Every once in a while, somebody does something in the name of science that turns out to be really useful. Their research changes the world, a eureka moment catapults them onto the world stage for making scientific history. They might even be awarded a Nobel prize.
But what about the science we don’t hear about?
We don’t often witness the shock, the surprise, and, most importantly, the humour behind the scenes in moments of discovery. The things people set out to do that really matter to them and turn out to be hilarious.
Like personally building and testing a suit of armour that would protect you from grizzly bears.
Or analysing the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces, and discovering that it's easier to drag a sheep downhill.
Or one of our personal faves - a bomb that, if deployed, would make enemy soldiers become irresistibly sexually attracted to each other.
Now that’s the kind of science we love to talk about. And that’s exactly why the Ig Nobel prize exists. This prize is not about making the best or most impactful discovery. The Ig Nobel Prize is awarded to someone who has done something that makes people laugh and then think.
It’s bringing the jokes back into science!
In this episode, we’re joined by the man himself, the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize, Marc Abrahams, to talk about where the idea for the prizes came from and some of the funny things people have done in their pursuit of science.
To be clear, none of the Ig Nobel Prize winners set out to win an Ig Nobel Prize. They were all legitimately trying to discover something that they believed was important. They just didn’t know whether it would be utterly worthless or so incredible that it would change the world. The point is, it’s science.
Like the Psychology Prize that was awarded to German scientist, Fritz Strack, for discovering that holding a pen in your mouth makes you happier… and then disproving himself and realising that it actually doesn't. Lol.
And the Medical Education Prize that went to Japanese doctor, Akira Horiuchi, for his lessons learned from self-colonoscopy in the sitting position. Rest assured, if you're on a desert island and you do need to do a colonoscopy by yourself, it can be done!
One thing that’s really cool about the Ig Nobel prizes is that if an entry doesn’t fit into an existing category, they just invent a new one.
It’s wonderful to think about curiosity and play coming back into the centre of the scientific process and that every day people are being recognised for their wacky and wonderful discoveries.
Did we mention that the reward for the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize winners was a ten trillion dollar bill?
Previous Episodes Mentioned:
The Heroes and Idiots of Scientific Self-Experimentation! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ-e0Ld-p0w
The Life and Times of Alfred Nobel https://omny.fm/shows/the-wholesome-show/the-life-and-times-of-alfred-nobel
Smart Toilets, Brain Pics, Corpse Comfort, Nuclear Moon, Space Fashion, and Super Conductivity https://youtu.be/WJhxFtrO9Mo?si=c7HCXK4I0wVSxqU7&t=580
SOURCES:
MORE FROM IMPROBABLE RESEARCH:
Website: https://improbable.com/
2023 Ig Nobel Ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9UQi0ORXv4
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[00:00:00] Will: The Ig Nobel prize. It was levitating a frog?
[00:00:04] Marc: Right. Using magnets to levitate a frog. He gave a prize to a Canadian man named Troy Hurtubise personally building and testing a suit of armor that he hoped would protect him against grizzly bears.
[00:00:23] And analysis of the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces gave a prize in the category of safety engineering. His project that won him the prize years later was he designed and built a moose crash test dummy. It's better for the rhinoceros if you dangle it from the helicopter upside down, and that's what won the Nobel Prize.
[00:01:00] Rod: So today, the day we're recording, the Ig Nobel awards for 2023 dropped, not the Nobels, the Ig Nobels. The better ones, the funnier ones. By definition.
[00:01:11] Will: I'm sorry Nobels, you're very worthy, it's wonderful. We've talked about you in the past and you're doing good things.
[00:01:15] Rod: We even talked about the Nobel himself. He was pretty funny, Dynamite and all that. Okay. Dynamite's hilarious. So the Ig Nobels. They've been around for what, 30, this is the 33rd year, I believe.
[00:01:25] Will: I think, I think it might be the 33rd annual, first annual. Yes. Something like that. Yes.
[00:01:30] Rod: They do like, everyone is the first annual, but this is the 33rd time they've done it. And so apparently anyone can nominate or be nominated and you can self nominate, but self nominations generally don't go well
[00:01:42] Will: well, probably shouldn't. It's just not cool.
[00:01:44] Rod: It's not cool. That doesn't mean it shouldn't win. That's the problem. Sometimes uncool things, Donald Trump became president. He's not cool. The Ig Nobel board of governors prides itself on incompetence, especially it's demonstrated ability to lose all records as to when, where, and how, who nominated whom for what?
[00:02:01] Will: Cool. Okay.
[00:02:02] Rod: They like a joke. Yeah. Also if you've been nominated in previous years you stay in the pool, so you could be nominated years later.
[00:02:09] Will: Oh, okay. You're in the selection mix.
[00:02:11] Rod: It's not like, I think the big Nobels, you're nominated and then you don't get it and that's it.
[00:02:14] Will: Oh. And if you die, you can't get it.
