The 2015 Ig Nobels: Kisses, Stings & Dino Chickens

Each year, the Ig Nobel prizes honor the weirdest and wackiest contributions to humanity's scientific understanding of the natural world. In this pair of Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast episodes, Robert, Joe and Christian unpack each of this year's winners. In this episode, explore the wonders of dinosaur chickens, medicinal speed bumps, passionate kisses, dino chickens, Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty and the sting index.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, I'm Joe McCormick, and I
am Christian Savior. Hey, and all three of us are
back in here again, talk about the ig Nobel Prizes.

(00:26):
Part Fishing. Yeah. This is part two of the two
part episodes. If you haven't checked out the first part,
you might want to go back and listen to that first.
It was the last episode we did right before this one.
But if you want to just jump right in the middle,
you don't care about any context. I don't want to
know what the prizes are. You just want to hear
about some weird science. Here we are because it's very
modular in that respect, and we one study after the other,

(00:47):
and we will definitely be talking about weird science today.
We are going to be talking about the science of kissing.
These science and how many people, how many babies a
man could possibly have in a certain period of time
of his life, beastings in a sour chickens. We're gonna
talking about speed bumps and the pain that they apply
to us, right, yeah, oh man, But before we get

(01:08):
into that. I want to remind our listeners about our
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we curate all kinds of weird science that we stumble

(01:29):
across throughout the day on the internet. Uh, just yesterday
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you know, keep abreast of all the kind of cool
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(01:50):
on there, and don't forget On Friday's at noon Eastern
Standard time, we will be on the periscope to live
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all of our podcasts, all of our videos, and the

(02:11):
amazing blog posts that mainly Robert composes about things from
electronic music to monsters and cat busses. Right, oh yeah, yeah,
all that good stuff. All right, So let's let's jump
right back into it here and talk about the two
thousand fifteen Ignoble Prize for medicine. Medicine, Well, that was

(02:32):
one of the ones that I looked into, and it
was actually for a collection of four studies. So there
were three by one recipient and then one by a
different group, and they were all studying the scientific consequences
of intense kissing and other intimate interpersonal activity. So you
can see find what the ladder was. Yeah, well we'll

(02:53):
get into that. No, but you can see why this
appealed to the Ignoble committee obviously because it involves making
out and and sexy sex. So because therefore the studies,
my attention is going to have to be rather summary
on these. But the basics of the first group, and
I'm I'm going to try to say they're beautiful Slovakian names.

(03:15):
I apologize to these people if I pronounced them horribly.
But the first group included Yaroslava, Georgia Kova, Peter Cheleich,
Natalia Commodiova, Tatiana said, latch Cova, Gabriella Repisca, Barbara Vizenia,
and Gabrielle Minarik. And there they are, and they were

(03:37):
given the award for their paper Prevalence and Persistence of
male DNA identified in mixed saliva samples after intense kissing
in Forensic Science International Genetics. So their study was an
investigation of how much foreign DNA you could expect to
find in a woman's mouth after she'd been participating in

(04:01):
some quote intense kissing. So here's how the study went.
They got twelve pairs of volunteers to try out some
of this kissing and see how it goes. And they
practiced where the volunteers couples or were they just you know,
I mean, I think they were couples. So they practiced
some intense kissing behavior for about two minutes, and then

(04:25):
afterwards the scientists collected saliva samples from the women in
the couples to look for the presence of male DNA
with modern highly sensitive molecular methods of DNA detection like
multiplex y str PCR, I gotta admit I don't know
the first thing about what that is. But I did
do a little poking around. It appears to be a

(04:46):
real thing. That is a method for detecting the presence
of DNA and and for sampling it. So the researchers
found that they could show the presence of male DNA
and female to live at ten men. It's after the
intense kissing had stopped, and even up to sixty minutes
after the kissing in some cases. So one thing like
I'm inherently curious about right away is why is it

(05:10):
specifically male to female kissing and is there a difference
in homosexual kissing. I don't know about that, But they
did find that they might not be able to say
sixty minutes after the kissing was over who the male
who was kissing the person was, but they can say
this is a male was male, and they are focusing

(05:32):
on mail DNA DNA and the female mouth and not
the reverse the female. About Slovakian French kissing, well, in
a less funny way, I think it has to do
with the potential application of this study, which is that
it would be potentially useful in forensic science that in
cases of sexual assault that involved mouth to mouth context.

(05:53):
So if a saliva sample can be collected quickly enough,
it may contain useful DNA evidence that could be used
against the perpetrator of sexual violence. Gotcha. And and you know,
it's more likely that those perpetrators are going to be male,
so that's probably why they're zeroing in on that. Yes, Okay,
this is one of those studies where to kind of
get into the whole wines it ridiculous, finds it funny.

(06:13):
It's it's kind of like a joke that is funny
on the surface, and then when you go to explain
the joke, you realize that it's actually really serious. Yeah,
and getting kind of dark. Yeah, But I mean, anything
that could help help bring sexual predators to justice, that's
certainly a good thing. Yeah. Absolutely, And I'm kind of
fascinated by the way that they're isolating this stuff too. Yeah. Yeah,

(06:38):
I don't know much about the testing methods that they used,
but it seemed to be that they were just they
were applying modern like the best equipment and best procedures
that we have today, looking for the presence of DNA
to saliva, which was something that hadn't been done yet.
But I said, there are more studies. Yeah, that is
certainly not all in the kissing and interpersonal contact category,

(07:01):
because there are also three studies by Dr how do
You make Chimada, who operates an allergy clinic in the
Osaka Prefecture in Japan, and according to an article I
read in the Japan Times, Kamata quote is continuing to
find a more natural method to relieve allergy symptoms for
his patients without the use of steroids or prescription skin creams.

