September 21, 2023 • 46 mins
It’s that time of year again! Join Robert and Joe as they discuss some of this year’s Ig Nobel prize-winning scientific studies and papers – honored as always for first making us laugh, then making us think.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today we're going to
be kicking off a yearly tradition, our coverage of some
of the winners of this year's Ignobel Prizes.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
That's right, We've been doing the Ignobel Prizes on the
show for many, many years now. We almost never cover
them right away. The awards usually drop and I think
this has been the case for like at least a
decade now. They tend to come out during September or
rarely earlier on I think they would come out in October.
(00:47):
But any event, we're often already wrapped up in Halloween
stuff by that point, and we end up coming back
to the Ignobel Prizes early November. It's kind of like
a post Halloween detox to get away from a lot
of the spooky stuff and into some other topic areas.
But this year is a little different. I mean, last
year was a little different because Joe, you're on parental leave,
(01:08):
so our former producer Seth had to pop in and
sort through these with me. So this year, we're back,
and we welcome me back. But also this year we're
actually ahead of schedule and hitting the egg Nobels before October.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Feels good to be prompt.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
If you're not familiar with the ig Nobels, these are
a series of awards given out once a year by
the scientific humor journal the Annals of Improbable Research, edited
for many years now by Mark Abrahams. This this, of course,
is a play on the the the on the Nobel Prize.
(01:46):
You know the Nobel Prize in various areas physics, chemistry,
et cetera, And there's a similar organizational structure in place
for the ig Nobel Prizes. Their stated purpose is, quote,
do honor achievements that first make people laugh and then
make them think. If you want to learn more about them,
go to Improbable dot com. You can find out more
(02:08):
about the magazine. You can see they have a wonderful
list of all the winners going back to the very
beginning of the whole project.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yes, now, usually the prizes are given out in honor
of studies that are published in regular scientific journals but
just might have to do with some intentionally or unintentionally
funny subject matter. But occasionally it also focuses on papers
that are themselves like intended to be funny or satirical.
(02:38):
One example that comes to mind is a study, a
quote study from several years back that was about the
raiology of cats. Raology being the study of how materials flow,
and so the idea is like, you know, our cat's
a liquid or a solid, So you know, that is
a joke, but also there was some interesting stuff to
ponder in that paper, and the the pattern continues. Most
(03:01):
of this year's winners are regular scientific studies published in
academic journals, but the for example, my selection for today
is more of a historical interest paper that leans on
a subject that was I think intended to be selected
because it was funny.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah, yeah, And I think the important thing to keep
in mind is that, yeah, at the heart of all
of these there is some genuine science or a quest
for knowledge, some some seriousness. It's not all just complete tomfoolery.
And I think that's ultimately what they're celebrating here. That's
one of the reasons we keep covering it is that
with each entry, you know, we often ask the question, well,
(03:41):
what makes this funny? Any kind of point to the obvious,
you know, it maybe say a study that has to
do with, say, you know, flatulence or something, and it's
pretty obvious why that's funny. But then there is also
the follow up question why is it important? And in
all cases there's something there, there's some way to answer that,
like it's the study involved. You know, it may seem like,
(04:02):
you know, it's the pure shrimp on a treadmill territory,
where like this is how does this possibly benefit anything?
But it is benefiting our scientific understanding of ourselves or
the world to some extent. And I always say, the
other cool thing about it is that, yeah, I mean,
it inevitably draws attention to some of these smaller studies
and the work of professional researchers and scientists. So it's
(04:23):
all good.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Now, Rob, If you're ready to get into the actual
winners we're going to talk about today, I think maybe
a good place to start would be on the maybe
the halloweenist of all the Ignobel Prize winners I can recall.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
That's right, we're talking about the Mechanical Engineering Prize that
goes to a paper that deals with necrobotics, which, if
you're not already familiar with the term, yes, it does
sound like it could be made up by some sort
of a nineteen eighties science fiction film or earlier that
we were watching on weird house cinema, But no, this
is an actual term. Will explain what it means here.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Shortly, it sounds like like a Stuart Gordon movie.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah. So the paper in question is Necrobotics Biotic Materials
as Ready to Use Actuators by yap at All, published
in Advanced Science volume nine, number twenty nine from twenty
twenty two. So the entire premise of this study is
at once completely sensible and also morbidly sensational, and I
(05:27):
think that's one of the reasons it really zings. So
the author's touch on biomemicry, which as you probably know,
refers to the idea of turning to nature to help
solve engineering problems, because why spend a few years trying
to solve a problem that nature already solved over the
course of evolutionary time.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Now, of course, some solutions that are engineered by evolution
are easier to reproduce or reverse engineer and reproduce in
inanimate technology than others are. For example, we still can't
really like recreate what's happening in a human brain. That
is a very complex bioengineering problem that we have not
fully reverse engineered yet. But there are lots of other
(06:07):
sort of simpler biological mechanisms that we have been able
to look at and say, ah, okay, yeah, here's how
that works, and we could actually we could make technology
that does the same thing.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
But the authors here point out, yeah, you know, this
is all well and good, but why don't you You
don't have to just stop at merely copying the design.
We can actually reuse parts and materials, and this is
where we get specifically into the idea of a biohybrid robot,
something that quote goes a step further by incorporating living
(06:39):
materials directly into engineered systems, so a kind of cybernetic approach. Really. Now,
it's my understanding that biohybrids in general covers a lot
of things that are maybe less necro in flavor, such
as biohybrid materials that contain both a biopolymer and a
synthetic polymer. But that's just one route. As for biohybrid robots,
(07:02):
you can, yeah, you can think of him in general
as somewhere on the same slider with the concept of
a cyborg, except more of a robot that's made with
some organic materials or parts.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Tired donating your body to scientific research, wired donating your
body to a robot's body.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah, in a way, I think one of our classic
cinematic examples of a cyborg can be very can throw
off our understanding of what these things can consist of,
because you think of the Terminator, right, he's essentially a robot.
He's just a robot, but he has this living tissue
on top of all of that as a disguise. But
he can completely lose that and he's still very functional.
(07:42):
As we've discussed on the show before, the topic of
cybernetics is a little more complicated than that and involves
a lot more. But in this particular case, this idea
of the biohybrid robot, it's you know, imagine that it's
not so much the robot is covered in the skin,
but the robot then actually uses human skin in various places,
is to help move better, to perform its functionality better,
(08:04):
et cetera.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
So they say in the movie Terminator that the living
tissue on the outside of the T eight hundred is
grown for the cyborgs in labs they have. But imagine
instead that maybe, say, when the Terminator gets injured, it
can like harvest the flesh of its enemies in order
to graft onto its own skin and become part of
(08:26):
its living encasement.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
There you go, it's the Terminator remake right there. You
can thank Joe McCormick for that.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
But repurposing the dead flesh of living organisms for itself.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
I like it. I think it could work. But a
couple of real world examples of this, at least in
you know, you know, ideas that have been explored in
various studies and projects. There is a twenty eighteen University
of Tokyo project that created a robotic finger using rat
muscle cells. There was also a twenty twelve Harvard Caltech
project that produced a silicone jellyfish, so kind of like
(09:00):
a jellyfish robot using rat heart muscle cells. And then
they later worked in a kind of like swimming ray
using some of the same technology.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Now, less people start getting weirded out at the idea
of using animal body parts as technology, it might be
worth pointing out that I think really the only novel
part here is that it is using independently moving body parts.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean they stress here in a way
that I found kind of comedic. I laughed a little
bit at this, but also it's a totally valid point.
They point out that, like, look, humans have long used
bioderved materials in their tool use. I mean that's the
basic two thousand and one A Space Odyssey model, right,
you know, you pick up the bone and you use it.
We've talked about this numerous times in the show in
(09:46):
the past, using bits and pieces of animals, using all
of the buffalo in some cases, to create various bits
of human ingenuity, various tools, materials, clothing, etc.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Animal hides, Yeah, are a huge part of human technology.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah. So there's nothing particularly weird about this. I guess
it just kind of runs counter to what some people
might think about as the trajectory of human materials and
human inventions, that as they get more futuristic, they move
further and further away from this idea of something that
we've made from the natural world and it becomes just
(10:23):
completely synthetic, you know, matching up with these various sci
fi visions. Where As on that SpongeBob app episode, everything
is chrome, you know, everything is metallic, et cetera. This
seems to run counter to that, and in some ways
because they're asking you to imagine a robot that reaches
out to you, not with a metal hand or even
a metal hand that is covered with like some sort
of plastic substance that is like a that is kind
(10:46):
of like human skin. No, it is reaching out to
touch you with a hand that is a dead tarantula.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
It's funny that you mentioned the plastic hand though, because
if it were a metal hand, you could say, Okay,
that's never been alive. That was always just you know,
mineral content in the ground that was mined. But if
it's a plastic hand that's derived from petroleum products, which
are derived from at some point life.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
That's true and that it's interesting how we have kind
of a mental disconnect on that a lot of the time.