[00:02:16] Rod: You can't get it posthumously and they don't, what is it? They don't release until 30 years later or something. They don't tell you who the nominees were in the real Nobels.
[00:02:22] Will: Yeah. But a lot of people claim it. A lot of people are like, I was nominated.
[00:02:25] Rod: Of course we do. We do. I mean, we were nominated for literature. The wholesome show was nominated the Nobel prize for literature in 2022. A piece of literature. So the voters are, and I do like this too, that it's composed the board with a capital B is composed of scientists, including some Ig Nobel and actual Nobel prize winners, which is fair, science writers, athletes, public officials, other individuals of greater or lesser eminence.
[00:02:50] I'm quoting the website again. By tradition, for balance, on the final day of deliberations, a random passerby is invited to help make the decision. Yes! That's excellent. So good.
[00:03:00] Will: Yes.
[00:03:02] Rod: So, like we said, there's been years. There's been years of them. And I rummaged, I literally read the entire list of previous ones, all 33 years worth of stuff. To look for the ones that tickled my fancy.
[00:03:11] Will: What tickled?
[00:03:12] Rod: One of them was entomology. Robert A. Lopez. He was a valiant veterinarian, it says, and friend of all creatures, great and small. He was nominated or he won for his series of experiments in obtaining ear mites from cats. Already I'm grossed out cause I just don't like cats or ear mites. He then put them into his own ear and then he would carefully, or he carefully observed and analyzed the results. And this features in the journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association and the article is called of mites and man.
[00:03:45] Will: I don't want to do that.
[00:03:45] Rod: Fuck no.
[00:03:46] Will: I don't want to. I don't want to. I like the scientists that self experiment we've talked about them in the past. A drug. I'll be like, okay, well let's test the effects. I can understand that. But the idea of getting like a creature, like a mite or a bacteria from another thing. No fucking way.
[00:04:03] Rod: I wouldn't take one from one part of my body and put it into another part of my body. Better yet, take it from a fucking cat.
[00:04:08] Will: I do that.
[00:04:09] Rod: From a cat or your own body.
[00:04:10] Will: My own body.
[00:04:11] Rod: It's come from the date I'm putting it in my nose. Turns out it smells bad, but otherwise no difference. Peace Prize in the USA. This is again, a 90s piece of research.
[00:04:19] Will: Hang on, they have Ig Nobel Peace Prizes?
[00:04:21] Rod: They have everything. Okay. So the Air Force Wright Laboratory at Dayton, Ohio, USA, obviously. They they got the award, the peace prize, for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon or gay bomb.
[00:04:35] Will: So not a lot of this is sounding either legitimate or ethical or anything but also not peace. A bomb
[00:04:42] Rod: you know, would we because if it's used, if it's deployed, I think is the language, it would make enemy soldiers become irresistibly sexually attracted to each other.
[00:04:50] Will: But it's not about the gay. It's more about you become so horny.
[00:04:54] Rod: No, but they were very much about, the idea was that it would make it man on man specifically.
[00:04:59] Will: Someone tried this?
[00:05:00] Rod: Yeah. I mean, they made a joke movie. You remember Get Smart 100, 000 years ago? There was Get Smart, the old school 1950s or 60s American.
[00:05:08] Will: Of course I remember Get Smart.
[00:05:09] Rod: Well, you're a young man. I don't know. I don't want to assume. But they did a movie. They had a couple of Get Smart movies, or at least one. And one of them was The Nude Bomb.
[00:05:17] Will: Ah, well, indeed.
[00:05:19] Rod: To be fair, I didn't see it, but I remember thinking, that's hilarious, and also 99, who obviously everyone loved. If 99 got hit by the nude bomb, we would've all been happy. My bet is she didn't.
[00:05:27] Will: Probably. I think she was probably safe.
[00:05:30] Rod: Yeah, because she worked for control. Not chaos! Psychology Prize from Germany, speaking of which. Fritz Strack. He discovered that he was awarded for discovering that holding a pen in your mouth makes you smile and makes you happier and then for discovering, actually it doesn't
[00:05:51] Will: discovery to say I found something and then I unproved myself.
[00:05:54] Rod: Try that. Put the pencil in your mouth.
[00:05:56] Will: It does make me happier.
[00:05:57] Rod: And so you kind of have to sort of smile.
[00:05:59] Will: Seriously, one of my top something happiest moments of my life is climbing up the rigging of of a tall sailing ship.
[00:06:08] Rod: The Jung Endeavor?
[00:06:09] Will: Yeah, it was. But I had to hold a knife between my teeth to cut off a sail. I don't know if I don't know.
[00:06:15] Rod: Were you wearing a shirt that had laces at the top and bloomers?
[00:06:21] Will: I was just like, finally, I didn't know this was my dream.
[00:06:26] Rod: I've never been so pirate. I've never been so happy.
