiology rather than anatomy is involved here, but the article was called "Temperature asymmetry of the scrotum": it turns out that temperature can affect the development of this part of the body and may be responsible for its asymmetry as a whole.
Another quite physiological award (but in the category "Chemistry") Mineko Ohnishi, Kaori Imai, Eiji Kavanaugh, Seiji Igarashi and Shigeru Watanabe got for measuring the average volume of saliva that a five-year-old child allocates per day per day.
The Nobel Prize, like the Nobel Prize, sometimes finds a laureate after many years: Shigeru came to the award ceremony with his two sons, on whom he conducted research 35 years ago. They were among 30 subjects (15 boys and 15 girls) who were forced to spit into a container and made sure they could not swallow anything. If the measurement was carried out during a meal, the children were given a good chew piece, and then asked to spit it out again for measurements, only in this case the mass of food was subtracted. After two days, scientists have found that on average a five-year-old child produces half a liter of saliva per day, if its excretion during sleep is equated to zero.
Dolce vita and felicita
The children from the previous section were offered mashed potatoes, pickled radishes, rice, sausages, cookies and apples. Not bad, but it's not a pity for measurements either. The Italian medical laureate Silvano Gallus obviously would not be satisfied with such uncomplicated dishes: he decided to prove that eating authentic pizza in Italy reduces the risk of cancer. His gourmet habits, however, were justified. In the first article, the scientist found out that among the patients hospitalized with cancer of the esophagus, pharynx and oral cavity (more than three thousand cases in total), there are much fewer pizza lovers, and the risk of getting sick for those who ate it more than three times a month was the lowest. It was not possible to find clear patterns between eating pizza and breast, ovarian and prostate cancer: lifestyle features, heredity and other criteria correlated more strongly with terrible diagnoses.
Gallus did not stop at oncological diseases and studied the effect of pizza on the risk of myocardial infarction. He also succeeded here: it turned out that pizza lovers are indeed more likely to have a healthy heart (which was confirmed even with adjustments for age, gender, alcohol consumption and smoking). However, the result of the research is rather a big curiosity than a medical recommendation. It is unlikely that there is a secret ingredient in Italian pizza that will protect our health, and the coincidence of factors does not indicate a causal relationship. Most likely, pizza lovers generally adhere to the Mediterranean diet, which is favorable for health. Therefore, if you eat defrosted pizza from the supermarket or with delivery twice a week, this does not mean that dolce vita ("sweet life" in Italian) is provided for you, and you can not take care of the body.
Another famous song with an Italian name – Felicita ("Happiness") – would be more suitable for the psychology laureate Fritz Strack, who, quite in the spirit of fashionable coaches, supported the hypothesis of a "feedback" between facial expression and mood. And is there a better way to cause a smile or sad grimaces at will than a pen shoved into your mouth in the right way? No – Strak decided and asked the subjects to watch funny cartoons in this position.
The author even managed to repeat his result. However, thirty years later, the reproducibility of the study in the Registered Replication Report project failed: the focus did not work for half of the groups, so the scientist concluded that if there is an effect, it is weak, therefore it does not reproduce when conditions change. The other two probabilities are an error in the probability calculations or a false positive result. But Strack initially did not try to declare his method a remedy for depression – he was only trying to find a pattern. Therefore, he looks sadly after the passing era in psychology: chasing large numbers and statistical power, according to the scientist, you can miss weak patterns that are also important.
Training surgeons and a magnet for cockroaches
If you train yourself to radiate a positive positive while holding a pen in your mouth, alas, it will not work (we are still living people and have the right to different emotions), then we have good news for surgeons. The clicker training system for training animals ("and small children," the American Society against Cruelty to Animals cunningly adds) is based on the reinforcement of random successes with an incentive. This is how the behavior is selected, where those of the naturally occurring reactions that the trainer needs "survive". So, if you split each surgical procedure into components, and then train them with the "clicker method", the training of orthopedic surgeons will be more successful than if you force students to follow instructions with pictures.
For such an original conclusion, the founders of the award even created a special nomination "Medical Education" to award the authors of the work, Karen Prior and Teresa McKeon. Another prize from the field of life sciences (and death) – in the nomination "Biology" – went to Lin-Yun Kong, Herbert Krepaz, Agniezhka Gorek, Alexander Urbanek, Rainer Dumke and Thomas Paterek. This group of scientists tested the magnetization of living and dead American cockroaches Periplaneta americana, and not out of latent love for necromancy.
The fact is that many animals – even frogs – can navigate by the Earth's magnetic field, and this kind of arthropods is no exception, although for them the benefits of such superpowers, to put it mildly, are not obvious. Therefore, scientists armed with a cesium atomic magnetometer conducted a series of experiments on seven dead and seven living cockroaches.
First, the cockroaches were magnetized for 20 minutes using a 0.15 tesla induction field perpendicular to their body; in the second stage of the experiment, the cockroaches themselves became the source of the magnetic field, as if they were a dipole magnet.
Live cockroaches smartly demagnetized in 50 minutes, while dead ones took an average of 47.5 hours! Scientists have compiled a mathematical model that showed that nanoparticles in a viscous medium – presumably consisting of greigite (Fe3S4) - can play pranks in living insects. This study (as it should be according to the rules of "Shnobelevki") makes you "smile, and then think." At least, about what then causes magnetoreception in cockroaches – after all, the described nanoparticles are too slow – and why these insects then need greigit.
Dirty money and the itch of the twelfth year
Another dirty topic (yes, this year's Nobel Prize is very fruitful for them) is money. We all know that banknotes are full of bacteria, because so many people have touched them with unwashed hands. The winners of the Economics Prize – Habip Gedik, Timothy and Andrea Voss – checked which of the seven international currencies best survives methicillin-resistant staphylococcus (MRSA), a dangerous strain of Escherichia coli and enterococcus resistant to vancomycin. As a result, enterococcus survived on the Indian rupee after drying, E. coli on the euro, MRSA huddled alone on dollars (Canadian and American). All three strains have been preserved on Romanian lei, with enterococcus for a whole day, and not a single bacterium has taken root on Croatian currency. The transfer of bacteria to the skin of the subjects (of whom there were only three) failed with euros, staphylococcus from dollars grew weakly in humans, but with lei, both E. coli and MRSA grew into thriving colonies.
Finally, we left the peace prize. To pacify and pacify the laureates, apparently, offered histamine, which makes us want to scratch. Ghada bin Saif, Alejandro Papoiou, Liliana Banari, Francis McGlone, Sean Quatra, Yuong-Huak Chan and Gil Josepovich studied one of the most accessible and understandable guilty pleasures for all people – the pleasure of scratching. It is known that if you scratch yourself, the effect is stronger than when someone else does it.
The authors of the study, an article about which was published in 2012, devoted themselves entirely to itching and pleasure. They even tried to find an analogue of the notorious G-spot for ches. However, it would not have worked out to draw a map. On average, itching was felt more strongly on the ankles and back than on the forearm, on which scientists, as if by agreement, usually conducted their tests earlier (for obvious reasons: accessible and convenient for participants). The more the ankle and forearm itched, the more pleasant it was to finally scratch them. When the desire to scratch passed in the process, and the pleasure itself was on the decline, the joy of scratching the ankles was slower. The most effective scratching was from itching on the back.
In place of the organizers of the prize, one could wish scientists that no scratching would satisfy the itch of their curiosity. Otherwise, how else can you come up with research topics that are impossible to read about without a pen between your teeth?
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