Maybe part of it is, you know, being in denial
of our fossil fuel dependency to some extent, But the
other part is like, yeah, I mean, plastic is that
was made by magic, that was made by human wit
and ingenuity. It has no connection to the natural world.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Right, Yeah, That plastic is the refined and reprocessed remains
of organisms. That lived millions of years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
But the idea of the tarantula hand here is actually
key to the study. I'm exaggerating a little bit by
making it to a tarantula and making it a robot
reaching for you. But the whole paper here is about
the idea of repurposing a dead spider as a quote
unquote ready to use actuator. And they highlight that there's
actually fewer steps involved, like this is a shortcut. This
(12:03):
is not like that. This is not something where you'd
be doing it and you'd be overworking for just some
sort of grotesque mechanism. No, they're saying, like you actually
would have to do less to take advantage of this
fewer steps in the production. I love this, They write,
quote The unique walking mechanism of spiders relying on hydraulic
pressure rather than antagonistic muscle pairs to extend their legs
(12:28):
results in a necrobotic gripper that naturally resides in its
closed state and can be opened by applying pressure. The
necrobodic gripper is capable of grasping objects with irregular geometries
and up to one hundred and thirty percent of its
own mass Furthermore, the gripper can serve as a handheld
(12:49):
device and innately camouflages in outdoor environments. Okay, the last sense,
I don't know why that part is important. Do we
need a stealth hand that grab things one hundred and
thirty percent of its own mass? I don't know, but
it does give us more horror movie ideas, I suppose.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Yeah, that one seems a little bit. I don't know,
but I never thought about this before. But yeah, So
they're talking about how the idea that like, when a
spider closes its legs, it's operating on a different mechanism
than how say, mammals would move their limbs. Mammals, as
it says, move their limbs with antagonistic muscle pairs, so
(13:28):
you know, muscles contracting or relaxing in order to bend
the skeleton of the joints, whereas with spiders it has
to do with an internal hydraulic pressure state to cause
the legs to extend. And so when the pressure is
relaxed that is when the legs close, which I guess
makes sense because when you see a dead spider, it
(13:49):
tends to have its legs curled up exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
They point that out. Yeah, when a spider dies, the
pressure is no longer opposing the flex or muscles, and
so you get that curled up appearance. This is exactly
how you find them if you start busting open dirt
dobber nests and you find them scrolled away in there
to feed the growing young. But they do point out
by the way, that we don't need to stop at spiders.
(14:13):
All manner of bioderived parts could be repurposed in an
engineered system. And again, there's nothing creepy about a spider
handed necrobot at all, so we shouldn't, you know, act
like it is. But I included images, and I imagine
these images can be I think the paper itself is
not behind a paywall or anything, so folks can pull
this up. You can find a link on the eight
(14:33):
Nobel Prizes website, but they show exactly the steps that
are involved, and it involves first of all, euthanizing the
spider and then a fabrication, a step that requires just
one thing to be done, and that's quote, inserting a
needle into the prosoma region of a deceased spider and
fixing the needle to the spider's body. With glue to
(14:56):
form a hermatic seal.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
This is still not creepy, folks, Stop stop acting like yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
So the legs grip inward and then pressure is applied
via the syringe that you just glued to the dead
spider to extend the legs and open the gripper and
then there you see the step. See the third step
in the illustration is just using the necrobotic gripper the
syringe powered effect here to open and close the spider
(15:22):
as if it were a claw.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
This is truly one of my favorite Ignobel studies we
have done.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, I mean, this one's amazing and it opens my
mind to this whole world that I had no idea
was really on the menu for the future, but there
it is. So why is it funny? I think it's
obvious that you know, the dead spider is now a
robot hand. A dead spider has been used well, first
of all, created, they did euthanize it, but then made
(15:49):
into this gripper device. That alone is just inherently morbidly funny.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Now, if you wanted to have a cruelty free dead
spider robot hand, presumably you could bust up mud Wasp
nests and find all the dead spiders inside, you know,
get them out, and then stab needles in them and
glue those needles in place, and then use the hydraulic
pressure to make your little robot hands.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah. I like that idea. I certainly don't want to
encourage anyone to hurt and kill spiders without real need to. Here,
I do wonder. I don't think they got into this
in the article. Maybe they did and I missed it,
But I wonder if there might be a risk in
using an already dead spider in that the organic materials
might have decomposed to some degree and you wouldn't get
(16:37):
the same grip.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
Now then again, way, so I was joking anyway, But
now that I think about it, the spiders in the
in the wasp nest, are those technically going to be dead?
Or are they paralyzed and still alive in order to
preserve them longer so they can be food for the young.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I don't remember off the top of my head. I
know it varies with different parasitic wasps exactly how they
carry out the deed. Sometimes, you know, there's a laying
of eggs on the hosts. Sometimes they are inserted within
it varies from species to species, and you know, depending
on what their their host organism happens to be. It
(17:14):
might also depend with the dirt dobber ness when you're
catching them. But you know, if you want a pristine
spider necro gripper, I think you do have to make
the dead spider yourself. You have to make it dead yourself. Now,
why is it important this study? Well, you know again,
I think the idea of you know, of just necrobotics
in general, it's it's nothing to scoff at. You know,
(17:37):
we might consider a kind of post synthetic or beyond
that synthetic material science of the future. You know, well,
machines of the future will continue to have synthetic parts.
What if biotic and even repurpose tissues play on an
important role in at least key parts of the design,
particularly where you need some sort of like, you know,
(17:58):
a mechanical interact to take place, and you could either,
you know, you could fine tune some sort of artificial
system and gears and three D printed pieces, or you
could turn to pre existing structures and materials, be it
the muscles of a rat's heart or the you know,
the fantastic limbs of a spider.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Shake hands with spider.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah. I do love this idea of the tarantula hand spider. Yeah.
It makes me think of the like tarantula up hand
puppets that you sometimes see. And it's one of these
things too that if we saw this in a movie
from the sixties, we would say this is ridiculous. This
is like robot Monster. They clearly just had a robot
costume and two of these spider hand puppets and they
just made it all up. But no, they actually had
(18:44):
had glimpsed the future had they made this movie.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
All Right, you ready for the next prize?
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah? What do you have for us here?
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Okay? So the twenty twenty three Chemistry and Geology Prize
was awarded for a twenty seventeen article called Eating Fossils,
written for the newsletter of the Paleontological Association, a UK
based group that promotes the study of paleontology and publishes
multiple academic journals, and the author is Yan Zawichevich, a
(19:25):
geologist and stratigrapher who is an emeritus professor of paleobiology
at the University of Lester in the UK. And a
note so I said he's a geologist and a stratigrapher.
Stratigraphy is the subdiscipline of geology that's focused on understanding
geological strata, meaning the layers of rock in Earth's crust,
(19:47):
how they form, how they're ordered and structured, and so forth.
It's also worth flagging, as I mentioned earlier, that usually
the winners of the Ignobel Prizes are studies published in
scientific journals. This is not one of those. This is
instead a sort of historical interest feature about, as the
title says, eating fossils and congrats to Zowachevitch. Because I
(20:12):
loved this article, so I'm going to start just by
reading the opening passage. The rock lying by the roadside
did not look like much of interest at first, a
rather nondescript limestone with little more to show to casual
observation than a few vague blotches. Anyway, old habits die hard,
so I picked it up, licked the surface, and put
(20:34):
it and my hand lens to my eye. Now, okay,
so half of that picture makes sense to a non expert.
As a non geologist, I might expect a geologist to
pick up a rock and use a magnifying lens to
look at it. But licking the rock is that part
of the standard geology modus operandi.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, I'd never heard of this before.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
It seems to some extent. Yes, yes, as Zawachevitch says,
licking the rock, of course, is part of the geologist
and paleontologists armory of tried and much tested techniques used
to help survive in the field. Wetting the surface allows
fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than
being lost in the blur of intersecting micro reflections and
(21:22):
micro refractions that come out of a dry surface. And
I thought about that for a second. I said, oh,
that is really interesting. I think many of us will
have noticed that a wet rock looks very different than
a dry rock. A wet rock has you can see
some of the textures and the grain more sharply. Some
(21:46):
of the structure of the mineral is revealed. And of course,
if you know, don't have like a I don't know,
like a bucket of water with you, you of course
have some water in your mouth, you can lick the
rock or spit on it, put some sali on it,
and see that grain and structure with more clarity.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, and I guess it allows you to put a
very control amount of moisture on the rock as well.