[00:06:28] Will: Fuck me. It was like a cold front coming over. And so it was like blue sky there. And there was a line in the sky and then it was evil. And they were like, got to cut the fishermen down. Got to cut that.
[00:06:41] Rod: Look, I'm rarely that honestly jealous of people, but right now you've moved me. Final one I'm gonna bring up, there are many related to the fundament obviously, and they of course attracted my attention. Medical education prize from Japan. Oh, okay. For the medical report. Colonoscopy in the sitting position. Lessons learned from self colonoscopy,
[00:07:07] Will: in the sitting position. '
[00:07:10] Rod: cause that's what inquiring minds wanna know. Now, have you had one? I've had one. And afterwards, as I was lying there, they put me into the twilight. Two of the most beautiful nurses I've seen in my life walked in one with a rolled coil of sort of camera material on one arm and the other, like it was a long tube.
[00:07:27] And the other one had this face shield on. And I remember looking up going. Fucking typical. And then they did the thing. So apparently I could respond to commands, but I don't remember any of it.
[00:07:36] Will: It's like brain surgery. You got to be aware so that they can
[00:07:39] Rod: because they might want to move you around. Apparently it'll get you to change position. I don't remember any of that. Thank fuck mercifully. But at the end they went, okay, anyway, look, we think the problem is not enough fiber in your diet.
[00:07:49] Will: No doubt. That's what they say to everyone. Like they are like we wish it was cleaner.
[00:07:53] Rod: But then he says, so you should go and have a talk with Jackie and Simone about fiber. And I walk out and it's those two nurses after the fact. And I'm like that and that, yeah, I promise not that much. I won't eat as much pizza. I thinking you see me in ways that no other human has. This is probably not date material, but I just remember thinking. Fuck.
[00:08:14] Will: Not at all. So hang on, the self colonoscopy.
[00:08:17] Rod: Yeah, it appears in a journal, gastrointestinal endoscopy in 2006. And the title of the paper is colonoscopy in the sitting position; lessons learned from self colonoscopy by using a small caliber variable stiffness colonoscope.
[00:08:34] Will: Well, what were the lessons learned?
[00:08:36] Rod: I didn't get to that. I seized up.
[00:08:38] Will: Like, is the lesson learned, if you're on a desert island and you're a proctologist and you do need to do a colonoscopy by yourself.
[00:08:45] Rod: You may have a post anal fissure or polyps.
[00:08:47] Will: It can be done. Other than that, there is no scenario in which you need to do one to yourself.
[00:08:51] Rod: More importantly, it can be done sitting up. Those are some of the previous Ig Nobel's. But now we're going to hear from what the man himself, the guy, and I apologize or I you're welcome. I'm not in this interview because I was having my butt cheek implants and I was recovering from surgery.
[00:09:08] Will: I thought you were doing yourself colonoscopy.
[00:09:11] Rod: Oh, well, yeah. Okay. I was embarrassed to say
[00:09:20] Will: Marc Abrams. Welcome to the wholesome show.
[00:09:23] Marc: Why, thank you. I think that's the proper thing to say, isn't it?
[00:09:27] Will: So you are famed, obviously, for amongst other things, the Ig Nobel prizes. Now I want to do a bit of a discussion about what the Ig Nobel prizes mean for the communication of science and the thinking about science. But Marc, can you just tell us what are the Ig Nobel prizes?
[00:09:44] Marc: They are prizes, but they're different from any other prize I'm aware of. There are 10 prizes every year. We've been doing this since 1991. Every other prize that I can think of is either for the very best things, or at least they claim they're for the very best things, you know, Olympic prizes for the best athletes Oscars for the best movies and so on.
[00:10:06] But there are a few prizes that are for the worst things, the worst dressed. List the worst movies. For us with the Ig Nobel prize is best and worst don't matter whether something's important or completely unimportant doesn't matter. Whether it's good or bad Doesn't matter. The only thing that does matter is that, if we've chosen well, Every winner has done something that makes people laugh and then think. There's something about what they did that the moment somebody anywhere in the world, no matter who it is, here's about it, they start laughing. That's their reaction. And there's also something about it that's going to stick in people's heads so that a week after they hear about the thing, all they really want to do is tell their friends.
[00:10:52] Will: How and when did you come up with the idea of rewarding research that makes you laugh and then think?
[00:10:59] Marc: Since I was a little kid, I would kind of collect reports about odd things, especially science things. And I liked writing, and I liked things that were funny. And I used to write things up and send them to friends. And that year, I decided to see if I could get something published because I'd never tried.
[00:11:15] So I took some of the stuff I'd written and sent it off to a magazine. A few weeks later, I came home and there was a message from somebody saying, Hi, I'm the editor of the magazine. We got your articles. Would you be the editor of the magazine?
[00:11:32] Will: You submitted some articles and they said you can be the editor now.
