The anus is also an obscure object of desire for science. At least, this is demonstrated by the consecutive Ig Nobel Prizes achieved for devices and studies related to this part of the body. In this edition, the 33rd, one of the awards for the most bizarre research has gone to the so-called “Stanford Toilet”, a toilet that records, monitors and analyzes depositions in real time in one of the places where most Humans seek intimacy. This year, Spain has once again joined the list of winners with a study on the turbulence that causes the sexual relations of anchovies, which leave the pool scene. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995) at the height of a substitute’s warm-up; and with another on the skills to speak “la vesre”, that is, backwards. Two of the winners are proud. “It is the sexiest investigation of my entire life,” says Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, chief scientist of the campaign who attended the maritime orgy.
The Ig Nobels – a play on words that, when pronounced together, could be translated as ignoble – are awarded Annals of Improbable Research (Annals of improbable investigations) to studies published and reviewed by prestigious journals. They are usually held at Harvard University with the presence of real Nobel Prize winners, but this year, for the fourth time, the ceremony has gone virtual again. These are the winners, who will receive a cutout and a 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill, a currency that disappeared in 2015 and whose total today would be less than 30 cents:
A camera for the butt. If it were not enough to have cameras recording every second of our lives, a team from South Korea and the United States now proposes the “Stanford Toilet”, a toilet that has not yet been tested by influencers. The device in question examines urination and urine, obtains images of the anus and its products, and analyzes bowel movements. According to the study, “the smart toilet is autonomous and leverages pressure and motion sensors to analyze uroflow, calculate flow rate and volume, as well as classify stool with performance comparable to that of trained medical personnel.” As if that were not enough, the data is stored in the cloud. All potential well-deserved loot for hackers.
The sexual frenzy of anchovies moves the sea. Spain has returned to the Ig Nobels and twice. One of the jobs It was the product of the unintentional observation of a marine orgy of anchovies, capable of generating a small tidal wave.
Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, head of the involuntary expedition voyeurs, is delighted with the award. “This is the sexiest research of my career,” says this biologist born in Ferrol 48 years ago with amusement. She published it in a subsidiary magazine of Nature and the discovery provides answers to the influence of living beings on the movements of the sea, an eternal question in oceanography. “I thought it was going to be the cover in the media and no, nothing at all, cri, cri, cri,” he jokes to explain how this Ig Nobel allows him to attract attention to a very serious work that did capture the interest of the Anglo-Saxon media. .
For the original study, she insisted on following a fisherman’s strategy and anchoring for three weeks waiting for results. “We were looking at how environmental conditions affect the growth of microscopic algae, some of which produce toxins,” she recalls. “At night we saw very high levels of turbulence and mixing, at more or less the same time and in the same interval. The echo sounders showed that there was a lot of fish activity. It looked like a feast of horse mackerel, squid, seagulls…,” she explains.
After a first misidentification of the origin of the data, they analyzed whether the echo sounder records were compatible with the sexual activity of anchovies. And they were. The data was confirmed with biological remains collected with nets, where there were many eggs of these delicious fish. “The story started to add up,” he says.
Beyond the curiosity about the origin of the movement, research is essential to complete the energy balances in the ocean, which are usually attributed to winds and tides, mainly. “The latest research seemed to rule out the relevance of the turbulence associated with the movement of organisms, which form very small eddies. “We managed to demonstrate that organisms, in this case anchovies, in that sexual frenzy, agitate and generate effective turbulence to mix waters with different properties.”
Blaha datirevni (reversed speech) The team of which the Spanish-Argentine María José Torres-Prioris is part is also delighted with the distinction of their study on the specialists in speaking backwards, inverting sounds. The researcher gladly accepts her appointment and believes that, far from discrediting her, it provides her with a great opportunity for dissemination. “I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the money,” she says ironically at the prize valued at 30 cents. The work has implications for neurolinguistic research, an aspect little studied, despite the fact that the degenerative aphasia suffered by Bruce Willis has put some focus on these problems.
Born in Malaga by adoption and born in Tucumán (Argentina) 36 years ago, the researcher says she received “the news with a mixture of surprise and amusement.” “At the end of the day, this is an award given to research that stands out for being peculiar and having unconventional approaches. It is a unique opportunity to present science from another point of view that can be fun,” she explains.
Regarding the motivation for her scientific work, Torres-Prioris explains: “I was interested in all the mechanisms of phoneme sequencing because I work with people with aphasia who have language problems as a result of a stroke and I was studying the linguistic errors that these people made. and its relationship with brain variables”.
His team had the opportunity to meet real experts in speaking backwards (one of them uses it as a seduction technique) and found that “it was really a super interesting model because these people relocate phonemes.” “He was a model of expertise. It’s been studied a lot from the perspective of brain damage or in healthy people who make mistakes when speaking, which is common. But it had not been studied from an expert model,” he explains.
And he adds: “We are trying to understand at a behavioral level, through language tests and other cognitive functions, how we are able to perform this phoneme sequencing in such an extraordinary way and if this ability correlates with differences at the brain level, both in its anatomy as well as its function.”
The usefulness of corpses
A dead spider for the toolbox. An award-winning study incorporates a concept close to Frankenstein’s monster (Mary Shelley’s). The job It reuses a dead spider as a pincer capable of “grabbing objects 130% larger than the mass” of the converted bug. This science has been called “necrobotics.” The name says it all.
The nose hairs of the dead. Also related to the things that the deceased can provide us with is the Medicine prize, awarded to a work of “quantification and measurement of nasal hairs in the cadaveric population”. The authors are surprised that it has not been done before.
The taste is yours
Why scientists suck stones. The Chemistry and Geology prize went to Polish Jan Zalasiewicz for explaining the fascination with sucking stones with a personal, intimate and poetic narrative: “The rock lying on the side of the road did not seem very interesting at first: a rather nondescript limestone, with little more to show for the casual observation of a few vague specks. Anyway, old habits never die, so I picked it up and licked the surface (…). The memory of the shock and excitement of the discovery is still fresh.”
Take download. The Japanese challenged the world to savor umami, that flavor that is difficult to describe and about which so much has been written. As they see that the Eastern gastronomic culture does not have enough and the Western one needs reinforcements, a Japanese team has now proposed the “augmented tasting using electricity”. “Electric taste is the sensation caused by stimulating the tongue with electrical current. Our method consists of changing the flavor of foods and drinks through the use of electric flavor,” they propose. To do this, they have developed straws, chopsticks and forks connected to an electrical circuit. They are not yet available in stores, but if someone is in a real hurry to try, they can remember their childhood and suck the popsicles from a small stack of flasks.
Demystifying the old punishment of writing 100 times. The Literature award was won by a team from four countries for explaining The effect jamais vu (never seen) by repeating words many many many times. This phenomenon, opposite to the known deja vu (I’ve seen this before), it refers to the perception of something that is familiar as unknown. After a minute of writing the same words, a third of those surveyed began to perceive the spellings as “peculiar.” Hundreds of schoolchildren could have signed the investigation.
Let’s count sheep. Also related to the educational field, a job winner maintains that “boredom is omnipresent among schoolchildren” and defends that there is a prior attitude that predisposes it to intensify. “Students who expect a lesson to bore them subsequently feel more bored.” The list of Gothic kings is not in the study, but it could.
But what do they look at? This investigation reflects what everyone knows: people look at what people look at. During the study it was observed that the response of passersby to a crowd looking at a building is to do the same. The more voyeurs, the more people are added. For this trip we didn’t need so many saddlebags.
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