Reversing the usual flow of gases in the last section of the digestive system and changing the one-way signal to a two-way signal is a bold proposition. As such, Japanese research who proposes that mammals can breathe through their anus has won one of the Ig Nobel Prizes this year, the awards that Annals of Improbable Research The prize is awarded every year to the most delirious scientific works. Among them, one that shows that drunk worms are slower than sober ones, another that discovers that dead trout They swim only slightly worse than those experienced in a stream or a study proving that frightening a cow every 10 seconds affects milking while a cat on its back does not interfere. These are the investigations, published in scientific journals, which have been distinguished in a ceremony held this Thursday (early Friday morning in Spain) at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in the presence of five Nobel Prize winners:
Breathing through the anus. Gas exchange via the traditional escape route in mammals does not have to be unidirectional, from the individual to the environment, with undesirable side effects among cohabitants. It is the conclusion The Ig Nobel Prize winners from Tokyo Medical University have come to this conclusion. The researchers did not start from the Spanish Nobel Prize winner for Literature Camilo José Cela’s confessed ability to absorb liquids through the anus, but instead were inspired by the hake, a fish also known as the bertorella or loach, to develop “unique intestinal breathing mechanisms to survive under hypoxic conditions.” The Ig Nobel Prize winners already highlighted a study on the anal ingestion of all kinds of substances among the Mayans, but having the last part of the digestive system breathe is a unique approach.
The awards have recognised the boldness of proposing “the exploitation of enteral (intestinal) ventilation through the anus (with the suggestive acronym EVA in English)” by supplying oxygen intrarectally or with liquid containing oxygenated perfluorocarbon. Fortunately, so far they have only experimented with rodents and pigs. But they assure that both procedures, in the case of respiratory failure, can improve survival and systemic circulation. The side effects are “similar to those of an enema without significant signs of complications”, according to Okabe. In any case, its possible clinical use seems one more good reason to stop smoking.
Drunken worms are slower. Although the results were to be expected, the method of the team of the specialist in the organization of matter Tess Heeremans, from the University of Amsterdam, has received a well-deserved award for studying “the speed of convective transport of polymers [macromoléculas en cadena]” from worms, due to their similar structures. The experiment, published in Science Advancesinvolved subjecting several worms to a maze, half of them sober and the others exposed to a 5% ethanol solution. The first group arrived 50 seconds earlier. The study does not detail the accidents of the second group against the walls of the course.
Better if it hurts. Every mother and father has ever comforted their wounded children with a saying: what stings, heals. Well, a study A Central European study has taken it to the extreme, subjecting 77 people to inhalations that had no therapeutic effect but caused pain in the nose. Half of them were told that it was a treatment. Those who felt more pain as a side effect found the supposed therapy more effective. The worst thing is that the researchers propose including these side effects in medicines to promote a positive reaction from patients.
Milking with a cat on the cow and a scare every 10 seconds. The managers of experimental livestock farms in Kentucky and Minnesota, not content with testing the effects of administering different substances during milking, decided to explore something new: the consequences of putting a cat on the animal’s back and exploding paper bags every ten seconds. According to the experimentThe cat was shown to be irrelevant and was soon freed, but the “systematic” scares resulted in the udders not producing milk again until 30 minutes after the trauma, “although the gland was still relatively hard, but considerably more relaxed than at the time of fear,” the researchers explain.
So They swim the dead trout. James C. Liao, of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, has proposed in The Journal of Experimental Biology a reinterpretation of the miracle of Lazarus, but in a trout version. Liao has studied how these fish swim according to the current of water to demonstrate what popular wisdom had already said: a shrimp that falls asleep is carried away by the current. According to the research, the more favorable the water course, the less effort the fish has to make, which ends up adopting an inert position to let itself be carried along. In other words, they play dead. The most curious thing is that the research has compared these positions of live fish with dead trout to reach a conclusion that seems obvious without any scientific effort: “The head angles of live trout have a wider range of values and a greater variety compared to dead trout.”
Pigeons to pilot missiles. Psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, who died in 1990, would have personally collected the Ig Nobel if the prize had existed when he reviewed attempts to use animals to guide weapons in World War II. He warned then: “This is the story of a crazy idea.” American Psychological Association has won the Ig Nobel, collected by Skinner’s daughter, for recovering this year his 1960 proposal on the “use of living organisms to guide missiles”, included in a research program during the war called Project DoveThe erratic behavior of the animals led to the idea being abandoned, lest they want to return home during the mission.
Curls don’t understand geographyIt is difficult to know the scope for humanity of a discovery as achieved by the Department of Medical Genetics at the Montpellier hospital and Chilean scientists: “The hair on the head of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction as in the southern hemisphere.” The motivation for such a momentous discovery was that “the mechanisms that determine the inclination and rotation of the hair are unknown,” explain the researchers, surprised that no one had studied it before, knowing that the drainage in a sink does occur in different directions depending on the hemisphere.
Looking for random rules. “Many people flip coins, but few have stopped to reflect on the statistical and physical complexities of the process,” argue the fifty or so authors of a study on which side they fall when thrownThe number of researchers may seem exaggerated for such a simple study, but considering that they tossed the coins 350,757 times, each one was responsible for 7,000 annotations. The worst thing is that after that effort, the result is inconclusive. According to the authors, the tendency is to land on the same side as when they were tossed, but the effective conclusion is that only 51% of the time. Almost half.
False centenaries. In the past, people didn’t live longer, they lied better. Saul Justin Newman, from the Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, has revealed an open secret: there are not so many centenarians. Living longer is related to good nutrition, strong social connections and genetic inheritance. But, according to your studythe abundance of such long-lived people in past times is tricky in most cases. The widespread use of reliable birth records has caused the number of declared centenarians to fall by up to 82%. And many of those who remain as such on official lists have a coincidence: their date of birth is divisible by five, which suggests the presence of fraud in the declaration to collect benefits years before they should have. If you want to die early, according to data from Italy, England and France, you only have to live in poverty and where the crime rate is higher and health indices low. Sardinia, Okinawa and Icaria would be an exception to this rule, but Newman attributes this to document falsification.
Plants see. Researcher Felipe Yamashita, from the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany at the University of Bonn, considers it “a plausible hypothesis” that plants can see. He defends this in a study (Plant Signaling & Behavior) where he attributes to the creeper Trifoliolate mouthpiece the ability to perceive the shapes of their neighbouring plants and imitate them, even if they are made of plastic. The fashion world has been exploiting this trend in humans for years.
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