[00:11:36] Marc: Yeah, I ended up doing that and I had a double life for a number of years and very quickly because I was Talking to meeting and interviewing people from all over the place who'd done all kinds of very strange, Sometimes wonderful ,sometimes terrible, often funny things. I kept thinking that most of these people, Nobody knows they've done this and most of them probably are going to live their whole life and they'll die and nobody will still know they've done it.
[00:12:05] And that's not right. Somebody should do something. And then I thought, well, we can do something small. So that was pretty much the birth of the idea for this thing. And then I just started talking to a lot of people, telling them what we wanted to do and asking, can you help? And people were great.
[00:12:21] People had all kinds of ideas. And things happen, like somebody introduced me to the head of a museum at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which also is here in town. He was intrigued and he said, do you have a place to have this ceremony? No. Do you want to have it here? Okay. So we had a place to have it.
[00:12:41] It was one of those. Really lucky periods when for a few months, all kinds of things happen to go right and a lot of people, most of whom I hadn't met before, were being really generous with their thoughts and actual help in things. And if we hadn't been so lucky that first year, it never really would have got off the ground, but we were the first ceremony was held there.
[00:13:06] We put word out on the internet, which was much smaller at that point. And we had people almost crawling up the sides of the building, trying to get in. We had some winners we'd invited. I had met some famous scientists because I was the editor of a magazine now, you know, and I invited four of them who I thought had a sense of humour about themselves and they all said, sure.
[00:13:28] So they came. You know, we had four Nobel prize winners, they're handing out the prizes. And we also had a bunch of reporters, journalists from around the world, and it got a lot of attention, almost all of it, really happy attention around the world because the first year went so well, we were able to do it the second year on a much bigger scale. And that's continued every year. This is now the 33rd first annual Ig Nobel prize ceremony.
[00:13:53] Will: You said we had a lot of luck going our way. Can I just be potentially flattering here and say potentially you actually had a really good idea and it's a good idea that that hadn't been done before. And it was an idea that science needed in a sense that we, as you said before, we award all of the most important research or the most transformative research, but we don't do the stuff that awards interesting research that doesn't fit into all of these other categories. Maybe it doesn't have high impact, but it says interesting things about science.
[00:14:23] Marc: And I'll point out it's it's not just research and it's not just science. Most of the prizes are involved with science, but we often give out a literature prize.
[00:14:33] We've sometimes given out a prize in art. And in fact, another way we're different from most other prizes is most prizes that have a handful of different categories every year. Have the same categories and try to fill them. With us it's the opposite. We pick the things that have won. If it happens to fit into some existing category, wonderful. That's easy. But if not, we invent a category and I'll give you an example. Must be more than 20 years ago now, we gave a prize to a Canadian man named Troy Hurtubise troy had spent at that point, something like 7 years personally building And testing a suit of armor that he hoped would protect him against grizzly bears.
[00:15:19] He wanted to be able to go out in the wilds in Canada and hang out, commune with grizzly bears, but grizzly bears are really big and really powerful and not always friendly to humans. If you're going to give a prize To somebody who's done that, what category would you put that in?
[00:15:38] Will: Well, do you know what my first category thought was? That sounds like the Darwin Awards to me, not the Ig Nobel's. That sounds like someone who is you know, asking to be the end point of an evolutionary branch. What? So the award category it's gotta be, it's a little bit engineering and a little bit biology. But a little bit costume design
[00:15:56] Marc: Listening to you is like listening to the conversations we had trying to figure this out ourselves. Keep going. Propose a category, a single category.
[00:16:03] Will: All right. Single category. Look, I have to lean. I'm just going to go boring. This is this is biology. Surely.
[00:16:10] Marc: It is. I would have no quarrel with that. What we came up with in the end, the category we invented for him was safety engineering.
[00:16:18] Will: All right. Fair enough. That's lovely. So you saw that piece of research and you said, Hey, we need to invent a category to wrap around that because we want to award that piece of research because it has made us laugh and it has made us think.
[00:16:29] Marc: Almost everything that we know about in science, the story changes over time. That almost all of it when it starts, it doesn't get treated like it's the best thing that ever happened.
[00:16:43] It doesn't get treated like it's important. It doesn't even get treated like it's sensible. For almost everybody and almost everything, the very first stage when they first started, nobody got too excited about it. And in fact, often they were laughed at or people said, well, that doesn't work or that's stupid. Or, you know, why are you doing that?
[00:17:05] Every once in a while, somebody does something that turns out later to be obviously useful and maybe worth a lot of money to a lot of people. And at that point, the story changes and it's no longer a story of what actually happened at the beginning when nobody was very interested or very encouraging.
[00:17:25] The story later, give it just a few years, turns into as soon as professor discovered this, the whole world changed and everybody realized. That's almost really never what happened. And some of them, it's really fun when you talk to anybody who's, you know, they've discovered or invented or whatever, something that's become pretty well known, almost always, they'll start telling you what it was like the first few days, and often it was even pretty funny, at least to other people, and sometimes really funny to them, the way, you know, what happened was funny period, or it was funny, the reaction they got at first compared to what happened later, but they don't often feel comfortable talking about that in public, because that's not the way people talk about them.
