The Weak In SCIENTS

Hello folks. Dr Yobbo's World of Bollocks, aka The Weak In Sport (about a thousand years ago) is nearing the triple century of posts and in honour thereof, we'll be revisiting some of the more gold-plated moments of comedic effuvience that the last five years of untrammelled arsebilge have seen fit to provide. We begin with The Weak In SCIENTS, a grab bag of offcuts and shite related to musings on the Life Scientifique, as lived, loved and freshly abandoned by Your Correspondent.

We begin with a gratuitous shot of that poundworthy ranga from Mythbusters in a lab coat and bugger-all else as some sort of flimsy scientific segue into...















RESEARCH AND DESTROY
Dr Yobbo's Review Of The Scientific Literature
Yes it's time for you lot of knuckle-dragging Luddites to get yourself edumacated with our bluffer's guide to the latest groundbreaking findings in the world of research. If you're more likely to listen to Dr Phil over Dr Karl, think New Scientist is about the methodology involved in brewing generic lager or that Scientific American is nothing more than an oxymoron (which it is), you need to sit up straight, stop playing with what ever that is, and pay attention.

This may well be crap, but it's award-winning crap
No, not Silverchair's Young Modern, but the various bids for scientific immortality that were appropriately celebrated on science's award night of nights, the annual Ig Nobel Prize announcements. Described by Nature as 'arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar' (in the same way that Willie Mason is 'arguably' the most intelligent man ever to play rugby league), the Ig Nobels like their less prestigious Scandinavian knock-offs are awarded in a range of categories, by the editors of the august and learned journal of scientific endeavour, Annals of Improbable Research. This year's awards, the 17th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, saw the following researchers canonised for their contributions to their respective fields:

MEDICINE
Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects." Most of which being a lot of interesting questions being asked at airport metal detectors. "Sorry officer, must be something I ate."
"Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects," B. Witcombe and D. Meyer, British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp. 1285-7.

PHYSICS
L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how bedsheets become wrinkled. Primarily by sleeping on them, you half-arsed Chilean fruit loops.
"Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension," E. Cerda, K. Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan, Nature, vol. 419, October 10, 2002, pp. 579-80.
"Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling," E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan, Physical Review Letters, fol. 90, no. 7, February 21, 2003, pp. 074302/1-4.
"Elements of Draping," E. Cerda, L. Mahadevan and J. Passini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7, 2004, pp. 1806-10.

BIOLOGY
Professor Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for her compulsion regarding counting and classifying all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi found in bedding and mattresses. She strikes one as being just a tad on the OCD side of the ledger and would probably make for a really punishing one-night stand, so be warned next time you're off-chops at a dust mite research conference.
"Huis, Bed en Beestjes" [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31.
"Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed" [Dust, Mites and Bedding]. J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk Vakblad voor Biologen, vol. 53, no. 2, 1973, pp. 22-5.
"Autotrophic Organisms in Mattress Dust in the Netherlands," B. van de Lustgraaf, J.H.H.M. Klerkx, J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Acta Botanica Neerlandica, vol. 27, no. 2, 1978, pp 125-8.
"A Bed Ecosystem," J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Lecture Abstracts -- 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36.

CHEMISTRY
Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, developed a way to extract vanillin from cow dung. His neighbours have since stopped dropping by the house to borrow cake ingredients from him.
"Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction," Mayu Yamamoto, International Medical Center of Japan, patent pending (as is committal to the big house)

LINGUISTICS
Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards. In a related study Dr Yobbo found that researchers from Arselona talk a lot of bollocks no matter what language they're speaking at the time, be it Catalan, Dutch, Spanish, English or gibberish.
"Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats," J.M. Toro, J.B. Trobalon and N. Sebastián-Gallés, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.

PEACE
The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon - the so-called 'gay bomb' - that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other. Dropping the 'gay bomb' sounds like something one might do at the Wickham in the early hours of the AM (cue Electric Six declaring "I've got something to put IN you!")
"Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.

ECONOMICS
Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them. An attempt to submit 'prior art' intellectual property of ACME Corporation and a Mr W.E. Coyote was argued as inadmissable by patent attorneys.
U.S. patent #6,219,959, granted on April 24, 2001, for a "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately."