(07:23):
So like, he seems to be a guy who's interested
in finding ways to help people with bad allergies get
some relief without so much drugs and medication. But do
you guys have bad allergies? I do, Yeah, not so much. Yeah,
I don't really either. So I my wife has very
bad allergies, and so I can sympathize with her pain

(07:46):
and understand what it is like to be out in
the spring and want to, you know, have a have
a full body bubble what they call it, yeah, to
to live separate from the world of nature. But according
to his research, he has found some very promising leads
on natural methods for for getting some allergy relief, and

(08:09):
they involve putting on your copy of Selene Dion's my
heart will go on, but it is not the music itself.
That is just a means to an end. So I'll
briefly mention the reported results of three studies. The first
was called Kissing reduces allergic skin wheel responses and plasma
neurotrophin levels. So here's how it goes. You've got three groups.

(08:31):
You've got thirty normal subjects who are control group. They
don't have any bad allergies. You have thirty people with
allergic rhinitis a are also known as hay fever or
just straight up allergies. When people say I have allergies,
this is what they're talking about. And then you've got
thirty people with a topic dermatitis also known as eggs ema.

(08:52):
And of the latter two groups, all the patients are
allergic to Japanese cedar pollen and the house dust might
and commodically that all of the patients quote do not
kiss habitually. This seemed to be a point he was making.
I think it was an assumption about Japanese culture, and
that like kissing is UH is at least believed to

(09:12):
be not as prevalent in Japanese culture as it is
in lots of other cultures. I don't know the extent
to which that's true today, but that seemed to be
an assumption going into his research. That may well be true.
That seems to match up with some materials and research
in the past. I mean, it gets kind of complicated
because you have all these varying cultures and kissing traditions, um,

(09:35):
and there's a certain amount of universality, but then there's
then there's not in some areas, and then you have
Western culture rolling into these areas, and you have Western
ideals and images of individuals engaging in these passionate kisses,
and that changes everything. Yeah. Um, so so that was
what he said, at least they do not kiss habitually.
And he's Japanese, yes he is. And so the subjects

(09:57):
went into a room with their kissing partner of choic
and they quote kissed freely for thirty minutes while listening
to soft music. And then so the patients underwent the
standard allergists skin prick tests. You'll ever done these, prick
your skin to see if you get a wheel response
and raised red area, and they did mine. They did,

(10:17):
like the whole part of my upper left arm, and
then all across the upper part of my back and
then they basically prick you with the thing that you're
allergic to, and a wheel will rise. If you want
to come in, have a crab claw and a jab
in your arm and then make it. Yeah, it's just
like a cockroach. They're just smashing a cockroach in your
across the crab claw. If you're for shellfish, yeah, okay, right, yeah,

(10:41):
So they got the standard skin wheel response test, the
skin prick test before and after the kissing sessions, and
Chimodic claims that the half hour of kissing quote significantly
reduced wheel responses for both the DustMite allergen and the
Japanese cedar pollen allergen, and though it did not reduce

(11:02):
responses for the pure inflammatory agent histamine. So if you
just gave people histamine directly, that the kissing did not help, well,
does make sense, right, Because you're you're mingling your immune
systems a little bit, You're you're mingling your microbiomes, so
seems like one would rub off on the other. You'd
have some of the soldiers would would take up with

(11:23):
the news. Well, I guess I don't know if I
should be surprised by this or not. I'm kind of curious,
since they gave the test before and after, if they
just gave it before and then did nothing and like
they didn't make out, and then they gave it to
them again afterwards, if they would still have the same results.
You know what I mean? Because interesting question because you're
you're getting an exposure in your system already, right, and

(11:47):
then thirty minutes go by, and then that you're exposed
and tested again. So I wonder just how how much
naturally your body would would react less to the inflammation. Yeah.
So anyway, after or the end of that, come out
of concluded that kissing quote might have some implication in
the study of neuroimmunology in allergic patients. And then there

(12:08):
were a couple more studies that were pretty much along
the same lines. The second one was called reduction of
allergic skin wheel responses by sexual intercourse in allergic This
guy is like the mad scientists. He's just he's just
coming up with reasons so he can watch people make
out and have sex. Oh. I don't think he was watching. Oh,
but then clearly the data is erroneous. Uh. The study

(12:31):
found almost exactly the same thing, except to replace thirty
mins of kissing with some sexual intercourse um in allergic people,
it reduced skin wheel responses for Japanese cedar pollen and
dust mites, but not for pure histamines, So the same
pattern as the other one. And in normal non allergic people,

(12:52):
sex didn't change anything about skin wheel responses. Okay, so
there you got it. What's what's dr creepy? Third study?
The third one, it's it's pretty much along the same lines.
It's kissing selectively decreases allergen specific i g E production
in a topic patients. Again, this is looking at at
like skin responses like eggs ama and he found essentially

(13:15):
that kissing could alleviate some allergic symptoms by the decrease
of what he calls allergen specific i GE production. So
so basically, the the thrust of this guy's work in
this area is that is that kissing and other intimate
interpersonal contact may help with your allergies. Okay, all right, Well,

(13:39):
next time I'm having problems, I guess I'll have to
address that with my wife. But I'd rather than take
a lauratodin or whatever I mean, regular paces or use
my name. I wonder how many minutes of kissing it
takes and at least apparently well no, maybe maybe it
would have been the same with ten minutes. Who knows, uh?

(14:00):
And so okay, so if it takes like thirty minutes
of kissing or the people, are there some people who
would be like thirty minutes of kissing, I don't have
time for that. I'll just take the drugs. Yeah, exactly right.
That's a I don't know, it's a great commercial for
like an anti histamine. It's just like, would you do
you really have time to kiss someone for thirty minutes?

(14:23):
Or would you just like to drink this night? Well
or whatever? I'll never sleep again. Well, this study is
a makes a great segue. I see now why the
ignoble UH committee put these next to one another. Nice
transition segue into the mathematics prize, which is all about UH.