[00:18:11] Will: I can certainly imagine that the ways that we normally talk about science, so whether it's that peer reviewed publication, where it's just the serious version, occasionally there are jokes, but not really.
[00:18:19] Or, you know, they go on to bigger success. You know, and they're talking with big wigs, or they're at big prize ceremonies. There will be the serious way of talking about it, and I accept that is the public face for a lot of, for a lot of science. But that moment of discovery is not necessary.
[00:18:34] Well, it can't really be a moment of seriousness. It will be a moment of confusion or a moment of Eureka or a moment of shock or surprise or something being funny. And I think, you know, drawing on those real human emotions of that moment when a scientist realizes something different is something that we don't see in so many ways of talking about science.
[00:18:55] Marc: Very true. And I think that a lot of people end up being pretty intimidated because of that. I think that you have to be the kind of character that you were taught about, you know, who is such a super genius that every moment they were discovering things nobody else could discover. And they're, you know, they're thinking a million times faster and better than you possibly could. I'm not sure those people actually exist.
[00:19:18] Will: Yeah. That was the question I did want to ask, you know, what is the type of person in your mind who wins an Ig Nobel prize? Are they different to other scientists or you're going to tell me they're all the same?
[00:19:28] Marc: Well, if I have to reduce it to one word, that word would have to be human. There's no type, there's absolutely no type. Also, none of them began by trying to do something that was funny. None of them were setting out to win an Ig Nobel Prize. Some of them realized pretty quickly that what they were doing was kind of funny, but it also was important to them, or at least worth trying.
[00:19:52] One prize we gave to a team in Victoria, it was the physics prize, and the paper that they had published that won the prize was called... An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces. An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces. And that phone call, that moment, apparently from what they said on the phone call was, that was the first moment they realized that what they'd done is funny.
[00:20:28] Really, the most important thing that we discovered is It's easier to drag a sheep downhill. You know, we're all like that. We, you know, whatever we do makes sense at the moment and then you never think about it really until somebody from outside points out to you that there's a little easier, better way.
[00:20:49] Another thing we gave a prize to just a few years ago that involved not sheep, but rhinoceroses. And it involved rhinoceroses that lived in a place that was becoming dangerous for them. So, a bunch of people had, scientists and others had decided to move the rhinoceroses far away to a much safer home.
[00:21:11] But how do you move a rhinoceros a long distance? They started doing it by helicopter. Well, you know, what's the best way? It's better for the rhinoceros, safer for the rhinoceros, if you... dangle it from the helicopter upside down. And that's what won the Ig Nobel prize.
[00:21:32] Will: You seem to have a great recollection of a lot of these different pieces of work. There must be, I mean, you've probably already mentioned some, but favorites over the years that stick in your mind I'm sure.
[00:21:43] Marc: Whatever you do, if you've been doing it for a while, sometimes the hardest question a person can ask you is what's your favorite? You just got too many choices.
[00:21:53] Will: Yeah. And I assume there's a chunk of when you're telling stories as you're telling stories to us now, or, you know, you're doing a dinner event or you're talking to school kids or something like that, that the stories pop up there, you're sparked by, Oh, that reminds me of the sheep or that reminds me of the rhinoceros or that reminds me of the grizzly bear suit that you would have such a large collection of interesting stories of science and they tell you lots of interesting things about how scientists behave.
[00:22:18] Marc: And other people could remember not all the people who win are scientists. We've even given prizes to little kids. Well, let me tell you something that just popped to mind. It's a prize was given to some scientists in Italy who did some mathematical models. And the question they were looking at was. If you have an organization of any kind, when it comes time to promote somebody, who do you choose?
[00:22:45] How do you go about choosing them? How do you decide who gets a promotion? So they did models in the computer of different ways. You know, you choose the one who's been there the longest. You did the one who seemed to have the best performance at their job, whatever that is on the job or anything else.
[00:23:01] And then to have something to compare it. How about if we also put in the model, what happens if we just pick somebody at random from the group and make them the new head of the group? So they did it and they ran all kinds of variations and all the variations pretty much came out with the same thing, which was the most efficient thing in the long run for everybody from anybody's point of view is pick people at random.
[00:23:28] Will: I love that. I love that. I'm such a believer in random. I think it would be great. I'd love to just reflect on the sort of I don't want you to do an obituary, but on the legacy on the impact of the Ig Nobel's and there are others that are doing similar sorts of work has done for science.
[00:23:45] You know, if you can think of when you were talking about the Ig Nobel's to school kids or to others, how does this change how people think about science and what might it do to the scientists of the future?
[00:23:55] Marc: I hope it's got some people trying to teach themselves to change their reactions a little bit when they see something new and they start to laugh.