AVIATION
Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
"Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms After Advancing Light Schedules," P.V. Agostino, S.A. Plano and D.A. Golombek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5 2007, pp. 9834-9.
Somewhat ironic that this, um, hard-hitting research ended up being published in a journal whose abbreviation is PNAS.

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Journal Club
Our favourite paper of the week is the following, the abstract for which we present utterly unedited as there's really no way we can improve on it. Yes, they're serious; and yes, they actually got this published.

Evolution and Human Behavior 28 (2007), 375 – 381
Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus?

Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan
Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA

ABSTRACT
To see whether estrus was really “lost” during human evolution (as researchers often claim), we examined ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by professional lap dancers working in gentlemen's clubs. Eighteen dancers recorded their menstrual periods, work shifts, and
tip earnings for 60 days on a study web site. A mixed-model analysis of 296 work shifts (representing about 5300 lap dances) showed an interaction between cycle phase and hormonal contraception use. Normally cycling participants earned about US$335 per 5-h shift during estrus, US$260 per shift during the luteal phase, and US$185 per shift during menstruation. By contrast, participants using contraceptive pills showed no estrous earnings peak. These results constitute the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females, in a real-world work setting. These results have clear implications for human evolution, sexuality, and economics.

And, of course, these results have absolutely NOTHING to do with three seedy, dateless male researchers' enthusiasm for writing off nine months' worth of 'working lunches' at Santa Fe Gold and Crazy Horse as research expenses...

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A late submission for our Research Paper Of The Weak comes from Chemical Communications, the journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), via our esteemed correspondent from the materials sciences, Dr Craigos.

Electrochemical synthesis of metal and semimetal nanotube–nanowire heterojunctions and their electronic transport properties
Dachi Yang, Guowen Meng, Shuyuan Zhang, Yufeng Hao, Xiaohong An, Qing Wei, Min Ye and Lide Zhang
Chem. Commun. 2007, 1733-1735

Metal and semimetal nanotube–nanowire heterojunction arrays have been achieved by sequential electrochemical-deposition inside the nanochannels of anodic aluminium oxide template with a layer of Au thin enough to leave the pores open.

So far so dull.

Heterojunctions of one-dimensional nanostructures have received considerable attention due to their unique properties [1–3], and potential applications in nanodevices [4–8]. Previous studies on longitudinally segmented heteronanostructures have mainly focused on two segments of nanowires (NWs) [9–12], two segments of nanotubes (NTs) [13], and one segment of NTs and another segment of NWs [14–17]. For NT–NW heterostructures, the NT segments are usually carbon NTs, which have been prepared by catalytic growth [14], chemical vapor deposition [15], solid–solid reaction [16] and surface attaching methods [17]. However, little has been reported on nanoheterojunctions with one longitudinal segment consisting of metallic or semimetal NTs, which might have potential applications in future nanotechnology.

You getting all this?

Here, we demonstrate a facile approach for the building of metal and semimetal nanotube–nanowire (NT–NW) nanohetero-junction arrays by sequential electrochemical deposition of two materials inside the nanochannels of anodic aluminium oxide (AAO) template. Herein we take metal Cu and semimetal Bi as examples.
The heterojunction arrays of CuNTs...

Ah. And suddenly, the stunt goes horribly wrong.

From that point on in the text, there are no less than fifty occurrences of Derek and Clive's favourite noun, not to mention numerous carefully diagrams, complete with arrows helpfully pointing out CuNTs of interest. In describing one of the figures the authors indicate 'It can be seen that the CuNTs (marked by dashed circle III) are quite uniform with smooth surface', which suggests to me they've been airbrushed like in Playboy - Hef won't publish them any other way.

We should at this point concede that maybe English isn't the first language of this group, given they hail from the Institute of Solid State Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and that rationally there is no good a priori reason why an appropriate abbreviation for 'copper nanotube' would not be 'CuNT', aside from it being the foulest curse-word in the most broadly spoken language in the world. We'll give them a pass mark on this one; quite what the fuck the English editors of the journal were up to we can't say, but one thing seems certain - the Royal Society for Chemistry are a bunch of copper nanotubes.

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At 9.30pm CET yesterday, a bunch of white lab-coated wonks buried in a super-secret compound deep under the Swiss Alps, switched on a machine designed to generate a black hole and destroy the world. It didn't work, so they're trying again next week.