Whereas you're pouring a little water from your canteen, you're
gonna waste more of your water and so forth.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
And Zawachevich says that it just so happened on this
day with this rock is big old slabbery tongue helped
reveal something amazing. The rock he found contained the most
remarkably preserved numbulites, which are fossil remnants of a variety
of four amniferin And I'll have more to say about
(22:35):
these organisms in a bit, but in this particular fossil,
these ancient organisms, their shells were preserved with three dimensional structure, intact,
all bound together in a chunk of calcite. So, having
established that the main purpose of licking the rock is
to be able to see it better, you still might
(22:56):
be wondering what does a collection of fossilized for aminifera taste,
like Zawachevich writes, quote, the taste now was likely merely
registered as generically slightly dusty and then instantly forgotten. I
had always thought it entirely superfluous to identification, but perhaps
not so as we contemporary types develop capabilities in one direction,
(23:21):
we might be entirely losing them in another. Go right
back to the beginnings of our science, and our ancestors
and their senses were attuned to different settings. One could, then,
it seems, literally develop a taste for stratigraphy.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
So Zawachevich goes on to talk about an important figure
in the history of his field, a man he calls
this ancestral stratigrapher, the Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino, who lived
seventeen fourteen to seventeen ninety five, who notably came up
with the idea of a geological division of Earth's history
(24:02):
into different periods that would correlate with strata in the crust.
These periods he called the primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary,
and these categories have been majorly revised and refined by
modern geologists, but the basic principle still sticks that you
can identify sedimentary rock layers and correlate them with different
(24:27):
historical periods in which they were laid down. So Sawichewitch
describes Arduino as quote a busy man who had to
be everywhere at once. This guy apparently worked as a
mining engineer and as a surveyor, but was also just
an all purpose freak for rocks and fossils. He ravenously
collected and studied them from all over the northeast of Italy,
(24:51):
from the Alps down to the Po River delta around Venice.
And he called himself a mineralogist, meaning he was into
all different types. He was into fossils, sediments, springs and
all that stuff, everything about the earth. Now, the interesting
thing is that despite his importance in the history of
(25:11):
this branch of geology, Arduino was in some sense an amateur,
and he did not publish his theories in books. Instead,
they appeared in letters that he sent to a friend
of his who was a professor at the University of Padua,
who in turn published Ardueno's letters in a Venetian journal,
which then filtered out to other scholars who took the
(25:33):
ideas and refined them further, and they ended up morphing
into the ideas we have today in stratigraphy. But here's
where we get back to the flavor of rocks and fossils.
Zawachevich describes these letters that Arduino wrote to his friend
the Professor, which were only translated into English and published
in full the year before this article, So I guess
(25:55):
that would have been twenty sixteen. And Zawachevich says that
these are fun reading, full of enthusiastic conversational style, and
also just full of gushing about crushing. And all of
Arduino's crushes are rocks and minerals and mineral springs awesome.
So I want to read a passage here where Sawichevich
(26:17):
is setting up and quoting sections of these letters. So
this is Sawaichevitch writing it first. Quote Fossil shells in
a mud rock, for instance, and coal fragments, when burned,
leave an ash that quote. As soon as it is
placed on the tongue, it burns like fire and leaves
a flavor equally bitter and urinous. When spat out, it
(26:41):
leaves a certain sweetness and a skinned tongue. Springs that
emerge from a stratum full of marquesite and coal quote
have an acid, spicy flavor. Vitriolic, yes, but with a
certain pleasantness that I cannot describe, like the acidity of wine.
These waters quote made me far less nauseous than did
(27:04):
the waters from the same source that I have tasted
here in Vincenza and at the skio. The white and
micacious sediment from one stratum has no taste in the
raw state, he said, but one's burnt quote acquired a
flavor as well as a caustic quality from the calcining
of the spar This man loved rocks. He loved to
(27:27):
collect them. He wanted to understand them, and he wanted
to know which ones tasted like pea, and which ones
were spicy, and which ones tasted like a fine montepulciano.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
And Zawachevich says that Arduino also described in exquisite detail
the appearance and smell of mineral specimens as they were burned, dissolved, boiled,
and so forth. And he says that Arduino was doing
something that partially kind of feels like alchemy and partially
just kind of feels like rapturous sensual pleasure at the
(28:01):
experience of rocks, but then in part is also very
detailed scientific analysis. You know, he's making an interesting point
that without the modern equipment that we use for chemical
analysis of minerals, information about taste and smell was actually
very useful data to log which would maybe help us
(28:22):
better understand what these minerals were. In a way, the
tongue could be seen as like the chemistry lab of
the body. I think you could argue that it exists
primarily to do fast chemical analysis on anything that is
about to enter the digestive tract. And this would be
both for screening purposes, so to reject chemicals that could
(28:44):
hurt us, but also for conditioning purposes to cause immediate
pleasure when we're eating something nutritionally desirable, to sort of
condition our brains to repeat the behavior that got that
substance into the mouth.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
This is Yeah, this is all a great point because
I think it's very easy for human beings to think
of like, you know, we're very visual. It's easy to
sort of cut out all the other senses and only
focus on the visual and then the intellectual and of course,
you know, intellectual information that's been recorded and so forth,
and forget that. Yeah, we do have sensory awareness in
(29:18):
these other realms as well, and those senses can be
used to understand and catalog the world. It reminds me
a bit of I think we talked about this in
the past when we were talking about mushroom foraging that
experienced foragers, and I want to underline that experienced foragers
will sometimes taste but not consume taste and then spit
(29:42):
out portions of fung guy that they're in the process
of identifying, and they'll utilize that additional sense data into
their identification process. Again, experts not eating the mushrooms. Don't
attempt this if you if you were not an expert,
don't eat any mushrooms because you listen to this podcast,
(30:03):
et cetera. All the standard disclaimers, but examples of you
know this sort of you know older way of using
all the senses to try and understand bits of the
natural world.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, I think that's a great point and a great
point of comparison. Likewise, I would say the same thing
for minerals. Don't just go tasting rocks and sediment and minerals.
You know, you don't know what you're putting in your mouth,
and it could very well be dangerous. But given those
caveats about safety, especially if you don't have to do
this to the eighteenth century mineralogist trying to understand the
(30:35):
mineral world with a comparatively limited toolkit, tasting sediment and
rocks and fossils and spring water makes a lot of sense.
Those flavors are potentially useful information. Yeah, all right, So
that's the first subsection of Zavachevic's essay here about eating fossils,
but there are more. He next goes on to talk
(30:58):
about the story of the nineteen fifty one Explorers Club
dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, which famously,
or maybe better to say, infamously, served attendees a meat
dish that the host of the event originally claimed was
the meat of Megatherium, an extinct genus of giant groundsloth.
(31:23):
The later reports in the media, I think specifically in
the Christian Science Monitor, claimed that the meat had actually
been from a wooly mammoth. In both cases these animals,
the animals in question were long extinct. So the story
went that the meat served at this dinner had been excavated,
frozen from a site at the Aleutian Islands, and held
(31:47):
in stock by a man named Father Bernard Hubbard, popularly
known in the media as the Glacier Priest. This sounds
more and more like a D and D scenario to us.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yes, the glaciers now request that you consume the precious
fossil meat. Go ahead and give us a constitution check
on all that.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yeah, better have only the fighter eat at first.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, well, even the wooly mammoth meat. Though this is
of course, you know, we do know that that organic
material from wooly mammoths have been preserved in like, you know,
snow and frozen environments. Is this real? Did they really
eat frozen wooly mammoth?
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Well that's what the report said originally, But in twenty
fourteen this story was finally proven to be a hoax
because apparently one member of the Explorers Club who had
been unable to attend the dinner in nineteen fifty one,
somehow got his portion of the dish to go. I
(32:50):
guess they gave to go contain. I don't know how
he got it, but he never ate it, and somehow
his portion of this meat dish ended up at the
Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, preserved somehow. I don't
know if they packed it in formaldehyde or whatever, but
they somehow preserved it and had it there at the museum.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
It wasn't just in the fridge the whole time.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
I hope not yeah, Gary's leftovers. Yeah. In twenty fourteen,
testing of the sample revealed, despite the fact that the
meat had been cooked more than sixty years before, that
it was not mammoth and it was not sloth. But
it was actually do you want to take a guess?