[00:24:08] For many people, if you ask them, why did you laugh, they'll stop for a minute, think about it and say, Oh, well, cause oh, that means something stupid or something's crazy. And you always laugh at that, but that isn't necessarily why they were laughing. Who knows why when something is so completely surprising to you, that's the kind of the default reaction.
[00:24:31] You laugh at first moment, and I think that's what's going on often. And when you're reacting that way, you don't know anything about it, so you really don't know whether it's something that's stupid or brilliant, you don't know whether it's something that's completely, utterly worthless or maybe this is so wonderful this is going to change the world, you just don't know, there's no way you can know in that first instant.
[00:24:57] And maybe, you know, I hope that some people will start to teach themselves this little habit, a little bit, that when you find yourself reacting that way to anything, stop a minute and just start asking yourself those questions. Is this stupid? Is this brilliant? Is this, you know, how do I know? For anybody, if you do that a little more often, that's, I think, a good change.
[00:25:22] You know, rather than just assuming, and also rather than accepting what the next person tells you. You know, if somebody standing nearby tells you, oh, that's stupid, you're going to be inclined to think that. And also, you know, the opposite happens, you're going to be inclined to think that. Schools often everywhere kind of beat it out of everybody, the idea that you can take a little time and maybe make your own decision about what's worthwhile and what's not.
[00:25:50] Will: Yeah, I love that. I love that so much of the ways that scientists are taught is trained towards the objective and trained to get rid of emotion. And I think it's really good to bring back at the center of scientific discovery emotional recognitions, laughter, obviously being a key one shock and surprise, those kinds of things, and realizing that scientists, of course, are human, but also having that really human moment at the moment of discovery might be something that is actually a key part of science, not something that we should ignore and drum away.
[00:26:23] Marc: Yeah. And that moment may not even strike you if you're the person who discovered it as a moment, you may just notice something and then later it starts to occur to you that, huh, I want to think about that. I want to go back and look at that some more.
[00:26:37] Will: So I guess finally, just to close up there, what's what's that recipe that I need for me to go out and win an Ig Nobel. I got to be doing some sort of research that's got crazy stuff that will make you laugh or just do my own stuff and then hopefully it'll make you laugh by accident.
[00:26:50] Marc: Here's the recipe. Arranged for fate to be coming to you. Beyond that, I don't know any recipe. This is all about, this is all about the unexpected. That's really what these prizes are about down deep. Things that are so completely unexpected and surprising that they're going to make people laugh. And far as I know, there's no way to plan to do that. Anybody who ever sets out to try to win an Ig Nobel Prize, and a lot of people do, but we, those things always fail. It's always very clear. It's really nearly impossible to do that if that's what you're trying to do.
[00:27:25] Will: You know what I love? I love that unfortunately your colleagues in the Nobel prizes, they do by quirk of history and quirk of the power and the money and all of those kinds of things, skew to certain types of labs, certain types of universities, certain types of people. And whilst I'm not saying that the Ig Nobel's are going to get a perfect representation, but that you're skewing more towards the unexpected, towards something that's a little bit more random.
[00:27:50] Marc: Yeah. Well, I think that the people who do other prizes would be crazy if they ran them that way, because it doesn't make sense for what they're doing, but it does make sense for what we're doing.
[00:28:00] And you may be aware that there is one person who has one both an Ig Nobel Prize and a Nobel Prize. And he won his Ig Nobel Prize ten years before he won his Nobel Prize. And both of them, when you hear the details of what he did, sound completely goofy.
[00:28:16] Will: The Ig Nobel Prize, it was... levitating a frog?
[00:28:20] Marc: Right. Using magnets to levitate a frog. Something that almost no professional physicist in the world would have told you was possible, if you had asked them.
[00:28:33] Will: That sounds to me like a little bit setting out to win an Ig Nobel Prize though.
[00:28:36] Marc: No, the way it was set out, this Andre Geim is the person who did it and he won the prize together with a British scientist named Michael Berry.
[00:28:44] Andre Geim, his whole adult life has Friday night experiments. The tradition in his lab is he and I guess anybody who wants to on Friday nights, if they think of anything they want to try, not at all related to what they normally do, probably isn't important at all. But hey, I wonder about this. It just occurred to me, or I've been wondering for years, whatever.
[00:29:07] Just try it. So on Friday nights, they do these Friday night experiments, most of which would appear kind of crazy to other people or not worth spending time on or whatever, it interests and amuses them. And this experiment with the frog being levitated by magnets, they did that as a Friday night experiment.
[00:29:28] And once they saw it happen, they started levitating all kinds of stuff. Strawberries, drops of water discovered you could levitate almost anything that way. And then 10 years later, here's what he won his Nobel Prize for. Andre Geim and one of his students were doing this scribbling with pencils on paper, and then they got a piece of scotch tape, sticky tape, and put it down on the paper.