(14:45):
A guy named Mulai Ismail the blood Thirsty, who I
had not heard of before this. No, I was not
familiar with this character either. I mean, he sounds impressive.
Was he thirsty for blood? He was? Indeed, and I
will tell you all about him. The paper itself was
written by E. Obern Soccer and K. Grammar. In the

(15:07):
case the studies called the case of mulai Ismail fact
or fancy and this was also in p L O. S. One. Uh. So, Okay,
the basics here are that these researchers developed a computer
simulation to program to determine if the myth of mulai
Ismail having actually sired eight hundred and eighty eight children,

(15:30):
as per the Guinness Book of World Records was true.
So the Guinness Book of World Record says he sired
eight hundred and eight children. These people want to find
out if it's even physically possible for him to do that.
They found that he could, and not only that, but
he could have much more than eight hundred and eighty
eight children during his lifetime. So he's really an underachiever. Well,

(15:51):
actually no, it turns out that there's reports that he
had more. Uh. They also narrowed down how many times
a day he would have to copulate and how many
women would need to be part of his harem for
this whole operation to work. Uh. And they used different models.
The first model was a random mating pool where he
had unrest unrestricted access to women. The second model, though,

(16:15):
it was a quote restricted harem pool, in which basically
they took account for as women got pregnant, they would
be removed from the harem for at least eighteen months
to account for their pregnancy and lack patient times. And
then they used three different models for looking at the
likelihood of conception across the female cycle. That's they're phrasing,

(16:36):
not mine, but basically the ideas they based these these
models in different conditions in which ovulation might happen, or
like whether or not the sperm would be potent, or
whether or not the birth control methods somehow being enacted here, right,
So the three models that they used, or the Wilcox
Weinberg model, the Barrett Martial model, and then the Joe

(16:58):
shiel I Believe model UH. And they found with these
three models that roughly UH it would take one point
four three times per day with the first one, one
point six three times per day with the second one,
and only point eight three times of copulation per day
with the third one. So they took into account things
like menstruation being a taboo or there's an idea that's

(17:22):
been reported on another research that people are more attracted
to one another during opulation periods UH. And and of
course the viability of his sperm decreasing per year as
he got older. They added all this stuff into their
computer simulation model UH, and even when restricted to the
second model UH, they found that he would be able

(17:44):
to sire the fabled number of offspring. In fact, he
would be able to sire at least one thousand, one
hundred and seventy one children UH. And that his harem,
even though it was reported to be five hundred and
four women strong, it wouldn't need to be much larger
than somewhere between sixty to ten women for him to

(18:06):
achieve this UH. That it might have been that he
actually did have a harem that was five hundred people,
but that that was for other reasons of potentially he
wanted to keep women out of the reach of other
men and their reproductive potential right, so that he was
he was sort of fathering the next generation. It was

(18:27):
probably rare. They also found for each woman in the
harem to have had intercourse with him more than once
because of the large amount of women that were in
the harem. So you know, you you essentially you have
intercourse with him, you get pregnant, you have a child,
there's a lactation period, and then When the concubines within

(18:50):
the Harem reached the age of thirty, they were kicked
out isn't the right word, but they weren't part of
the Harem anymore. He didn't want anybody over the age
of thirty in his hair. Wow. Yeah, I haven't even
gotten to why they call him the bloodthirsty yet. This
is just all about his h sexual conquests. So uh,

(19:11):
Sheriff Iron. He's referred to as the Sheriff Iron Emperor
of Morocco Moulay Ishmael the blood Thirsty. He was in
power from sixteen seventy two to seventeen twenty seven and
became emperor when he was twenty five. So he was
the first great Sultan of the Moroccan Aloe Wheat dynasty. Okay,

(19:32):
and sheriff Ian means that he claimed to be descended
from Mohammed, the founder of Islam. His rule was the
longest in Moroccan history, and towards the end he had
an army of a hundred and fifty thousand men. He
supposedly started his reign by mounting the heads of four
hundred enemy chiefs at the city of Fez. Over fifty

(19:53):
five years, He's estimated to have killed thirty thousand people.
And that's not including those in battle. This is just
at his whimsy. He killed people, Okay, okay, and I'll
give you some examples of that. Any women who were
suspected of adultery were strangled personally by him. So any
any of his concubines or any of his wives who

(20:15):
he suspected, he strangled them or their breasts were cut
off or their teeth were torn out. WHOA. This included
former concubines. So even if you hit the age of
thirty and were allowed to leave the harem, you were
still not allowed to have intercourse with any other man.
So he, you know, committed violence against all these women.
Just a real winner. Oh yeah, he's a real cheery individual.

(20:40):
Any man who looked at one of his wives. He
had four wives, and then the five concubines. But any
man who looked at the wives or the concubines were
punished by the death penalty. I don't think he physically
did it himself as he did with the women, but
he was bloodthirsty, as the name you know implies. So
they looked at this report, the researchers that was written

(21:02):
by a French diplomat named Dominique bus Not from seventeen
o four and at the time he was visiting. He
said that Moulay had six hundred sons with his four
wives and five hundred concubines. However, only the daughters from
his four wives were allowed to live. Those from the
concubines were suffocated by the midwives at birth, so he

(21:26):
only wanted male offspring from the concubines. In total, uh,
even you know, including all of the children that were uh,
you know, supposedly suffocated by these midwives, that comes down
to one thousand, one seventy one children in the span
of thirty two years. So why is it ridiculous? Well,

(21:46):
you know, what do we learn from confirming this legend
about this man's sexual prowess? Right? That seems pretty weird
that they spent all this time looking into this. Yeah. Well,
I mean, as as nasty and sensational and uh and
cruel as the details of the story are, I mean,
I guess it could be actually interesting from just a

(22:07):
mathematics of studying population generation perspective, Like if you want
to look at at how animal populations reproduce themselves under
certain constraints, like this one, it might be useful to you. Yeah, absolutely,
sort of like Last Man on Earth scenario or repopulating

(22:28):
a world that's exactly it that there, you know, there's
value to this. It's important because they're trying to figure out,
you know, given it a certain scenario, you know, where
there's only one man who can potentially do this, like
oh why the last Man quite type scenario. You know
where actually I feel like this could be useful would
be in in uh, trying to deal with endangered species,