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Oh, I mean you're attempted to guess something close to
a wooly mammoth like an elephant.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Right, it was actually turtle meat. So I went and
looked up at zawachevitch doesn't include it. But I had
to know more, so I went and looked up the
paper in question here. This was a paper published in
Plus one in twenty sixteen by Jessica R. Glass, Matt Davis,
(34:00):
Timothy Walsh, Eric Sargius, and Adelgisa Checone. Title of the
paper was Frozen mammoth or Giant ground sloth served for
dinner at the Explorers Club. This was the year twenty sixteen.
Just to note that it is apparently more difficult to
do DNA testing on older remains, and also more difficult
(34:24):
to do DNA testing on meat that has been cooked,
but they did succeed at testing it. This is from
their abstract quote. We sequenced a fragment of the mitochondrial
cytochrome B gene and studied archival material to verify its identity, which,
if genuine, would extend the range of megatherium over six
(34:44):
hundred percent because if it actually came from the Aleutian
Islands or from the Glacier, priest no idea that giant
ground sloths were living there at any point. But anyway,
they say, if it actually was genuine, it would extend
the range of megatherium over six hundred percent quote and
alter our views on groundsloth evolution. Our results indicate that
(35:08):
the meat was not mammoth or megatherium, but green sea
turtle Chelonia midas. The prehistoric dinner was likely an elaborate
publicity stunt, now specifically the green sea turtle. This is sad.
I should add that this animal is considered endangered today.
I don't know what its status was in nineteen fifty one.
(35:29):
But I'm so confused because if you're doing a hoax,
why would you try to pass off sea turtle as
extinct giant groundsloth meat? Why not just to use like
beef for goat or something.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
M I guess I guess you could argue that you
would want to serve something that is edible, of course,
but also case different like that people are going to
try it and they're not going to say, oh, this
tastes just like beef, or this tastes just like chicken.
They're gonna be like, what, this is a little different.
This is strange. And it makes sense that it's strange
(36:03):
because I'm eating a creature that has been extinct for
so long. That being said, it seems like, are there
not multiple culinary methods you could use to sort of
weirden up your meat and make it taste strange, like
different marinades and so forth.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Probably, I mean they could be people could be like, huh,
this tastes a lot like goat, but that wouldn't prove
that it was goat. You could still continue your home.
Maybe it's just that, yeah, mammoth meat tastes like goat.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
This makes me think of the whole situation of mock
turtle and like trying to then replicate turtle meat by
turning to other animals, Like why is the turtle wrapped
up in this weird cycle of imitation meats?
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Yeah? Okay, so there's another example of people claiming that
they were eating the meat of a quarter million year
old organism, but in fact it was just a It
was just a sea turtle for some reason. But finally,
(37:04):
in this essay, Zawychevic comes back around to the subject
of numulites mentioned earlier, because those were the remarkably preserved
three dimensional fossils in that rock that he told the
story about finding on the side of the road and
licking to see better. Numbulites are fascinating in their own right.
So numulites are a genus of for iminifer dating back
(37:27):
millions of years, notable for their disc shaped or lins
shaped shells, which are found abundantly in fossil form. The
organisms themselves are single celled protozoa and they form this
protective shell on the outside called a test. These tests
(37:47):
or shells have been observed since ancient times. In fact,
what's called numulitic limestone, which is that's sedimentary calcium carbonate
rock from archaic seafloors, contain huge proportions of numulite fossils.
Numbulytic limestone was what was quarried out by the ancient
(38:08):
Egyptians and used to build the Pyramids of Giza. So
the pyramids are made at least in part out of
fossil rock containing the shells of all these organisms. And
these disc shaped fossils in the pyramid blocks were noticed
by the ancients, people didn't necessarily understand that they were
(38:28):
fossilized shells of you know, trillions of single salt marine organisms.
I've read elsewhere that in the fifth century BCE, the
Greek historian Herodotus thought that these discs were lentils that
had turned to stone. So maybe like, ooh, the people
who built the pyramids so long ago, they spilled some
(38:49):
lentils all over the place while they were building them,
and now these lentils turned into rocks. But in fact
they are these protozoan shells, and these shells can grow
to enormous sizes in some cases for some species, especially
for a single celled organism. Zawichevich mentions that I guess
this would be the species. I don't know how to
say this quite I think Numulitis milika put which means
(39:14):
the thousand head nomulite. This can grow a shell sixteen
centimeters in diameter. That's for a single celled organism. Wow,
and these really these tough outer shells, and the size
of these organisms raise questions about like what in the
ocean could actually successfully eat them, and this leads down
(39:36):
another road where where Zawichevich ends up talking about a
deliciously weird obsolete thesis from a nineteenth to twentieth century
British zoologist named Randolph Randolph Kirkpatrick who worked at the
British Natural History Museum from eighteen eighty six to nineteen
twenty seven, and in nineteen twelve Kirkpatrick published a book
(40:00):
that was called the Numbulosphere, An Account of the Organic
Origin of so called igneous rocks and abyssle red clays.
And this book, while now regarded as totally wrong and
based entirely on observational error and classification error in looking
at the grain of rocks, seems nevertheless to hold an
(40:25):
almost kind of cherished place in the hearts of many
geologists and paleontologists. In this essay he cites Stephen J.
Gould as one of these people who, like everybody knows,
this thesis is totally wrong, but there's something about it
that they seem to find pleasant and amusing and almost
(40:45):
almost sweet or cute. So what did Kirkpatrick argue, Well,
I want to read here from Zawichevic's summary quote. The ocean,
Kirkpatrick said, is full of organisms which efficiently extract calcium,
carbon and silica from the seawater to create myriad skeletons,
which then go on to become geological strata. Look at
(41:08):
thin sections of those ancient strata through a microscope and
you will see traces of those skeletons, many of them,
he went on to say, show the traces of the
curved shells and chambers of numulites. These were not always obvious,
but could be detected with the trained eye. That trained
eye then put other rocks under the microscope, with just
(41:29):
a little more training, the same shapes could be detected
in all of the specimens that Kirkpatrick looked at, including
in lavas, granites, and even meteorites. The inference was clear.
So what was that inference? It is that all the
rocks on the surface of the Earth are numbulites. The
(41:51):
Earth itself, Kirkpatrick thought, was essentially encased in a four
a miniferent test of its own. There was a shell
for the planet made out of rocks that were made
out of the fossilized, indigestible shells of marine organisms. From million,
millions of years past, so like whatever other kind of
(42:13):
rock you might think it is. Kirkpatrick was like, no,
that's actually just a version of numulite shells that you know,
looks different for some.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Reason, numulites all the way down the one.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
I didn't get to the bottom of this, but I
was wondering, wait, why did he think that about meteorites though?
Did he also think there were noumulites in space or
maybe he thought they didn't really come from space?
Speaker 2 (42:34):
Surely that I mean that also is unbelievable, but maybe
less unbelievable than like, not only this world, but all worlds.
It's numulites throughout the cosmos. Yeah, the idea that like,
oh yeah, meteorites, that's not real. What you're looking at
is nomulites.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
But I guess that connects to the eating fossils idea,
because it's like, oh, you got these organisms, you know,
candyt them, can't digest those shells. Where do they go?
They end up on the bottom of the ocean, And
in fact, they really do become a lot of you know,
a big part of these these sedimentary fossil rocks, these limestones.
But it is not the case that that all the
rocks on Earth are actually from anomulites.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
So, in my opinion, big props to Yen Zawachevic for
this essay, which I would say it's a bull's eye
on the motto of the Ignobel Prizes. Yes, this this
essay has a lot of historical tidbits that are quite
funny and silly, but it also made me think in
numerous ways very interesting.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, we often really enjoy an incorrect
hypothesis about the natural world. You know, I instantly think
to the idea of the aquatic ape, the aquatic ape
hypothesis that we covered on the show a while back.
You know, obviously not true, but it is intriguing to
sort of dive into it and think about how, you know,
people became devoted to this idea. And yeah, and then
(43:59):
on top of this, this whole idea of just geologists tasting rocks,
how that factors into their you know, their their analysis
of the geology.
Speaker 3 (44:09):
What is the taste of the e sn epic.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Ask your local geologist.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Okay, well, I think we're going to have to call
it there, but we will be back next time to
talk about more of this year's Ignobel winners. And don't worry,
we are going to be talking about the nose hairs
of a dead man.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, nose hairs. That may be where we start.
Next time. We're going to start with the nose hair,
which makes sense. They're they're right up front, as you
have probably noticed in the mirror. So yeah, I hope
you will join us for that episode going to be
here I guess Tuesday. In the meantime, if you would
like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
your Mind, we'll just remind you that we're primarily a
(44:48):
science podcast. We get into you know, little history, little philosophy,
a little what have you. But those core episodes are
going to come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays
we do a listener mail that your chance to write
in and chat with us about past, current and future episodes.
