Ig Nobels 2017: Liquid Cats, Didgeridoos & More

Each year, the Ig Nobel prizes celebrate the most absurd and humorous efforts in legitimate scientific research – and 2017’s winners do not disappoint. Join Robert, Joe and Christian as they discuss all 10 studies in a special three-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind feature. Up first, prepare yourself for sex-swapped cave bugs, liquid cats, a better way to drink coffee and the health benefits of the didgeridoo.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from house stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, I'm Christian, and I'm Joe McCormick,
and it's the day after Halloween here in the house
Stuff Works office. How is your Halloween, guys? Yeah, yeah,

(00:23):
I had a good one. I had to go hunting
for like an actual Halloween experience though, because I my
wife and I got dressed up and we took the
dogs out for a walk, and no one in like
a like a mile radius of our house was was
really celebrating Halloween. You're not saying hunting hunting, well, I
was hunt You don't seem like a hunt humans. That's
what you do on Halloween, right, for fine, but not

(00:45):
hunting them for fun, hunting them in hopes of food exactly.
And I prefer the ones that are in costumes because
they taste better. So we had to get in the
car and drive to a suburban neighborhood where there was
like full on Halloween going and it was great. Well, well,
we just went around in our roborhood. UM, my son,
his his friend, uh, their parents, and we all just

(01:05):
walked around at the trick or treating thing and there,
but there was one moment that was there was a
little bit legitimately creepy. I'll say that that kind of
goes in with our recent creepy Posta episode. So we
were finishing up, it was dark, uh you know, one
or two houses left, and there are a lot of
kids on this particular street that we're trick or treating
on and one of the kids turns around and he

(01:26):
points past me, behind my back and says says, he's
dressed as slender Man. And I look around and there's
clearly nobody dressed as slender Man. There's like nobody even
tall enough to be slender Man. And it's like left
me confused for a second, and I for a brief moment,
I considered, is he seeing something that only children can see?

(01:48):
His slender Man back there? And that's actually that would
make the Slenderman thing even creepier if it was only
children could see slender Man. But I wanted to question him.
I didn't get a chance. I was like, like, hey, hey, kid,
where is slender Man? Point to slender Man. Let's have
a discussion about this. What hey, Joe, what did you do?
I stayed home. Rachel and I stayed home. We gave
out some candy to trig Re treaters. We we reheated

(02:10):
some leftover chili. Kind of nice Halloween feast, and we
watched Toby Hooper's Salem's Lot in many series with all
of the haircuts horror. Yeah, the seventies haircuts unbelievable. That
movie scared the hell out of me when I first
saw it, but I was much younger. Yeah, it does
the scene with the little boy floating up against the window. Yeah,

(02:33):
the vampires in it are really freaky. Yeah. I I
haven't seen it in forever, but I listened to a
lot of Halloween mixes yesterday and there was one in
particular that threw in some samples from the Salem's Lot movie,
the bit where the showdown between the Master and the priest,
Barlow and Callahan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man, I would sample

(02:54):
the heck out of James Mason in that movie because
he is so smooth. I love how they invert the
classic monsters familiar, like in the Universal Dracula and well
all the traditional Draculas. You get the crazy familiar. You
get Renfield who's out of control, but he's also like
imprisoned and not very potent as a character. In this one,

(03:15):
you've got this smooth, suave James Mason and these fancy suits.
He's basically Captain Nemo outside of the submarine. Hey, I
got a question. Though, we're talking about Halloween and actually
October's over, guys, that means that we can't do Halloween
episodes for another year. That's a bummer, though, you know us,

(03:35):
if you're a regular listener, we kind of slip some
Halloween in all year long, and we'll we'll we'll sneak
it in, I'm sure. But of course we've been talking
about Halloween for a month and in doing that we
we managed to yet again let the Ignoble prizes slipped
past us. So we're gonna make up for that this
week and also provide maybe a kind of a palate cleanser.
I guess for anyone who wishes to move on from

(03:58):
Halloween episodes for a little bit, this will definitely be
like your silly science uh series of episodes. So let's
why don't we tell the audience Maybe some of them
haven't listened to our previous Ignoble episodes, but we generally
cover them every year. What are they Well, they have
been awarded since by the publication the Annals of Improbable Research.