(22:50):
like if you if you have a species in captivity
where you may only have like one one reproducing male
or something like, yeah, absolutely, uh. And so for compare
Sin Genghis Khan is another one that's sort of fabled
to have had many sexual encounters and subsequent offspring. Uh.
He had so many offspring in the thirteenth century that

(23:12):
eight percent of the men that live currently in the
region of his former empire carry almost identical why chromosomes
to his. And they've figured out that that's sixteen million descendants.
So you can see now, you know why trying to
do the math on this and and essentially developing this
program so they can they can map this out is important,

(23:34):
so you can figure out sort of genealogy, right, So
it is actually telling us something about how the world works,
not just about the particulars of this one really nasty
guy in history. Yeah, I mean in fact, like yes,
like the the historical narrative of him is you know,
brutal and and sad. Yeah. I had to look him

(23:55):
up when you were talking, just too, in the hope
that he had like a satisfying death for me. He
got his come up and did he did? You know?
I didn't see any mention of assassins slicing him to pieces.
I believe I may be wrong about this, but I
believe that his dynasty and his descendants are still in

(24:15):
power and Morocco, so he's the you know, progenitor of
this dynasty essentially. Yeah. Yeah, it's like real life Game
of Thrones, awful individual thinking about. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But
you know, they've got these three different models in this
computer program now, so that they can apply that to
you know, various other circumstances. And if we're in a

(24:37):
circumstance where there's only one man left alive, we know
who to turn to to find out how many children
they can have to keep the human race. Going all right, well,
let's let's move on to the next one. This one
is the two fifteen Ignoble Prize and Biology. And this one,
this one was a lot of fun to look into.
The actual paper is walking like Dinosaurs Chickens with artificial

(24:58):
tails provide clues about non avian there apot look emotion
by Bruno Grassi, Jose Errat, diez Omar Larch, Marcurio Canalis
and Rodrigo A. Vasquez. And this was published in Plus
one two thousand fourteen. So the basics here. Um, if

(25:20):
you want to study dinosaur biology outside of looking at
fossil remains, modern birds are a great study a because,
of course birds are pretty much the modern dinosaur. Right there,
can see that the direct lenage the evolution. However, a
lot has changed with the with the basic anatomy since
the age of the dinosaurs. For instance, living birds maintain

(25:43):
an unusually crouched hind limb posture and locomotion powered by
knee flection. Meanwhile, we generally infer that non avian therapods
from the dinosaur age kept a more upright posture and
their limb movement was powered by femur retraction. So so
I'm thinking velociraptors from Charassea Park. Yeah. Yeah, so you know,

(26:06):
similar similar bills that is known for its scientific accuracy
by the way, Yeah, so we're talking similar bill, but
we're talking you know, different ways of motion and ultimately
different center of mass. And so in this particular joint
US Chile and study, the researchers set out to quote
experimentally manipulate the location of the center of mass and

(26:27):
living birds. And what better way to do that than
to raise some chickens with artificial tails stuff to their bums.
And it's and it's key here that they were they
had the artificial tail during key growth phases, so they
would they would stick it on, they stuck out on
early and they kept having to change it up because
the bird group. So for our for our audience, in

(26:49):
the notes, Robert has inserted a picture of Donald Duck
with a plunger on his butt. Yes, and I mean,
I can't remember exactly what Disney cartoon this is from,
but it instantly came to my mind and it it
hg is up pretty perfectly with what they actually did,
because the tail in the experiment was make them wear
a little sailor upfits sadly not, I mean, but they

(27:10):
did have an elastic fabric coat with Velcrow fasteners to
hold this on because it's essentially the tail was a
wooden stick set in a clay molding base that was
then held on with with Velcrow and elastic, and they
replaced it every five days. As the chickens group. But yeah,
if you remember Donald Duck with a plunger on his
but that's exactly what this consisted of. UM, so that

(27:33):
what But what this accomplished is that it effectively moved
the chickens center of mass towards the posterior, and the
chickens did, in fact demonstrate quote a more vertical orientation
of the femur during standing and increased femeral displacement during locomotion.
So I'd have to go back and rewatch that Disney cartoon.
But I'm assuming Donald Duck did not walk differently, UH,

(27:57):
that his gate didn't change, the center of mass didn't
change in the cartoon based on a plunger, but this
experiment proved that he would have. UM. This is not
all that far away from the research that we were
looking at last week on the podcast about UM why
certain early humans had short legs because it enabled their

(28:17):
center of gravity to be better for fighting and grappling. Yeah. Yeah,
it's very very much just about just how the creature's
position and ultimately what the creatures doing. A chicken a
modern nut, you know, domesticated chicken versus this, uh, this
ancient creature. So why is it funny? Of course, chickens
are inherently funny. We all know that just the sound

(28:38):
of the chicken is funny, and sticking the plunger on
ones but even funnier, especially if it's ultimately about exploring dinosaurs,
which you're generally not inherently funny, but you know, inherently cool.
Do you think there's ever a point with the research
in the Ignoble Prizes where the researchers kind of set
back one afternoon and they said, all right, let's stick

(29:00):
a plunger on the chicken's butt. That's essentially what they did,
and from there work our way back to write an
academic paper about this that the scientific justification of the
plunger on the butt. Yeah. I like the idea of
the researchers, like after it's after it's published and they're
feeling proud of their work. They end up what seeing

(29:21):
some Disney cartoons on TV and like, oh my god,
that's where that can that's anatomically inaccurate. Um, No, I
believe them. I believe that this was done in good
faith and for good scientific reasons. Yeah. Yeah, and it's
it's it ultimately helps us understand the anatomy of these
ancient creatures and help us better understand the evolution that's

(29:43):
taken place with this form um. And they also point
out that through careful of phenotypic manipulation of of of
our modern birds, we can actually quote open new avenues
of experimental invest stigation into unexplored faucets of dinosaur local
locomotive mechanics and energetic So so, unless I'm misunderstanding that

(30:08):
they're saying we can genetically engineer birds to turn back
into dinosaurs, Yeah, that's I mean, that's some some research
has been on the table for for a while that
there are various various ways you can sort of turn
turn various a genetic and epigenetic traits on and off
and hearken back to earlier morphological modes. Well, as I