On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster
fact episode unless it's being preempted by something, and then
(45:11):
on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today we're going to
be kicking off a yearly tradition, our coverage of some
of the winners of this year's Ignobel Prizes.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
That's right, We've been doing the Ignobel Prizes on the
show for many, many years now. We almost never cover
them right away. The awards usually drop and I think
this has been the case for like at least a
decade now. They tend to come out during September or
rarely earlier on I think they would come out in October.
(00:47):
But any event, we're often already wrapped up in Halloween
stuff by that point, and we end up coming back
to the Ignobel Prizes early November. It's kind of like
a post Halloween detox to get away from a lot
of the spooky stuff and into some other topic areas.
But this year is a little different. I mean, last
year was a little different because Joe, you're on parental leave,
(01:08):
so our former producer Seth had to pop in and
sort through these with me. So this year, we're back,
and we welcome me back. But also this year we're
actually ahead of schedule and hitting the egg Nobels before October.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Feels good to be prompt.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
If you're not familiar with the ig Nobels, these are
a series of awards given out once a year by
the scientific humor journal the Annals of Improbable Research, edited
for many years now by Mark Abrahams. This this, of course,
is a play on the the the on the Nobel Prize.
(01:46):
You know the Nobel Prize in various areas physics, chemistry,
et cetera, And there's a similar organizational structure in place
for the ig Nobel Prizes. Their stated purpose is, quote,
do honor achievements that first make people laugh and then
make them think. If you want to learn more about them,
go to Improbable dot com. You can find out more
(02:08):
about the magazine. You can see they have a wonderful
list of all the winners going back to the very
beginning of the whole project.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yes, now, usually the prizes are given out in honor
of studies that are published in regular scientific journals but
just might have to do with some intentionally or unintentionally
funny subject matter. But occasionally it also focuses on papers
that are themselves like intended to be funny or satirical.
(02:38):
One example that comes to mind is a study, a
quote study from several years back that was about the
raiology of cats. Raology being the study of how materials flow,
and so the idea is like, you know, our cat's
a liquid or a solid, So you know, that is
a joke, but also there was some interesting stuff to
ponder in that paper, and the the pattern continues. Most
(03:01):
of this year's winners are regular scientific studies published in
academic journals, but the for example, my selection for today
is more of a historical interest paper that leans on
a subject that was I think intended to be selected
because it was funny.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah, yeah, And I think the important thing to keep
in mind is that, yeah, at the heart of all
of these there is some genuine science or a quest
for knowledge, some some seriousness. It's not all just complete tomfoolery.
And I think that's ultimately what they're celebrating here. That's
one of the reasons we keep covering it is that
with each entry, you know, we often ask the question, well,
(03:41):
what makes this funny? Any kind of point to the obvious,
you know, it maybe say a study that has to
do with, say, you know, flatulence or something, and it's
pretty obvious why that's funny. But then there is also
the follow up question why is it important? And in
all cases there's something there, there's some way to answer that,
like it's the study involved. You know, it may seem like,
(04:02):
you know, it's the pure shrimp on a treadmill territory,
where like this is how does this possibly benefit anything?
But it is benefiting our scientific understanding of ourselves or
the world to some extent. And I always say, the
other cool thing about it is that, yeah, I mean,
it inevitably draws attention to some of these smaller studies
and the work of professional researchers and scientists. So it's
(04:23):
all good.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Now, Rob, If you're ready to get into the actual
winners we're going to talk about today, I think maybe
a good place to start would be on the maybe
the halloweenist of all the Ignobel Prize winners I can recall.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
That's right, we're talking about the Mechanical Engineering Prize that
goes to a paper that deals with necrobotics, which, if
you're not already familiar with the term, yes, it does
sound like it could be made up by some sort
of a nineteen eighties science fiction film or earlier that
we were watching on weird house cinema, But no, this
is an actual term. Will explain what it means here.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Shortly, it sounds like like a Stuart Gordon movie.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah. So the paper in question is Necrobotics Biotic Materials
as Ready to Use Actuators by yap at All, published
in Advanced Science volume nine, number twenty nine from twenty
twenty two. So the entire premise of this study is
at once completely sensible and also morbidly sensational, and I
(05:27):
think that's one of the reasons it really zings. So
the author's touch on biomemicry, which as you probably know,
refers to the idea of turning to nature to help
solve engineering problems, because why spend a few years trying
to solve a problem that nature already solved over the
course of evolutionary time.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Now, of course, some solutions that are engineered by evolution
are easier to reproduce or reverse engineer and reproduce in
inanimate technology than others are. For example, we still can't
really like recreate what's happening in a human brain. That
is a very complex bioengineering problem that we have not
fully reverse engineered yet. But there are lots of other
(06:07):
sort of simpler biological mechanisms that we have been able
to look at and say, ah, okay, yeah, here's how
that works, and we could actually we could make technology
that does the same thing.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
But the authors here point out, yeah, you know, this
is all well and good, but why don't you You
don't have to just stop at merely copying the design.
We can actually reuse parts and materials, and this is
where we get specifically into the idea of a biohybrid robot,
something that quote goes a step further by incorporating living
(06:39):
materials directly into engineered systems, so a kind of cybernetic approach. Really. Now,
it's my understanding that biohybrids in general covers a lot
of things that are maybe less necro in flavor, such
as biohybrid materials that contain both a biopolymer and a
synthetic polymer. But that's just one route. As for biohybrid robots,
(07:02):
you can, yeah, you can think of him in general
as somewhere on the same slider with the concept of
a cyborg, except more of a robot that's made with
some organic materials or parts.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Tired donating your body to scientific research, wired donating your
body to a robot's body.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah, in a way, I think one of our classic
cinematic examples of a cyborg can be very can throw
off our understanding of what these things can consist of,
because you think of the Terminator, right, he's essentially a robot.
He's just a robot, but he has this living tissue
on top of all of that as a disguise. But
he can completely lose that and he's still very functional.
(07:42):
As we've discussed on the show before, the topic of
cybernetics is a little more complicated than that and involves
a lot more. But in this particular case, this idea
of the biohybrid robot, it's you know, imagine that it's
not so much the robot is covered in the skin,
but the robot then actually uses human skin in various places,
is to help move better, to perform its functionality better,
(08:04):
et cetera.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
So they say in the movie Terminator that the living
tissue on the outside of the T eight hundred is
grown for the cyborgs in labs they have. But imagine
instead that maybe, say, when the Terminator gets injured, it
can like harvest the flesh of its enemies in order
to graft onto its own skin and become part of
(08:26):
its living encasement.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
There you go, it's the Terminator remake right there. You
can thank Joe McCormick for that.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
But repurposing the dead flesh of living organisms for itself.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
I like it. I think it could work. But a
couple of real world examples of this, at least in
you know, you know, ideas that have been explored in
various studies and projects. There is a twenty eighteen University
of Tokyo project that created a robotic finger using rat
muscle cells. There was also a twenty twelve Harvard Caltech
project that produced a silicone jellyfish, so kind of like
(09:00):
a jellyfish robot using rat heart muscle cells. And then
they later worked in a kind of like swimming ray
using some of the same technology.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Now, less people start getting weirded out at the idea
of using animal body parts as technology, it might be
worth pointing out that I think really the only novel
part here is that it is using independently moving body parts.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean they stress here in a way
that I found kind of comedic. I laughed a little
bit at this, but also it's a totally valid point.
They point out that, like, look, humans have long used
bioderved materials in their tool use. I mean that's the
basic two thousand and one A Space Odyssey model, right,
you know, you pick up the bone and you use it.
We've talked about this numerous times in the show in
(09:46):
the past, using bits and pieces of animals, using all
of the buffalo in some cases, to create various bits
of human ingenuity, various tools, materials, clothing, etc.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Animal hides, Yeah, are a huge part of human technology.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah. So there's nothing particularly weird about this. I guess
it just kind of runs counter to what some people
might think about as the trajectory of human materials and
human inventions, that as they get more futuristic, they move
further and further away from this idea of something that
we've made from the natural world and it becomes just
(10:23):
completely synthetic, you know, matching up with these various sci
fi visions. Where As on that SpongeBob app episode, everything
is chrome, you know, everything is metallic, et cetera. This
seems to run counter to that, and in some ways
because they're asking you to imagine a robot that reaches
out to you, not with a metal hand or even
a metal hand that is covered with like some sort
of plastic substance that is like a that is kind
(10:46):
of like human skin. No, it is reaching out to
touch you with a hand that is a dead tarantula.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
It's funny that you mentioned the plastic hand though, because
if it were a metal hand, you could say, Okay,
that's never been alive. That was always just you know,
mineral content in the ground that was mined. But if
it's a plastic hand that's derived from petroleum products, which
are derived from at some point life.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
That's true and that it's interesting how we have kind
of a mental disconnect on that a lot of the time.