(04:21):
The purpose of the award, according to the editors of
the publication, is to quote honor achievements that first make
people laugh, then make them think. And furthermore, they stress
that the ten prizes aren't necessarily meant to pass judgment
on the winners. Instead, the official website emphasizes that the
prizes quote celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur

(04:42):
people's interest in science, medicine, and technology. And the principal
individual here and all of this is the editor of
the of the Anials and Probable Research, Mark Abrams. And
I would say that that goes along with our mission here,
and so these kind of work together nicely and that
like hopefully we give them a little bit of a boost.
They point out this bizarre research that we can take

(05:03):
a deeper look at, and we have more time on
the podcast than they have in their live ceremony to
actually like dive into the research here. Yeah, and I
think one of the big take homes about it. I mean,
obviously it is a it is a reference to the
Nobel Prizes, where where the like a Nobel Prize, and
chemistry or biology is a big deal, and it's usually
a study that is going to have a huge impact

(05:24):
with the Ignoble Prizes. I think it definitely highlights this
idea that we have touched on before, science as this
slime mold making its way through a maze or a labyrinth,
and and the slime mold of science as it explores
the world, it is going to explore everywhere. It is
going to look in every mundane pantry and closet, and

(05:47):
that is that's one of the things that the the Ignobel
Prize celebrate, some of these studies that we're going to discuss.
It's one of those areas where you can say, why
why did science need to look into that? Why why
did money and effort and and scientific rigor approach this
portion of the world. And the answer is, well, because
science must. Science must go in there. And in some

(06:07):
of these cases it actually turns out to be important,
like stuff that seems totally ludicrous, which I don't know
about you guys, but some of mine seemed totally ludicrous.
But yeah, and and in fact, like other episodes of
our show have built off of the entire premise of
Igno bells, like, for instance, our necrophilia episode. Uh, basically

(06:27):
we got the jumping point off of that from I
think it was like an Igno bell from like five
years ago maybe, yeah. Yeah, And and we were able
to find a whole ton of information. That's one of
my favorite episodes. Yeah. I remember after you guys had
first been talking about doing that, we were in this
long meeting and at the end of the meeting somebody
came over to talk to me about something and I

(06:49):
realized what was on my computer screen was all this
stuff about duck necrophilia. Yeah. Yeah, I hope they liked it.
And if you out there haven't listened to the episode,
you should because it's really really surprisingly not as grim
as you would think. I mean, it's grim, but it's
also like really educational, both in terms of the animal
kingdom but also psychology of human beings. Yeah. It demystifies

(07:12):
the topic, and I think I managed to do so
in a non exploited way. So what, And it's a
great way to get through a meeting, boring meeting, hit
up the duck necrophilia. So what can we do that
with today? Oh, we have a we have a host
of studies here to touch on. There are ten awards, right,
so this is gonna be part one of a multi
part episode. Correct, how many episodes? Who knows it might

(07:34):
be too, It might be three. Well, we'll see how
it goes. So the approach here, as in previous years,
is we divided these ten prizes up. We each took
three of them, and then there was one left over
and I ended up taking that one just because I
had one of my other papers turned out to be
a bit short. Okay, well, it looks like I'm up
to bat first. All right, what do you have for Joe? Well,
this would be the Physics Prize this year, which was

(07:56):
offered to Mark Antoine far Dan for use fluid dynamics.
You probe the question can a cat be both a
solid and a liquid? This is a real Shroggger's cat
slash not scenario, right, Okay, Yeah, I can see that
the cat's both a liquid and a solid until you
look at it. Okay, So it's for a paper called

(08:18):
on the rayology of Cats. So here's an experience I'm
sure you've all had. You're at a restaurant, you get
some French fries, you want to put some ketchup on
your plate. But the ketchup at your table is the
glass bottle. You know there may be trouble ahead. So
you turn it up, you unscrew the top, you shake, jiggle,
tap and all that, but you can't get the stuff
out of the bottle. It will not flow. You'll have

(08:41):
had this experience. Yeah, that's when you have to It's
probably not very polite, but you have to get the
butter knife. I always take a butter knife. Jam the
knife in, and you did, but then you'd end up
feeling like a real animal, which is always a shame
because I find that the glass bottle of ketchup, you
tend to encounter it at not the highest level of restaurant,

(09:02):
because that kind of place is going to have it's
gonna bring it out to you. And but it's also
not a super cheap restaurant because otherwise you would have packets,
or you would have a plastic squeeze bottle, or you
would have a pump and a little little cups that
you fill it up with. So it's a nice enough
restaurant that you feel awkward jabbing of a knife into
a bottle like an animal, you know, some restaurants take

(09:24):
those glass bottles and then just refill them at a restaurant.
For four years while I was in college, that was
part of the job, was refilling those much cheaper to
buy in bulk and then just pump it back into
But in that case, why wouldn't you use a scort bottle? Anyway,
So if if you have ever had this experience, and
you've ever wondered why won't the ketchup come out, your