(30:29):
learned in Jurassic World, these have the you know, military
possibility you could send in a pack of these genetically
modified birds into take out some enemies of the state.
So I have a question for you guys. It always
happens in the movies that the military is interested in
the creation of monsters that kill people. Has there ever

(30:52):
been a real military experiment in creating monsters that kill people? Um?
To a certain extent, you can look at various UM
projects that involved using animals as explosive delivery devices. Are
you also using animals as spy devices? That's true, Yeah,
you got your spy pigeons, you got your dog that

(31:14):
runs under a tank with a bomb on effect. But
but I mean like giant scorpions. Um, this sounds like
you get into some sort of gray areas here. You know,
in terms of how much of this is actually is
there any truth to it, and how much of it
is just hearsay in mythology, you do see some this

(31:35):
is a whole separate podcast, but you do see some
some arguments that the Soviets were interested in creating some
sort of man ape um, you know, hybrid that would
have probably if you give those stories any credence, they
would have probably been used for labor and I'm not
sure I get those stories any credence. I feel like
this is something we need to do some more research

(31:56):
and tackle for an episode. It sounds like, I mean,
all of the goal all the best movies begin with
a creature that's designed by the military as a weapon
but then gets loose on an airplane. Species. Oh they
get it from like yeah, it's like an alien like code,
but the military are the ones who are developing. But anyway,

(32:21):
getting back to the study with the chicken with the
plunger on us, but I do think, I don't know,
it's interesting because having great movies like Jurassic Park and stuff,
we can forget that we've never actually seen a dinosaur move. Yeah,
because of the movies are so good and they stick
in the mind. We think we've seen what it's like
for a Tyrannosaurs rex to walk, but we haven't. We

(32:43):
don't know what it would be like. We've seen those illustrations,
we've seen representations of how we think they move, but again,
all that is is based on looking at the fossil
remains comparing those two existing creatures, and this is uh,
this is an experiment that kind of bridges the gap
between its yeah, Hey, so I think it's time to
take a quick break to hear about our sponsor for

(33:05):
this episode. But after that we're gonna come right back
and talk about more weird science. Okay, Well, I think
if it's time to talk about the next award. This
next one was the prize given in physiology and entomology.
So that's kind of a weird mixture study of the

(33:27):
body and study of insects. And the essential unifying factor
here is insect stings, stinging insects and the pain they inflict.
So there were there were two different recipients for for
different studies on this award. It was Dr Justin oh
Schmidt was the first one, and then also Michael L. Smith.

(33:47):
So Schmidt is an American entomologist who has been studying
stinging insects like wasps, ants, bees for decades a long time,
and over the course of his career he's been stung
at lot. He's been stung just inadvertently, it happens. I
think there are some people who have reported that he
he set out intentionally to get himself stung by a

(34:09):
thousand different insects, and that's not necessarily true. But over
the course of his career, he has been inadvertently stung
more than a thousand times, and he's ranked the stings
of dozens of insects. The last figure I saw is
seventy eight different insects species by the level of pain
inflicted by the stings is purely subjective based on his

(34:30):
experience of the stings. Yes, both of these studies are
going to be inherently subjective. But at the same time,
I think useful because I mean, there are lots of
phenomena we study that are inherently subjective. But itself is
difficult to the class behind this regard. Yeah, they're inherently
you don't know the meaning of the word, right, They're
they're inherently subjective, but you can you can see trends emerge.

(34:53):
But you know, if you have a bunch of people
rate pain, you'll eventually discovered that it does actually more
on average to get hit in the head with a
hammer than it does to get flicked in the cheek
or something. But anyway, the scale, he he created a
scale that's known as the Schmidt sting pain index, and

(35:14):
so the scale goes from zero to four. A zero
is no effect at all. One is kind of a small,
little spark of pain, like a sweat bee or something.
A two is going to be a for a common
sting like the sting of a honey bee of APIs
MALIFERA three is a more kind of intense, powerful, really

(35:36):
troubling pain, and they're there are a bunch of insects
he lists that can give things like that, and then
A four is just melt your brain pain. An example
of level four is the tropical bullet ant parapone Era clavata,
which is pain that It's been described in a lot
of ways. I want to sort of summarize the things

(35:56):
I've read about it by saying it's like having a
hot nail shoved into your bones and the pain lasts
for twenty four hours. There is and speaking of the
animals that we could utilize for military purposes, oh yeah,
bullet ants, Yeah, some giant bullet at Also around four
is the tarantula hawk, which you can actually run into

(36:17):
in the United States, I think in the Southwest. Really,
this stuff is like if it'll if it stings you,
it's just unbearable. It's not lethal, right right, Well, I
don't know if if it's impossible for it to be lethal,
but I haven't read anything about it being lethal, I mean,
at least not regular and not to a person who

(36:38):
doesn't have an existing allergic reaction, right, yeah. Uh. And
so there's actually, if you want to read it, there
are plenty of places out on the internet where the
Schmidt sting pain scale has been supplemented with these kind
of wine tasting style descriptions that originally came out of
an article that he gave some quotes to in the

(37:00):
nineteen nineties. And it's pretty funny. I'm not going to
read through all of them here, but you know, it
would be like, oh, sort of like light fruity pain
had a flutter of strawberries, Like what's that movie Sideways? Oh? Yeah, yeah,
you know, I can imagine a future where you'll have
the human race it's so jaded by pleasurable distant stations

(37:22):
that they do have to explore. It's the cinemabytes, yeah,
exploring the limits of pleasure and pain intertwined. But anyways,
Schmidt first published a version of his sting pain index
in the nineteen eighty three paper Hemolytic Activities of Stinging
Insect Venoms in the Journal Insect Biochemistry and Physiology, and
he has since expanded and refined his scale in some

(37:45):
subsequent publications, and so now it's pretty big. You know,
it's got at least seventy eight insects. He might have
added more since then. But while there is some inherent
subjectivity to this, I think it's interesting that it's useful
to have ways of care aracterizing the levels of inflicted
pain by different insects so that we can study things
like insect venom and its effects. If you don't have