Maybe part of it is, you know, being in denial
of our fossil fuel dependency to some extent, But the
other part is like, yeah, I mean, plastic is that
was made by magic, that was made by human wit
and ingenuity. It has no connection to the natural world.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Right, Yeah, That plastic is the refined and reprocessed remains
of organisms. That lived millions of years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
But the idea of the tarantula hand here is actually
key to the study. I'm exaggerating a little bit by
making it to a tarantula and making it a robot
reaching for you. But the whole paper here is about
the idea of repurposing a dead spider as a quote
unquote ready to use actuator. And they highlight that there's
actually fewer steps involved, like this is a shortcut. This
(12:03):
is not like that. This is not something where you'd
be doing it and you'd be overworking for just some
sort of grotesque mechanism. No, they're saying, like you actually
would have to do less to take advantage of this
fewer steps in the production. I love this, They write,
quote The unique walking mechanism of spiders relying on hydraulic
pressure rather than antagonistic muscle pairs to extend their legs
(12:28):
results in a necrobotic gripper that naturally resides in its
closed state and can be opened by applying pressure. The
necrobodic gripper is capable of grasping objects with irregular geometries
and up to one hundred and thirty percent of its
own mass Furthermore, the gripper can serve as a handheld
(12:49):
device and innately camouflages in outdoor environments. Okay, the last sense,
I don't know why that part is important. Do we
need a stealth hand that grab things one hundred and
thirty percent of its own mass? I don't know, but
it does give us more horror movie ideas, I suppose.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
Yeah, that one seems a little bit. I don't know,
but I never thought about this before. But yeah, So
they're talking about how the idea that like, when a
spider closes its legs, it's operating on a different mechanism
than how say, mammals would move their limbs. Mammals, as
it says, move their limbs with antagonistic muscle pairs, so
(13:28):
you know, muscles contracting or relaxing in order to bend
the skeleton of the joints, whereas with spiders it has
to do with an internal hydraulic pressure state to cause
the legs to extend. And so when the pressure is
relaxed that is when the legs close, which I guess
makes sense because when you see a dead spider, it
(13:49):
tends to have its legs curled up exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
They point that out. Yeah, when a spider dies, the
pressure is no longer opposing the flex or muscles, and
so you get that curled up appearance. This is exactly
how you find them if you start busting open dirt
dobber nests and you find them scrolled away in there
to feed the growing young. But they do point out
by the way, that we don't need to stop at spiders.
(14:13):
All manner of bioderived parts could be repurposed in an
engineered system. And again, there's nothing creepy about a spider
handed necrobot at all, so we shouldn't, you know, act
like it is. But I included images, and I imagine
these images can be I think the paper itself is
not behind a paywall or anything, so folks can pull
this up. You can find a link on the eight
(14:33):
Nobel Prizes website, but they show exactly the steps that
are involved, and it involves first of all, euthanizing the
spider and then a fabrication, a step that requires just
one thing to be done, and that's quote, inserting a
needle into the prosoma region of a deceased spider and
fixing the needle to the spider's body. With glue to
(14:56):
form a hermatic seal.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
This is still not creepy, folks, Stop stop acting like yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
So the legs grip inward and then pressure is applied
via the syringe that you just glued to the dead
spider to extend the legs and open the gripper and
then there you see the step. See the third step
in the illustration is just using the necrobotic gripper the
syringe powered effect here to open and close the spider
(15:22):
as if it were a claw.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
This is truly one of my favorite Ignobel studies we
have done.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, I mean, this one's amazing and it opens my
mind to this whole world that I had no idea
was really on the menu for the future, but there
it is. So why is it funny? I think it's
obvious that you know, the dead spider is now a
robot hand. A dead spider has been used well, first
of all, created, they did euthanize it, but then made
(15:49):
into this gripper device. That alone is just inherently morbidly funny.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Now, if you wanted to have a cruelty free dead
spider robot hand, presumably you could bust up mud Wasp
nests and find all the dead spiders inside, you know,
get them out, and then stab needles in them and
glue those needles in place, and then use the hydraulic
pressure to make your little robot hands.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah. I like that idea. I certainly don't want to
encourage anyone to hurt and kill spiders without real need to. Here,
I do wonder. I don't think they got into this
in the article. Maybe they did and I missed it,
But I wonder if there might be a risk in
using an already dead spider in that the organic materials
might have decomposed to some degree and you wouldn't get
(16:37):
the same grip.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
Now then again, way, so I was joking anyway, But
now that I think about it, the spiders in the
in the wasp nest, are those technically going to be dead?
Or are they paralyzed and still alive in order to
preserve them longer so they can be food for the young.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I don't remember off the top of my head. I
know it varies with different parasitic wasps exactly how they
carry out the deed. Sometimes, you know, there's a laying
of eggs on the hosts. Sometimes they are inserted within
it varies from species to species, and you know, depending
on what their their host organism happens to be. It
(17:14):
might also depend with the dirt dobber ness when you're
catching them. But you know, if you want a pristine
spider necro gripper, I think you do have to make
the dead spider yourself. You have to make it dead yourself. Now,
why is it important this study? Well, you know again,
I think the idea of you know, of just necrobotics
in general, it's it's nothing to scoff at. You know,
(17:37):
we might consider a kind of post synthetic or beyond
that synthetic material science of the future. You know, well,
machines of the future will continue to have synthetic parts.
What if biotic and even repurpose tissues play on an
important role in at least key parts of the design,
particularly where you need some sort of like, you know,
(17:58):
a mechanical interact to take place, and you could either,
you know, you could fine tune some sort of artificial
system and gears and three D printed pieces, or you
could turn to pre existing structures and materials, be it
the muscles of a rat's heart or the you know,
the fantastic limbs of a spider.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Shake hands with spider.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah. I do love this idea of the tarantula hand spider. Yeah.
It makes me think of the like tarantula up hand
puppets that you sometimes see. And it's one of these
things too that if we saw this in a movie
from the sixties, we would say this is ridiculous. This
is like robot Monster. They clearly just had a robot
costume and two of these spider hand puppets and they
just made it all up. But no, they actually had
(18:44):
had glimpsed the future had they made this movie.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
All Right, you ready for the next prize?
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah? What do you have for us here?
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Okay? So the twenty twenty three Chemistry and Geology Prize
was awarded for a twenty seventeen article called Eating Fossils,
written for the newsletter of the Paleontological Association, a UK
based group that promotes the study of paleontology and publishes
multiple academic journals, and the author is Yan Zawichevich, a
(19:25):
geologist and stratigrapher who is an emeritus professor of paleobiology
at the University of Lester in the UK. And a
note so I said he's a geologist and a stratigrapher.
Stratigraphy is the subdiscipline of geology that's focused on understanding
geological strata, meaning the layers of rock in Earth's crust,
(19:47):
how they form, how they're ordered and structured, and so forth.
It's also worth flagging, as I mentioned earlier, that usually
the winners of the Ignobel Prizes are studies published in
scientific journals. This is not one of those. This is
instead a sort of historical interest feature about, as the
title says, eating fossils and congrats to Zowachevitch. Because I
(20:12):
loved this article, so I'm going to start just by
reading the opening passage. The rock lying by the roadside
did not look like much of interest at first, a
rather nondescript limestone with little more to show to casual
observation than a few vague blotches. Anyway, old habits die hard,
so I picked it up, licked the surface, and put
(20:34):
it and my hand lens to my eye. Now, okay,
so half of that picture makes sense to a non expert.
As a non geologist, I might expect a geologist to
pick up a rock and use a magnifying lens to
look at it. But licking the rock is that part
of the standard geology modus operandi.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah, I'd never heard of this before.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
It seems to some extent. Yes, yes, as Zawachevitch says,
licking the rock, of course, is part of the geologist
and paleontologists armory of tried and much tested techniques used
to help survive in the field. Wetting the surface allows
fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than
being lost in the blur of intersecting micro reflections and
(21:22):
micro refractions that come out of a dry surface. And
I thought about that for a second. I said, oh,
that is really interesting. I think many of us will
have noticed that a wet rock looks very different than
a dry rock. A wet rock has you can see
some of the textures and the grain more sharply. Some
(21:46):
of the structure of the mineral is revealed. And of course,
if you know, don't have like a I don't know,
like a bucket of water with you, you of course
have some water in your mouth, you can lick the
rock or spit on it, put some sali on it,
and see that grain and structure with more clarity.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, and I guess it allows you to put a
very control amount of moisture on the rock as well.