(09:47):
interest in the subject of yology has been ignited. Reyology
is the study of how matter flows. So given your
experience with the ketchup bottles, you can probably guess that
this is a surprisingly complex field. A lot of variables
are going to go into how a substance flows under
various conditions. So you know that one glass catchup bottle

(10:07):
sort of cleanly evacuates onto your plate, maybe even faster
than you wanted to, and then the next one, same brand,
same content, same bottle, just will not budge until you
jam the knife in. So what makes the difference. There
are a lot of variables. Temperature is a big one.
You probably know this from cooking, right, You've got a
lot of sauces, soups, so they're edible fluids that are

(10:29):
very runny at a high temperature but almost solid at
a low temperature. And there are just tons of reology
characteristics that you can chart exactly how does a flowing
material react to different types of substrate materials, Like how
does it flow on glass versus on some other type
of material, or how does it like how far will

(10:51):
it bubble up off the lip of a container before
it overflows? There are all kinds of questions like that.
So the measurement of a material's ability to flow is
known as rheometry, And I think this paper technically qualifies
as a foray into rheometry because it's going to be
measuring cats and how how well cats flow out of

(11:12):
catchup bottles. Uh, not quite catchup bottles, but it gets
surprisingly close. Uh. So reology is actually kind of it's
one of those things that seems kind of dry at first,
but it's more interesting the more you think about it.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitis is famous for this insistence that
the fundamental nature of the universe is sort of constant change.
It's sort of like the static change, since everything is

(11:34):
always changing in a way, everything is always the same.
You've heard that quote that no man ever steps in
the same river twice. That's attributed to Heraclidas. But another
way of expressing this idea is the aphorism panta ray,
which is Greek for everything flows, like we all flow
down here will flow too, and uh and so everything changes,
nothing remains still and far. Dwand points out that the

(11:56):
field of reology is sort of along the same same
same lines as this idea by Heraclitus. States of matter
are not fixed features of the universe. They're expressed through
a matter of time. So eventually forces act on every
massive particles to make those particles deform or flow in
some way. Uh. Solid matter tends to deform over time.

(12:20):
Liquid or gas tends to flow. Gotcha. Okay, yeah, this
makes sense. So I'm thinking about like we recently talked about,
like these massive glaciers in uh small Bard, and that
some of these glaciers have different states inside of themselves,
so some of them are more liquid and more solid
than other states, and that causes them to move, the

(12:41):
entire glacier to move at different paces. This is somewhat related. Yeah,
but that's a great example because on a long enough
time scale, glaciers do flow as well, even though they're
solid and you can walk on them if you want
to look over hundreds of years, they're sort of flowing.
Uh So, a major factor in how things flow or
resist flow is the state of matter at her. We
all remember this from you know, elementary school physics. But

(13:02):
by traditional definition, you've got solids, liquids, and gas. And
a solid is the state of matter which has both
a fixed volume it's not going to change in size,
and a fixed shape it's not going to change in shape.
Liquid is the state of matter that's got a fixed
volume but not a fixed shape, and instead it conforms
to the shape of whatever contains it. And then gas

(13:25):
doesn't have either one. It doesn't have a fixed shape
or a fixed volume, but expands to fill whatever container
it's in. Here's where the cat comes in. Now, being
an animal, I think you generally assume the cat is
more or less a solid, right, well, kind of complex.
It's a solid filled with liquids, that's true. Animals are
kind of bags of juice, right and then, but then cats,

(13:46):
I haven't read the study, but ever since I saw
the title, I keep looking at my cat and watching
her move and she does have like a very flowy
liquid movement to totally, but it's not I would say
it comes through less when the cat is moving around
and walking, and more when the cat is at rest
in various containers and substrates. So you guys are both

(14:06):
cat owners, haven't you seen the way a cat will
sometimes seem to puddle in the bathroom sink or pour
itself into a basket or box. Oh definitely the baskets
and box like that seems to be universal. Yeah, definitely.
My my female cat rowing is she she has an
ability to, like she's a little overweight, which she has

(14:26):
an ability to kind of just make her her mounds
of flesh kind of form around her in a liquid status. Yeah,
I mean, I remember this. I've seen lots of cats
that love to just sort of not just get into
depressions and cavities in various types of containers, but seemed
to fill them perfectly to every edge like a liquid would.

