We continue with a man with a stoat through his head.
Actually, we continue with a gratuitous shot of that chick 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.
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...
The Doctor is OUT (to go write some better grant proposals, having now been inspired)