Whereas you're pouring a little water from your canteen, you're
gonna waste more of your water and so forth.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
And Zawachevich says that it just so happened on this
day with this rock is big old slabbery tongue helped
reveal something amazing. The rock he found contained the most
remarkably preserved numbulites, which are fossil remnants of a variety
of four amniferin And I'll have more to say about
(22:35):
these organisms in a bit, but in this particular fossil,
these ancient organisms, their shells were preserved with three dimensional structure, intact,
all bound together in a chunk of calcite. So, having
established that the main purpose of licking the rock is
to be able to see it better, you still might
(22:56):
be wondering what does a collection of fossilized for aminifera taste,
like Zawachevich writes, quote, the taste now was likely merely
registered as generically slightly dusty and then instantly forgotten. I
had always thought it entirely superfluous to identification, but perhaps
not so as we contemporary types develop capabilities in one direction,
(23:21):
we might be entirely losing them in another. Go right
back to the beginnings of our science, and our ancestors
and their senses were attuned to different settings. One could, then,
it seems, literally develop a taste for stratigraphy.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
So Zawachevich goes on to talk about an important figure
in the history of his field, a man he calls
this ancestral stratigrapher, the Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino, who lived
seventeen fourteen to seventeen ninety five, who notably came up
with the idea of a geological division of Earth's history
(24:02):
into different periods that would correlate with strata in the crust.
These periods he called the primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary,
and these categories have been majorly revised and refined by
modern geologists, but the basic principle still sticks that you
can identify sedimentary rock layers and correlate them with different
(24:27):
historical periods in which they were laid down. So Sawichewitch
describes Arduino as quote a busy man who had to
be everywhere at once. This guy apparently worked as a
mining engineer and as a surveyor, but was also just
an all purpose freak for rocks and fossils. He ravenously
collected and studied them from all over the northeast of Italy,
(24:51):
from the Alps down to the Po River delta around Venice.
And he called himself a mineralogist, meaning he was into
all different types. He was into fossils, sediments, springs and
all that stuff, everything about the earth. Now, the interesting
thing is that despite his importance in the history of
(25:11):
this branch of geology, Arduino was in some sense an amateur,
and he did not publish his theories in books. Instead,
they appeared in letters that he sent to a friend
of his who was a professor at the University of Padua,
who in turn published Ardueno's letters in a Venetian journal,
which then filtered out to other scholars who took the
(25:33):
ideas and refined them further, and they ended up morphing
into the ideas we have today in stratigraphy. But here's
where we get back to the flavor of rocks and fossils.
Zawachevich describes these letters that Arduino wrote to his friend
the Professor, which were only translated into English and published
in full the year before this article, So I guess
(25:55):
that would have been twenty sixteen. And Zawachevich says that
these are fun reading, full of enthusiastic conversational style, and
also just full of gushing about crushing. And all of
Arduino's crushes are rocks and minerals and mineral springs awesome.
So I want to read a passage here where Sawichevich
(26:17):
is setting up and quoting sections of these letters. So
this is Sawaichevitch writing it first. Quote Fossil shells in
a mud rock, for instance, and coal fragments, when burned,
leave an ash that quote. As soon as it is
placed on the tongue, it burns like fire and leaves
a flavor equally bitter and urinous. When spat out, it
(26:41):
leaves a certain sweetness and a skinned tongue. Springs that
emerge from a stratum full of marquesite and coal quote
have an acid, spicy flavor. Vitriolic, yes, but with a
certain pleasantness that I cannot describe, like the acidity of wine.
These waters quote made me far less nauseous than did
(27:04):
the waters from the same source that I have tasted
here in Vincenza and at the skio. The white and
micacious sediment from one stratum has no taste in the
raw state, he said, but one's burnt quote acquired a
flavor as well as a caustic quality from the calcining
of the spar This man loved rocks. He loved to
(27:27):
collect them. He wanted to understand them, and he wanted
to know which ones tasted like pea, and which ones
were spicy, and which ones tasted like a fine montepulciano.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
And Zawachevich says that Arduino also described in exquisite detail
the appearance and smell of mineral specimens as they were burned, dissolved, boiled,
and so forth. And he says that Arduino was doing
something that partially kind of feels like alchemy and partially
just kind of feels like rapturous sensual pleasure at the
(28:01):
experience of rocks, but then in part is also very
detailed scientific analysis. You know, he's making an interesting point
that without the modern equipment that we use for chemical
analysis of minerals, information about taste and smell was actually
very useful data to log which would maybe help us
(28:22):
better understand what these minerals were. In a way, the
tongue could be seen as like the chemistry lab of
the body. I think you could argue that it exists
primarily to do fast chemical analysis on anything that is
about to enter the digestive tract. And this would be
both for screening purposes, so to reject chemicals that could
(28:44):
hurt us, but also for conditioning purposes to cause immediate
pleasure when we're eating something nutritionally desirable, to sort of
condition our brains to repeat the behavior that got that
substance into the mouth.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
This is Yeah, this is all a great point because
I think it's very easy for human beings to think
of like, you know, we're very visual. It's easy to
sort of cut out all the other senses and only
focus on the visual and then the intellectual and of course,
you know, intellectual information that's been recorded and so forth,
and forget that. Yeah, we do have sensory awareness in
(29:18):
these other realms as well, and those senses can be
used to understand and catalog the world. It reminds me
a bit of I think we talked about this in
the past when we were talking about mushroom foraging that
experienced foragers, and I want to underline that experienced foragers
will sometimes taste but not consume taste and then spit
(29:42):
out portions of fung guy that they're in the process
of identifying, and they'll utilize that additional sense data into
their identification process. Again, experts not eating the mushrooms. Don't
attempt this if you if you were not an expert,
don't eat any mushrooms because you listen to this podcast,
(30:03):
et cetera. All the standard disclaimers, but examples of you
know this sort of you know older way of using
all the senses to try and understand bits of the
natural world.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, I think that's a great point and a great
point of comparison. Likewise, I would say the same thing
for minerals. Don't just go tasting rocks and sediment and minerals.
You know, you don't know what you're putting in your mouth,
and it could very well be dangerous. But given those
caveats about safety, especially if you don't have to do
this to the eighteenth century mineralogist trying to understand the
(30:35):
mineral world with a comparatively limited toolkit, tasting sediment and
rocks and fossils and spring water makes a lot of sense.
Those flavors are potentially useful information. Yeah, all right, So
that's the first subsection of Zavachevic's essay here about eating fossils,
but there are more. He next goes on to talk
(30:58):
about the story of the nineteen fifty one Explorers Club
dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, which famously,
or maybe better to say, infamously, served attendees a meat
dish that the host of the event originally claimed was
the meat of Megatherium, an extinct genus of giant groundsloth.
(31:23):
The later reports in the media, I think specifically in
the Christian Science Monitor, claimed that the meat had actually
been from a wooly mammoth. In both cases these animals,
the animals in question were long extinct. So the story
went that the meat served at this dinner had been excavated,
frozen from a site at the Aleutian Islands, and held
(31:47):
in stock by a man named Father Bernard Hubbard, popularly
known in the media as the Glacier Priest. This sounds
more and more like a D and D scenario to us.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yes, the glaciers now request that you consume the precious
fossil meat. Go ahead and give us a constitution check
on all that.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yeah, better have only the fighter eat at first.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, well, even the wooly mammoth meat. Though this is
of course, you know, we do know that that organic
material from wooly mammoths have been preserved in like, you know,
snow and frozen environments. Is this real? Did they really
eat frozen wooly mammoth?
Speaker 3 (32:29):
Well that's what the report said originally, But in twenty
fourteen this story was finally proven to be a hoax
because apparently one member of the Explorers Club who had
been unable to attend the dinner in nineteen fifty one,
somehow got his portion of the dish to go. I
(32:50):
guess they gave to go contain. I don't know how
he got it, but he never ate it, and somehow
his portion of this meat dish ended up at the
Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, preserved somehow. I don't
know if they packed it in formaldehyde or whatever, but
they somehow preserved it and had it there at the museum.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
It wasn't just in the fridge the whole time.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
I hope not yeah, Gary's leftovers. Yeah. In twenty fourteen,
testing of the sample revealed, despite the fact that the
meat had been cooked more than sixty years before, that
it was not mammoth and it was not sloth. But
it was actually do you want to take a guess?
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Oh, I mean you're attempted to guess something close to
a wooly mammoth like an elephant.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Right, it was actually turtle meat. So I went and
looked up at zawachevitch doesn't include it. But I had
to know more, so I went and looked up the
paper in question here. This was a paper published in
Plus one in twenty sixteen by Jessica R. Glass, Matt Davis,
(34:00):
Timothy Walsh, Eric Sargius, and Adelgisa Checone. Title of the
paper was Frozen mammoth or Giant ground sloth served for
dinner at the Explorers Club. This was the year twenty sixteen.