(14:49):
So that inspired some people on the internet to make
posts like cats are liquids, and then far Dan is
basically like I saw a thing on the internet that
said cats are liquids, let's find out. So he essentially
takes a bunch of photos of cats and analyzes them
using the criteria of reology the same way you'd measure
I say, a massive ketchup or paint or mud to

(15:12):
understand the way it flows. A cat in a jar,
a cat spread across a lot of bars, a cat
in a basket, And what follows in the paper I
would say is mostly just a bunch of in jokes
for yologists, But I do think it's kind of interesting.
The results are obviously that cats can have some unique

(15:32):
reeological properties, combining apparent features of both solids and liquids.
But wouldn't that be true of basically any mammal Well,
I mean part fur. Yeah, I think the fur, the
fur and the sort of soft body is very crucial
for the cat because probably a little bit solid and
a little bit liquid. Oh yeah, like, well, my bodies liquid. Well,

(15:56):
I mean we are pretty much blood bags. But I
would say something about the shape of your body. So
imagine yourself trying to get into a sink or a
box or a basket and just fill it the way
a cat appears to like a liquid. It doesn't seem
quite as easy for you and me. Right, One of
the things about cats of course, is that they are
extremely flexible and uh and and then they have these

(16:18):
sort of various resting states that they'll go into, these
kind of uniform uh, you know, resting states. So there's
there's I like to think of it as you have
the bread uh shape where the cat you know, kind
of tucks its legs in and it it's kind of busy,
kind of cat bush cat loaf, Yeah, the cat or
a cat loaf, you could call it. There's also the
bagel in which they curl up, and then there's one

(16:41):
there's one I think most of them do this, but
my cat Mo, she definitely does this one where she
just kind of like lays like she's been hit by
a truck or something, you know, where it's just just
completely sprawled out. But all of these they do look
like different animals in these different shapes, and it's really
hard to nail down exactly what the shape of their
body is. Yeah, but my flesh isn't as loosely hanging

(17:05):
off of my body as it does in my cat's right, Yeah,
and cats you feel like you can just move it
all over the place, and the fur really helps. Also.
The fur gives the illusion that there's like a much
more body there than there actually is, and that part
of the body obviously can be deformed into almost any shape.
That's why when you give a cat of bath, it
is like one of the saddest things ever because they're miserable.

(17:27):
But also they lose this ability you're talking about, right,
So that's part of the thing. A shaved cat would
not appear to be a liquid in the same way
a very furry cat is. But I I think it's
it's pretty funny in the paper, Like a lot of
these are obviously a lot of these things, he says
in the paper are funnier if you are a reeologist
or you're familiar with all these concepts, but they're still

(17:49):
pretty funny even to an outsider. Like one is a
picture of a cat in a basket, and it's a
very small basket. So picture a large cat in like
a small French fry basket, and it's it's gathered up
into the basket, clearly filling it entirely, but puffing out
over the top and hanging over the sides. And he
analyzes this photo by saying, quote cat on a super

(18:12):
philadophobic substrate, showing a high contact angle. Another one, he's
got a jar turned on its side with the mouth
facing out, and there is a kitten pretty much completely
filling the jar, and he says, quote tilted jar experiment
showing the yield stress of a kitten. So the yield

(18:33):
stress would be like what kind of stress has to
be put on a mass of liquid before it flows
out of a container at a certain angle. So, for example,
the ketchup in the bottle, A lot of times the
ketchup will not come out of the bottle because you
have not adequately met its yield stress in whatever form
it takes in the bottle. Here we've got the kitten
will not pour out of this jar because it's yield

(18:55):
stress has not been met. So while this is funny, right,
and it's written to be funny, it also seems like
it's probably important because it illustrates the principles of reology
in a way that that basically backs up how well
they work. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I
would say that this paper seems to me to be
jokier than most of the other papers were looking at

(19:15):
this time, Like he actually does do some math in
the paper and actually applies the reheological principles does real analysis,
but it's mostly I think, just for the purpose of
being funny, especially to other reeologists. But I think it matters,
and he mentions in the paper some ways in which
it might matter. Like one thing is that cats are

(19:35):
unlike most other types of liquids you would measure the
flow of because they are self powered and self moving.
And there are some analogies here to other things that
you might actually want to study, like studying the flow
of self powered materials does matter in a lot of scenarios,
like studying the movement of large packs or flocks of animals,
or studying the flow of crowds of humans under various constraints.