[00:29:53] This also you probably have done as when you were a kid, and you pick it up, and okay, now there's all this gray stuff stuck to the tape. Big deal, right? And they started just kind of playfully flexing the tape, and these little gray things started to fall down from it. And they put some of them under a microscope, and they discovered some of those little gray things were little pieces of these sheets graphite.
[00:30:16] Nobody else had ever had pieces, at least they hadn't realized that they could start to examine. So they started not only looking under the microscope, they started doing experiments, and they discovered this stuff does all kinds of stuff, so many different things that almost unbelievable and it's, as you may well know, this has turned internationally into something where whole industries have grown up around this many governments and many big companies plunging loads of money into trying to figure out all the different things that they can do, engineering purposes, invention purposes, and making money purposes with this stuff. And, but it all started with something little kids do.
[00:30:58] Will: I think it's amazing. I think it's amazing to really put tinkering, curiosity, play back at the middle of that scientific process.
[00:31:06] Marc: Somewhere stalking the earth or sitting in a chair somewhere there may be a scientist who has absolutely no sense of humor, but I have not encountered a person like that. There are a lot of people in that world and a lot of even more engineers who give you the impression that they have no sense of humor and some of them work really hard at that. They all do have a sense of humor and often they have a good sense of humor about the stuff they do, although they may not feel comfortable in their normal professional setting saying that or letting on. At the Ig Nobel, you can both be recognized as being a very serious person and also being recognized as somebody who enjoys life and enjoys what they do.
[00:31:50] Will: That's fantastic. Look, I just want to say thank you, Marc. Thank you from us here at the wholesome show for coming in and talking to us. But more importantly, thank you broadly for bringing more of the humanity back to the surface in science.
[00:32:02] Marc: Thank you. And keep your eyes open for anybody you run across who should be winning an Ig Nobel Prize. One person somewhere knows about something. And I would ask you to do one step more than the usual. The usual is you tell your three or four best friends about it and then you forget about it. So, tell your three or four best friends and then tell us.
[00:32:25] Will: We love stories of science that make people laugh and think. So yeah we'll join in on that. Thank you, Marc.
[00:32:30] Marc: Okay. Thank you both.
[00:32:31] Will: The Ig nobel's have been, they've brought a lot of jokes into science. And I think it's a fascinating thing to bring to the world.
[00:32:43] Rod: Things that make you laugh and think stay with you. But I've got to say the more I listened to him, the more I thought. What the Ig Nobles is basically what we are.
[00:32:50] Will: Oh, totally.
[00:32:51] Rod: Cause I mean, we're all about laughter first. And I love the fact too, that they make up categories. If it doesn't fit, they find a thing that's cool anyway, and go, let's make up a category.
[00:32:59] Will: I think the Nobles should do that too.
[00:33:01] Rod: They really should.
[00:33:01] Will: Like, like just misc. I wouldn't mind running Nobel for misc, like I'd take that above the other categories.
[00:33:08] Rod: Yes. Like ours was so amazing that they just gave us one anyway. Yeah, sure. The stories about Troy, the drizz, the grizzly guy those really stuck in my head. Fuck me. Watch the video.
[00:33:18] Will: I thought when I was talking to Marc and I thought, Oh man, run is just going to be like this guy. You can get on the beers, get on the wines, get on the cones and you think of some interesting ideas, but to wake up in the morning and go, I'm going to do it. And then to wake up in the next morning and go, I'm still doing it. I'm still making a grizzly.
[00:33:38] Rod: The drugs have worn off. I love it was found objects. He had to make with found objects and part of it was he found a lump of titanium. I'm going to use that in my grizzly suit.
[00:33:48] Also, I love that Marc talks about having a double life as a magazine editor and his day job early in his career. And I'm thinking again, it's like us, we have our day jobs and this. Yeah, we are the ignobles in podcast forms.
[00:34:02] Will: Nice parallel. That's very good. People working multiple things.
[00:34:05] Rod: Look in the end, I think it's, I think it's fabulous. I was a big fan of what was going on. And as we said at the top of this episode, this year's 2023 just done awards happened this morning for us. Marc has a traditional close to the ceremony, which I think is fabulous. He says, apparently if you didn't win an ignoble prize tonight, and especially if you did, better luck next year. But I kind of like that. Like, Oh, you won one. Like you said, you don't tend to get an Ig Noble if you're gunning for an Ig Noble, they tend to be regardless. They're a by product like the sheep guys who didn't realize what they were doing was funny, dragging sheeps across different surfaces.
[00:34:40] Will: I think this is the fascinating thing of it all is that they are a by product of good science. Like it's the bits where they're going, Oh, okay. You know, so, you know, levitate the frog or the sheep. It's like, What are we looking at here? And let's just see what's going on. And a lot of science is not necessarily problem directed. It's very much what's going on. And I think that's the venue for the Ig Nobles.