Just to note that it is apparently more difficult to
do DNA testing on older remains, and also more difficult
(34:24):
to do DNA testing on meat that has been cooked,
but they did succeed at testing it. This is from
their abstract quote. We sequenced a fragment of the mitochondrial
cytochrome B gene and studied archival material to verify its identity, which,
if genuine, would extend the range of megatherium over six
(34:44):
hundred percent because if it actually came from the Aleutian
Islands or from the Glacier, priest no idea that giant
ground sloths were living there at any point. But anyway,
they say, if it actually was genuine, it would extend
the range of megatherium over six hundred percent quote and
alter our views on groundsloth evolution. Our results indicate that
(35:08):
the meat was not mammoth or megatherium, but green sea
turtle Chelonia midas. The prehistoric dinner was likely an elaborate
publicity stunt, now specifically the green sea turtle. This is sad.
I should add that this animal is considered endangered today.
I don't know what its status was in nineteen fifty one.
(35:29):
But I'm so confused because if you're doing a hoax,
why would you try to pass off sea turtle as
extinct giant groundsloth meat? Why not just to use like
beef for goat or something.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
M I guess I guess you could argue that you
would want to serve something that is edible, of course,
but also case different like that people are going to
try it and they're not going to say, oh, this
tastes just like beef, or this tastes just like chicken.
They're gonna be like, what, this is a little different.
This is strange. And it makes sense that it's strange
(36:03):
because I'm eating a creature that has been extinct for
so long. That being said, it seems like, are there
not multiple culinary methods you could use to sort of
weirden up your meat and make it taste strange, like
different marinades and so forth.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Probably, I mean they could be people could be like, huh,
this tastes a lot like goat, but that wouldn't prove
that it was goat. You could still continue your home.
Maybe it's just that, yeah, mammoth meat tastes like goat.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
This makes me think of the whole situation of mock
turtle and like trying to then replicate turtle meat by
turning to other animals, Like why is the turtle wrapped
up in this weird cycle of imitation meats?
Speaker 3 (36:42):
Yeah? Okay, so there's another example of people claiming that
they were eating the meat of a quarter million year
old organism, but in fact it was just a It
was just a sea turtle for some reason. But finally,
(37:04):
in this essay, Zawychevic comes back around to the subject
of numulites mentioned earlier, because those were the remarkably preserved
three dimensional fossils in that rock that he told the
story about finding on the side of the road and
licking to see better. Numbulites are fascinating in their own right.
So numulites are a genus of for iminifer dating back
(37:27):
millions of years, notable for their disc shaped or lins
shaped shells, which are found abundantly in fossil form. The
organisms themselves are single celled protozoa and they form this
protective shell on the outside called a test. These tests
(37:47):
or shells have been observed since ancient times. In fact,
what's called numulitic limestone, which is that's sedimentary calcium carbonate
rock from archaic seafloors, contain huge proportions of numulite fossils.
Numbulytic limestone was what was quarried out by the ancient
(38:08):
Egyptians and used to build the Pyramids of Giza. So
the pyramids are made at least in part out of
fossil rock containing the shells of all these organisms. And
these disc shaped fossils in the pyramid blocks were noticed
by the ancients, people didn't necessarily understand that they were
(38:28):
fossilized shells of you know, trillions of single salt marine organisms.
I've read elsewhere that in the fifth century BCE, the
Greek historian Herodotus thought that these discs were lentils that
had turned to stone. So maybe like, ooh, the people
who built the pyramids so long ago, they spilled some
(38:49):
lentils all over the place while they were building them,
and now these lentils turned into rocks. But in fact
they are these protozoan shells, and these shells can grow
to enormous sizes in some cases for some species, especially
for a single celled organism. Zawichevich mentions that I guess
this would be the species. I don't know how to
say this quite I think Numulitis milika put which means
(39:14):
the thousand head nomulite. This can grow a shell sixteen
centimeters in diameter. That's for a single celled organism. Wow,
and these really these tough outer shells, and the size
of these organisms raise questions about like what in the
ocean could actually successfully eat them, and this leads down
(39:36):
another road where where Zawichevich ends up talking about a
deliciously weird obsolete thesis from a nineteenth to twentieth century
British zoologist named Randolph Randolph Kirkpatrick who worked at the
British Natural History Museum from eighteen eighty six to nineteen
twenty seven, and in nineteen twelve Kirkpatrick published a book
(40:00):
that was called the Numbulosphere, An Account of the Organic
Origin of so called igneous rocks and abyssle red clays.
And this book, while now regarded as totally wrong and
based entirely on observational error and classification error in looking
at the grain of rocks, seems nevertheless to hold an
(40:25):
almost kind of cherished place in the hearts of many
geologists and paleontologists. In this essay he cites Stephen J.
Gould as one of these people who, like everybody knows,
this thesis is totally wrong, but there's something about it
that they seem to find pleasant and amusing and almost
(40:45):
almost sweet or cute. So what did Kirkpatrick argue, Well,
I want to read here from Zawichevic's summary quote. The ocean,
Kirkpatrick said, is full of organisms which efficiently extract calcium,
carbon and silica from the seawater to create myriad skeletons,
which then go on to become geological strata. Look at
(41:08):
thin sections of those ancient strata through a microscope and
you will see traces of those skeletons, many of them,
he went on to say, show the traces of the
curved shells and chambers of numulites. These were not always obvious,
but could be detected with the trained eye. That trained
eye then put other rocks under the microscope, with just
(41:29):
a little more training, the same shapes could be detected
in all of the specimens that Kirkpatrick looked at, including
in lavas, granites, and even meteorites. The inference was clear.
So what was that inference? It is that all the
rocks on the surface of the Earth are numbulites. The
(41:51):
Earth itself, Kirkpatrick thought, was essentially encased in a four
a miniferent test of its own. There was a shell
for the planet made out of rocks that were made
out of the fossilized, indigestible shells of marine organisms. From million,
millions of years past, so like whatever other kind of
(42:13):
rock you might think it is. Kirkpatrick was like, no,
that's actually just a version of numulite shells that you know,
looks different for some.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
Reason, numulites all the way down the one.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
I didn't get to the bottom of this, but I
was wondering, wait, why did he think that about meteorites though?
Did he also think there were noumulites in space or
maybe he thought they didn't really come from space?
Speaker 2 (42:34):
Surely that I mean that also is unbelievable, but maybe
less unbelievable than like, not only this world, but all worlds.
It's numulites throughout the cosmos. Yeah, the idea that like,
oh yeah, meteorites, that's not real. What you're looking at
is nomulites.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
But I guess that connects to the eating fossils idea,
because it's like, oh, you got these organisms, you know,
candyt them, can't digest those shells. Where do they go?
They end up on the bottom of the ocean, And
in fact, they really do become a lot of you know,
a big part of these these sedimentary fossil rocks, these limestones.
But it is not the case that that all the
rocks on Earth are actually from anomulites.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
So, in my opinion, big props to Yen Zawachevic for
this essay, which I would say it's a bull's eye
on the motto of the Ignobel Prizes. Yes, this this
essay has a lot of historical tidbits that are quite
funny and silly, but it also made me think in
numerous ways very interesting.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, we often really enjoy an incorrect
hypothesis about the natural world. You know, I instantly think
to the idea of the aquatic ape, the aquatic ape
hypothesis that we covered on the show a while back.
You know, obviously not true, but it is intriguing to
sort of dive into it and think about how, you know,
people became devoted to this idea. And yeah, and then
(43:59):
on top of this, this whole idea of just geologists tasting rocks,
how that factors into their you know, their their analysis
of the geology.
Speaker 3 (44:09):
What is the taste of the e sn epic.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Ask your local geologist.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
Okay, well, I think we're going to have to call
it there, but we will be back next time to
talk about more of this year's Ignobel winners. And don't worry,
we are going to be talking about the nose hairs
of a dead man.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, nose hairs. That may be where we start.
Next time. We're going to start with the nose hair,
which makes sense. They're they're right up front, as you
have probably noticed in the mirror. So yeah, I hope
you will join us for that episode going to be
here I guess Tuesday. In the meantime, if you would
like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
your Mind, we'll just remind you that we're primarily a
(44:48):
science podcast. We get into you know, little history, little philosophy,
a little what have you. But those core episodes are
going to come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays
we do a listener mail that your chance to write
in and chat with us about past, current and future episodes.
On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster
fact episode unless it's being preempted by something, and then
(45:11):
on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
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