Well, the doomsday device - the CERN Large Hadron Collider (as distinct from the Large Hadrian Collider, which was a truck which ran off the road in northern England and crashed into an old Roman wall - what, too obscure?) - worked pretty well, actually. About all the particle physics punishers in question actually did was to switch the thing on, align the beams, fire a few "lasers" around the track, then knocked off for beers. Despite the clamouring, embarrassing straw-man-a-thon of the media (i.e. breathlessly claiming 'World About To End In Nuclear Physics Experiment' then immediately afterwards declaring 'World Disappointingly Fails To End In Nuclear Physics Experiment'), CERN's best, brightest and deservedly single-est haven't actually smashed anything into anything yet. So there's hope yet for doomsday cults worldwide who are still trying to get over the public humiliation of that whole Y2K lead balloon, the biggest anticlimax since Jason Biggs tried to bang that exchange chick in American Pie 1.

Personally, I welcome Switzerland being turned into a black hole, a bottomless non-existant non-entity from which no light can excape and in which no life can be possible. And by 'welcome' I obviously mean 'would not actually be able to tell the difference'. And there'd bound to be pluses - Roger Federer would need a new place to hang his shingle, and since Llittle Lleyton's ggone to sshit we've been short of a decent tennis number one. Of course we'd have to stipulate on grounds of national pride that he'd be contractually prohibited from appearing in any more of those fucking punishing Gillette Mach Turbo Fusion Vibraslap Extreme Bollocks commercials with one-legged Tiger and that haughty Terry Henry git who used to play for Arsenal.

The actual point of the exercise, allegedly, is to smash tiny shit into each other at ferociously high speeds, much as most of us used to do with our Matchbox cars in kindy, in order to try and get at the most fundamental unsolved questions of the universe, like the mechanism of how gravity acts on mass, what dark matter is (other than the stuff which is used to make the griddle marks on chicken burgers), whether the Higgs Boson is truly a 'God particle' or just a highly obscure snowboarding manouevre, and why noone at CERN can manage to pull a root.

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I have been asked why I have failed to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and some chick has instead. I respond to this slight, though it remains clearly beneath me to do so, by pointing out that Nobel Prizes are for sucktooths and nimrods and that true science genius is motivated not by baubles and trinkets but by the pursuit of truth, clarity, understanding, and girls with big boobies. And anyway the IgNobels have more credence. They usually get a CCR tribute band to play the awards ceremony. The IgNobels, awarded by the Annals (that's ANNALS) of Improbable Research, are handed out yearly to individuals or groups that have made the greatest contribution to embarrassing, pointless or otherwise crap research in their field.

This year's crop of quote-unquote 'winners' was notably more crap than previous years, however, there was one shining beacon of fucken topsness amidst all the too-obvious played-for-laffs gongs (IgNobel Prize for Economics going to the heads of the Icelandic banks? Comedy GOLD!) - that being the IgNobel Peace Prize awarded to Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern for determining whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle. The findings, published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine And Glassing Munters In RSL Carparks, present the slightly counterintuitive result that while full beer bottles fracture with an impact energy of 30 Joules, empty beer bottles require 40 J of energy to break. To wit, while either will likely fuck you, empty bottles will fuck you good and proper. This intriguing difference in the energy required is explainified by the authors as relating to the state of beer as being an incompressible fluid, which propagates the energy of the initial impact throughout the glass in a way that the air inside the empty bottle does not. They also implicate potential effects of compressed gas inside the full bottle, in the form of carbonation, which would also increase the pressure within the bottle. They would furthermore like to know what the fuck you're doing shooting backwards from the 'D', advised you to stop fucken looking at their missus like that, and in conclusion, asked whether you want to fucken go, ay. You poofter.

Future directions of this work relate to determining whether the findings established by Bolliger et al. are translationary to an Antipodean context, ie from large-but-fragile 500mL bottles of Feldschlossen (understood to have served as weapon of choice of the venerable Field Marshall Therbs on his Oktoberfest sortie) in a beer tent in Munich, to glassing pissed munters in the Normanby Hotel carpark with the business end of a stubbie of VB.

I love science.

The Doctor is OUT to make his stockpile of potentially deadly beer bottles even more scarily weaponriffic by pouring the contents into his face.