[00:34:59] Rod: So some of the winners that caught my attention. There were many, of course, I'm going to give you public health first from South Korea. Seongmin Park for inventing the Stanford toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies, including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, computer vision system for defecation analysis. See, that's called niche porn.
[00:35:20] Will: No, it's not.
[00:35:21] Rod: Computer vision system.
[00:35:22] Will: It's called science.
[00:35:23] Rod: It's called the camera watching you poo in the toilet. It can be both.
[00:35:28] Will: It's looking at the poo.
[00:35:28] Rod: Niche porn can also be science. There's an anal print sensor paired with an identification camera, anal print sensor. Again, try and tell me that's not going into niches as well. Telecommunications link has put your date on the internet. So we'll monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete. They're talking about poo, but that's very it's very useful.
[00:35:50] Will: As we've talked about in the past, you know, the Soviets or the CIA want to track down people's poo to understand how the leaders are going. We can learn a lot from our stool.
[00:35:59] Rod: Psychology prize. Now this is back from 1969. Cause when I first read it, I thought this name is familiar. One of the authors is Stanley Milgram. Oh, the infamous Milgram. Yeah, but this is from 69. He's dead. So obviously he has other authors, Leonard Bickman, Lawrence Berkowitz. For experiments on a city street to see how many passes by stop to look upwards when they see strangers doing it. I love that.
[00:36:22] Will: I would do it. I love that. I was riding home yesterday and there was a couple out for walking their dog or something like that. Maybe they didn't have a dog. They're just out for a walk and it was in a bit of like sort of, foresty bit and there was a Falcon just hovering above the
[00:36:35] Rod: you sure it was a falcon?
[00:36:36] Will: Something like that. It was bird of prey, but it was doing the flapping thing. Like, I'm getting a rabbit. I'm getting a rabbit. Oh yeah. I'm keeping an eye out. And they were watching for, and so I stopped had a look.
[00:36:42] Rod: Of course. But see if they'd been doing that and you didn't quite see the bird, you'd probably still stop from a moment and go wonder were they looking at,
[00:36:47] Will: well, but it could be an asteroid. It could be. You know, it's like, of course we look.
[00:36:51] Rod: Yeah, of course we do. I just, I like the idea
[00:36:52] Will: you're an idiot for not look like that's the, it's so simple. Someone's looking at something, don't not look
[00:36:58] Rod: the Ig Nobel for nutrition. One by Miyashita Homei from Meiji University and Nakamura Hiromi from University of Tokyo for their research on electric chopsticks and drinking straws.
[00:37:10] The bottom line was the taste of food can be changed immediately and reversibly, seems important, by electrical stimulation. And this is something that has been difficult to achieve with conventional ingredients such as seasoning. So basically you can kind of mimic effective saltiness and other things using electricary.
[00:37:29] Will: What you're going to say? Like you get a little buzz in your mouth and it would be, it's okay. That's another flavor. And you're like, I don't just like that. Salt, savory and electricity,
[00:37:37] Rod: umami, sugar, sweet, electricity.
[00:37:41] Will: I mean, I do that. What you can fake salt with electric chopsticks.
[00:37:45] Rod: Well, I think you can fake a lot of things by the sounds of it. Or you, yeah, it sounds quite, I think it's interesting.
[00:37:50] Will: I need a pair.
[00:37:51] Rod: Finally the one that, the last one that caught my attention, the award for medicine. Went to researchers who used cadavers, there's already, you already got my attention, to explore whether each of an individual's nostrils contain an equal number of hairs. Yes. Yes. Science. Science. I mean, yes.
[00:38:19] Will: So really we counted the
[00:38:21] Rod: cadavers too. So no, the only way to make this valid, gotta be dead. Like, why couldn't I just grab you and me and go, can I count your nostril hair?
[00:38:29] I think
[00:38:29] Will: what they're doing is that they're peeling the nose backwards and they can count. They do a slit in the skin of the nose and then you can turn them inside out.
[00:38:37] Rod: I'm okay. For science. So do you know what the prizes are? What do they get? Because COVID, this year's prize, it's a PDF document that can be printed and assembled to make a three dimensional kind of object to do prize. And so that was emailed in advance to the laureates. Yeah. Also this year's winning teams will each receive a 10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe. In 2009 Zimbabwe's economy, their inflation hit 79. 6 billion percent. And they were printing a hundred trillion dollar bills. Which is the largest denomination ever anywhere circulated so they somehow these guys got hold of ten trillion dollar bills because apparently the hundred trillion dollar bills are now worth at least 2016 40 pounds on eBay Yeah, what a great interview. He was a good sport. I'm glad he spoke with you
[00:39:26] Will: I think your point 100 percent is It's the same thing. You know, we want to yeah, we want to talk about science because we believe in science But also science is not just about the most boring
[00:39:37] Rod: No, in fact, quite the reverse.