(38:08):
something like a sting pain scale, how do you begin
to study the relationship between like venom compounds and sting
pain or treatment. Sure, yeah, leading to treatment studies. Yeah,
But one of the things that Schmidt had acknowledged in
some of his earlier work is that different sting locations

(38:28):
on the body will make a difference. But he didn't
try to formulate a scale to reflect that. You know,
the map of pain across the body, Well, that's my
my new horror story map of pain. Oh no, it
makes me think about Jeffrey Combs and the Frighteners and
my body is a roadmap of pain. But in a

(38:53):
Cornell graduate student in neurobiology and behavior named Michael L.
Smith published a paper explore dring this theme, which it
was a different variable on the same question. So instead
of measuring the relative pain experience of stings inflicted by
different insects, he decided to measure the difference of pain
inflicted by the same insect stinging different places on the

(39:16):
body on himself. Okay, So Smith had been studying honeybee
behavior and evolution, and according to an interview he gave
to National Geographic, he was inspired to do this experiment
after a bee flew up his shorts and stung him
in the testicles. That would definitely be an inspiring situation

(39:36):
of silence from Michael L. Smith and his testicles. Yeah,
so the paper he wrote it doesn't stop there because
the paper he wrote it is called honey Bee Sting
Pain Indexed by Body Location. You can read the full
text online. It's available for free, and it is it's
it's certainly not going to win an award for like
the most rigorous methodology in the world because the number

(39:58):
of subjects is one the author himself, and the reporting
is inherently subjective. As we've been talking about, all of
this admitted in good humor by the author. It's not
like he's trying to make a bigger deal of it
than days. But it is a pretty fun read if
you're interested in some dry humor. A great example is

(40:18):
in his methods section, he says Cornell University's Human Research
Protection Program does not have a policy regarding researcher self experimentation,
so this research was not subject to review from their offices.
The methods do not conflict with the Helsinki Declaration of
ve revised in nineteen eighty three. The author was the
only person stung was aware of all associated risks therein,

(40:42):
gave his consent and is aware that these results will
be made public. Um, so his method was pretty interesting.
The research was carried out in and Smith picked twenty
five different locations on the body to test with the
standard stimulus of a honey bee sting. And the honey
bee sting is a good choice for a standard stimulus

(41:03):
because it's right in the middle of the Schmidt scale,
you remember, Yeah, so it's right in the middle. It's
it hurts, but it's not blinding pain. I'm guessing it's
also easy to control the number of stings. Yeah, that's
true also, and it's a familiar reference point for many
people in the world, a lot of people have been
stung by honey bees. So during the test, Smith goated

(41:25):
bees to sting him five times every day, always between
nine am and ten am, to avoid the sort of
pain perception variants that could be related to time of day.
It's possible that you might feel more pain in the
evening or something, So between nine and ten Back up
for a second, why would that be because of like
he just wanted he just wanted to eliminate that there,

(41:47):
he just had us. Yeah, so it's always between nine
and ten am. He'd get stung five times, and the
sting session would start with a calibration sting on the forearm,
which he used as his intern old standard. He gave
the forearms sting a five point oh pain rating out
of ten and so that's right in the middle. So
all of the other stings were rated relative to what

(42:09):
it feels like to get stung right on the forearm
by a honeybee. Is it worse? Is it not as bad?
And then he so he rated the test locations relative
to that, and then he would sting himself three times
in various test locations with a calibration sting before and
after on the forearm. So I have a question. Yeah,

(42:29):
how do you goa to the bees to sting you
in specific ways? Oh, I'm getting to that part. In fact,
just let me read you a quote straight from his
materials quote. Bees were taken from the cage haphazardly with
four steps to to apply the sting. The bee was
grabbed by the wings and plus pressed against the desired

(42:53):
sting location. The bee was held against the sting location
until the sting was first felt, and kept at the
location for five seconds to ensure that the stinger would
penetrate the skin. The bee was pulled away after five seconds,
leaving the stinger in the skin. The stinger was left
in the skin for one minute and then removed with
four steps. So he just to he thought it out,

(43:17):
and then he made a roadmap of pain. Oh we're
looking at the map of pain now. Yeah. So it's
marks all the places on the body where he stung himself.
And it's pretty funny to imagine how he got the
bee to sting him, for example, on the buttocks and
the back of the neck. And there must have been
some kind of must have had help, right, he probably
had like a like an intern. I don't know, he

(43:39):
didn't say anything about that, but anyway, he found some results.
So out of the twenty five places, he found that
the least painful places to get stung were the skull,
the middle toe tip, and the upper arm. That's inter right,
because I would have thought the buttock for some reason,
you know, I mean, that seems like a great And

(44:01):
then he found that the three most painful locations were
the nostril, the upper lip, and the penis shaft, which
got a nine point oh out of ten for the
nostril and eight point seven for the upper lip and
a seven point three for the penis shaft. I wouldn't
have thought about the nostril being that bad, but yeah,
I'm gonna get to the nostril in a minute. So

(44:24):
Smith found that for him, a few things were interestingly
ruled out. He found that the side of the body
was not a significant factor in pain perception, so left
or right doesn't matter. I found that the date of
stinging did not matter, and the order of stinging per
round did not matter. The most significant factor in pain
variation was, as predicted, the location of the sting. So

(44:47):
in short, it doesn't much matter whether you get stung
on Wednesday and Thursday. It matters if you get stung
on the knee or on the nipple, Okay, And so
I wanted to do a little test and see if
you guys can guess the following without looking. Okay, So
I'm gonna I'm gonna give you three places to get
stung and see if you can rank them in order
of least painful the most painful. Okay, upper thigh, foot arch,

(45:13):
so the instep, the sole of your foot, foot arch,
and behind the ear. Oh m hmmm. I would do
you want us both to do it? I would say
arch as of the foot is worse, and then and
then behind the ear and then thigh. Yeah. I'm kind

(45:34):
of going based on people I know who've had tattoos
uh done in those areas and how much pain they experience,
And so I think it's going to be behind the ear,
the foot arch, and then the thigh and at the end. No,
so they were all pretty close, but it was actually
in the order I said. The least painful was the

(45:55):
upper thigh, the second most painful was the foot arch,
and then the most painful was behind the ear. I
just was doing it in reverse orders. Sorry. Yeah, So
that's four point seven, five point and five point three respectively.
All pretty close. Yeah, not very far off. Now I

(46:16):
got three more for you, so you can do these
screwed um, buttock nipple. Okay, from least to most. Yeah,
I've got to go buttock nipple screwed hum. Would you agree?
Christian no Leasta wears buttock screwed um nipple for me? Okay,

(46:41):
Robert was right, it goes buttock nipple screwed um. The
nipple and screwed um are very close. The screwed um
was a seven point o out of ten, the nipples
six point seven and the buttock three point seven. He
points out also in the paper that this is limited
by also mail at enemy, so he's having stings on location,
so get stung on. I'm curious about the gender applications.

(47:04):
And he couldn't convince any of his female colleagues. He
couldn't convince anybody. I don't know if he tried, but
it was a kind of study where you might realize
I'm the only one. He's the game for this. Well,
you know he as he kind of pointed out like
it would probably introduce complications with ethics review if he
was trying to get other people to submit to this,

(47:24):
so he just did it to himself and in the
spirit of science. I think it's interesting what he found.
Why it's ridiculous, that's fairly obvious because it involves grabbing
these with tweezers and pressing them against your nipples until
they attack. Um, just like I kind of wish, and
I don't know, like maybe he did, maybe he didn't,
but he was like documenting the whole thing, and that

(47:45):
there's just like like twenty years from now, this series
of photos is going to come out of him, like
with the forceps applying them in various areas or the audio.
I would, oh, yeah, that'd be good too. Yeah, that's
just a whole podcast on its own, just getting stung
by peace different areas and listening to people yelling pain.
Uh yeah. So I think that this actually is, believe

(48:09):
it or not, despite the small sample size and the
subjective nature of it, I do think it's interesting research this,
both the Schmidt Sting Pain Index and the subsequent body
road map of pain, because there certainly not as objective
as like taking your temperature with the thermometer or measuring
your white cell count or something. But They're important for

(48:30):
helping us characterize the relationship between insects, venoms and the
subjective sensations they produce. Uh, it would be more useful
in the future probably to repeat these same types of
experiments just with larger sample size, just get more people
to get stung and report how much pain they felt.
But again that that presents an experimental problem. It's hard

(48:51):
to get an experiment like that ethically. Yeah, but if
you combine Schmidt's research, his his pain index, and this,
you get like a fairly interesting roadmap of pain. Yeah,
you ultimately, I mean that's what it's It's about your
mapping an unmapped area, which kind of goes back to
the fly mold analogy and science. What if it was scorpions.

(49:14):
I don't know, that's maybe that's his next project. Well,
and this is like the jackass of academic studies. Yeah,
getting getting like hit in the face like Johnny Knoxville
publishes and p l O S one like like this
is what happens when you jump off a trampoline when
you're naked into a pit of snakes. I don't think

(49:38):
they do the snakes, No, No, they do it. They
do a bit of nails. Yeah. Anyway, though, another interesting
takeaway from this was not just about the venom and
the sting pain, but about human responses. So one of
the things that Smith pointed out in his research was
that it's kind of weird how the most pain full

(50:00):
sting of all of them was a sting to the nostril.
He says that it was the especially violent. It was
a nine point o out of ten. He really did
not want to repeat that one, though he knew he
had to for the experiment, and he was not looking
forward to it. But he said that the nostrils stings
were especially violent, immediately inducing sneezing, tears and a copious

(50:21):
flow of mucus. Uh. And then he also points does
that make sense that they're probably fairly sensitive. Yeah, and
he's He says the sting did autautomize in the nostril,
meaning it it cut itself off, so the stinger gets separated, um,
and then the bee is removed, but the stinger stays
in uh. And he mentions that the copious full of mucus, however,

(50:42):
may help prevent subsequent stings to the area during a
natural attack. So that's something that we might now understand
better about humans in this scenario where if you're actually
getting stung by bees in the wild, putting all this
mucus out might prevent more bees from the stinging you
in that place. That's good. That's a good I think
it requires further research by some some brave, foolish individual. Well,

(51:09):
so anyway, I very much enjoyed reading about that, and
I hope that there is at least one more study
about pain. Oh there is, yes. Our final study here
is the two thousand fifteen Ignoble Prize for Diagnostic Medicine,
and it deals entirely with speed bumps and appendicitis. So

(51:29):
the actual and and this is I was really fascinated
by this because I I have not suffered appendicitis. I
have not had my appendix out, so I can't directly
relate to the pain. And I'm and kind of look
about their last time. I haven't just go on these
subjective accounts of what that pain is like. Um. The
paper in question here is Pain over speed Bumps and
Diagnosis of Acute Appendicitis Colon Diagnostic Accuracy Study. And this

(51:53):
is from Helen f Ashdown, Nigel Dososa, uh Delilah Caramer
j Stevens, Andrew Huang, and Anthony Harndon. And these are
all researchers from the University of Oxford and Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Okay,
so here's the basic deal. You have acute appendicitis, all right,

(52:16):
and it's it's this is actually the most common surgical
abdominal emergency, and rapid diagnosis of appendicitis is critical because
the more time that passes between diagnosis and surgical treatment,
the greater the risk for complications and even death. You
gotta get it fixed quick right. And then this is
where it gets trickier. There's no specific clinical diagnostic test

(52:39):
for appendicitis. We don't have a device that you can
point at the body. There's not a blood test. Most
all of it has to depend. It just depends on
the doctor talking to somebody, getting their subjective feedback about
the pain they're experiencing. And then the doctor has to
has to make a call do we do we cut

(52:59):
them open? Do we not kind them open with performer
or do or do we not? And as a result,
the rate of negative appendectomy that's surgery performed performed on
a healthy appendix ranges from four percent to yeah. So
clinical diagnosis especially that early diagnosis can be challenging because

(53:23):
you want to catch it early, but you if it's
it's early, it's gonna be harder to determine if that's
actually what's going on. And you don't want to remove
a healthy appendix. You don't want to perform unnecessary surgery
on people for a variety of reasons. So one possibility
emerges here, and that is the role of speed bumps because,
as it turns out, into the literal federal speed on

(53:46):
the road, lumps of asphalt that make your car, truck
or bus go blah blah blah blom up and down. Because,
as it turns out, individuals coming into the hospital for
appendicitis or suspected in appendicitis often find those speed bumps
really painful to go over, and emergency rooms have lots
of speed bumps in front of them usually, Yeah, I
think so it would make sense. Yeah, it's like the

(54:08):
no wake sign of the hospital. You don't want people
zooming around. Yeah. Yeah. So, as it turns out, some
doctors actually incorporate this into their diagnostics. Uh, when asking
somebody about their pain, trying to determine if they have
a pendicidis, they might ask them, well, what was it
like going over the speed bump or the series of
speed bumps coming into the hospital. Yeah, so that's why

(54:29):
those speed bumps are there. Well, it makes you, in
this study roll, I think, ultimately make you think that
any hospital that doesn't have speed bumps and needs them,
because what they did is they decided to look into
this right to see if there's any actual validity too
doctors asking about this? Should a doc? Should all doctors
ask about speed bumps? Uh and and abdominal pain. So

(54:53):
this is a really fun paper. I'm not gonna read
the whole intro, but I also really love that it
has one of these very clinical intros that define finds
what a speed bump is and why we have them. Um.
But the study itself examined a hundred and one patients
who were referred to the hospital for suspected appendicitis to
testing took place in two thousand twelve and patients were

(55:14):
between seventeen and seventy six years of age. Patients were
classed as speed bump positive if they had a worsening
of pain while traveling over the speed bumps, and they
were classified as speed bump negative if their pain stayed
the same if they were unsure or if their pain improved.
Wait a second, of people who were like, oh I

(55:34):
feel better that way back on the speed bump, it
was just I think I think we got it. So
all the participants were in question within twenty four hours
of their journey of the hospital. So these are the findings.
Sixty four patients traveled over speed bumps on the way
to the hospital. Fifty four of those were speed bump positive.
Thirty four of the sixty four had a confirmed diagnosis

(55:58):
of acute appendicitis, in which thirty three that's had worse
in pain over speed bumps. Seven patients who were speed
bump positive did not have appendicitis, but they did have
other significant problems such as ruptured or varian cyst or diverticulitis.
So in the end, they concluded that an increase in
pain over speed bumps is associated with an increased likelihood

(56:21):
of acute appendicitis and it should be a key part
of any doctor doctor's questioning during diagnosis. This is this
is one of those ones that seems well, first of all,
I just used huh in the way that wasn't diagnosed
in the previous report, But Also, this is one of
the ones that just seems like common sense that you
wouldn't need an academic or rigorous investigation done well, But

(56:46):
it's a good thing to do. It's one of those
where science is coming in and saying, yeah, it's like, we, well,
we know what's down that hallway. Do we need science
to check it? Well? How we do, because you can
imagine a scenario where the search would have said the
opposite instead. Actually, it's just willy nilly one way or
the other. This is no better than some medieval technique

(57:09):
of questioning the humors, you know. I mean that is
a standard response that I pretty much always opposed when
people say, like, oh, we didn't need to study to
show this this is obvious. I mean when you say that,
it just sounds like you're saying, our intuitions are good enough.
Our intuitions are not good enough, Our intuitions are wrong

(57:29):
all the time. This is like what science is good
for is figuring out whether or not your intuitions are correct. Yeah, uh,
you know that. This also gets into why this study
is funny and ridiculous, because the idea of a speed
bump a lump of asphalt serving is a diagnostic tool
in uh, in diagnosing a very real and very dangerous condition. Uh.

(57:54):
I mean there's this something just ridiculous about that. And
then of course it all ties back into the idea
that we don't have a a better diagnostic system, right, Yeah,
Like they don't have a way to test this other
than asking them what their experience was like hitting the
speed bump on the way. And well, I wonder what
like if models of vehicles come into play, you know,

(58:15):
like if you're in a Range Rover going over speed
bump versus a Dodge Challenger. But you know, oh yeah,
like you know the suspension in your car, that would
definitely be a factor. Yeah. It makes me wonder too
if there's a if they might just create some sort
of like funky Halloween chair that you set in the
doctor's office. The kind of does that does that hurt?

(58:37):
Sit in the bump chair? Um? Yes, I mean it's
a oh man, I can't wait for the scene in
the James Bond movie where somebody they get him to
test the bump chair, but then one of the henchmen
tries to kill him by turning the bump chair all
the way up like in Moon Raker and they put
him in the G four simulator. That would be good,
But it wouldn't he have to have an appenducitis for

(59:00):
it to work. No, No, you can just bump them
to death with the sheer forces of it. Okay, do
you know what I'm talking about, Roger Moore? I mean, yeah,
I need to see that one again because it's to
think it was the worst, but maybe it's the best,
because I've kind of gotten to the point in my
life where I don't know that I like any of

(59:20):
the James Bond films, so maybe I need to see
the the worst of them to appreciate the Again. I
was just talking about this with a friend the other day.
It's really moon Raker when I was a little kid,
but I don't know that it would hold up now.
All right, today you haven't. Hey, If you want to
check out each of these studies in more detail, check
out the landing page for this episode it's Stuff to

(59:41):
Blow your Mind dot Com. We'll make sure that their
links to related content on the website, to the how
stuff Works article about the Ignoble Prizes that I wrote
years ago, and more to the point links out to
the specific pieces of research that are referenced here. Yeah,
and while you're there, it's Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. You can check out our blog posts, other episodes, podcasts, videos.

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