(19:59):
And this is sort of me extrapolating, because I think
that would also come into some different kinds of fields
other than reyology. There's probably, you know, such a thing
as just studying crowd dynamics. But but hold on, I
got an idea of how this connects. Okay, So remember
that movie World War Z with the zombies like zombie
flow basically, yeah, exactly, like the zombies like came together
as like a hive mind and could like didn't. There's

(20:21):
even one point where like I think they turned into
a hand or something something dumb like that, Right, They
formed structures kind of like firing'st you're talking about the movie,
the movie, not the book at all. Yeah. Uh, well
they would climb walls by piling themselves up against the
wall and then scaling over. Yeah, exactly. And so you
could Let's say you were one of the c g
I operators on that film and you needed to figure

(20:43):
out how they would flow. You could probably use the
principles of reyology applied based on something like on crowd dynamics. Yeah. Possibly, Well,
I mean I would say that crowd dynamics, studying the
flow of crowds and other self powered uh types of
flow could have real consequences, and say designing environments. For example,

(21:05):
crowd crush and trampling are real things that happen when
you get a bunch of people together in a place
and they start flowing in a non optimal an entire
brain stuff episode on the science of crowd crushing. And
so I think maybe like understanding self directed flow of
bio materials, whether it's a single animal or lots of
animals acting as a pack, could help us better maybe

(21:26):
maybe better design public spaces to accommodate sudden human crowd
flow without leading to tragedies. So cases where say a
large group of people are screaming and flowing out of
a movie theater, and also cases where the blob is
flowing out of the same movie theater after them. Uh.
Both both of these would be opportunities for reology of

(21:46):
the blob would be a great paper. That's what this
guy should right next. I bet somebody has done that
out there. I bet that's one of those things you
could find. But to your point about just raising awareness
of reality, I think that's a great acent point on
this show. I do not believe we have ever discussed
reeology before, and here we are discussing it. Well, I

(22:07):
think we should commit now we should try to find
at least one really truly interesting yology topic to cover
within the next year. Okay, yeah, maybe the blob. Alright,
we're gonna take a quick breaking. When we come back,
we will jump into another two thousand seventeen ignoble winning study. Alright,
we're back, Robert, what do you have for us? Alright,

(22:29):
so this one, this was actually the first one that
I I snagged from from this year's offerings because it
is a paper that I have covered before. Kind of
ad nausea because there is a stuff to blow your
mind podcast episode. I believe that touches on this. There
was a video and I'm pretty sure I did a
blog post as well. Oh I remember this, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(22:53):
The title of the paper is female penis, male vagina
and their correlated evolution in a have insect. And this
was a Current Biology paper paper from two thousand and fourteen.
I gotta say, first of all, for our listeners, there's
an image that's inserted here in our notes for Robert's referencing.
Insert is a good Yeah. It is very difficult to

(23:15):
tell what is happening here, but it is also very
easy to imagine what is happening here. It's just these
uh oregan like structures flowing into and out of each
other with a male and female symbol on them. It
looks somewhat insectile, or maybe there's just hair on everything.
I can't tell. Oh it is it is a cronenberg
Ee world. This image attempts u this with so basically

(23:38):
the reason that this the study was highlighted previously, the
reason it want to ignoble UH this year is because
it concerns sex the sex swapped world of cave bugs,
which I think we can all get behind. Um. So specifically,
we're talking about Brazilian cave insects of the neo Trogla genus.

(23:59):
We're talking four to sink distinct species here, and they
mark the first documented example of an animal with sex
reversed genitalia. So as this as detailed in the Cell
pressed journal Current Biology, the females quote insert an elaborate
penis like organ into the males much reduced vagina like
opening during forty to seventy hour long love making marathons.

(24:23):
So to clarify, would this mean that's the male still
makes sperm cells, correct, and the female still makes egg cells,
but they bring them into contact by the female inserting
an organ into the male to retrieve the sperm cells
from inside. Exactly. It's a different like formation essentially, but
it's but it's unique, is the thing, Like, there are

(24:44):
no other examples of of a a sex or gender
swapping like this robust right, yeah, and this is I
mean that's forty to seventy hours. I mean sting would
probably be embarrassed looking at us. Well, these cave bugs.
The thing is of that the sting is a lover.
And uh, I think love making is a bit anthropomorphic

(25:06):
when you're talking about h I kind of agree, yeah,
because the insect world is pretty brutal, and the love
making world of really the love making world of a
lot of organisms is fairly brutal. Uh. And is the
I love how we've just landed on love making instead
of mating. I don't know, you know, it just sounds
more romantic, right, I guess so? So um, But there's more,

(25:29):
There's there's more. There's some more brutal details here. As
the team of Brazilian and Japanese researchers discovered, the female
inserts her phaalic gynosome into the mail and then the
sex organ inflates, hooking a bevy of spines into the
male's body to anchor the two insects together. Now, this
is not the only organism with penis spines. No. In fact,

(25:50):
there there's evidence that human ancestors have had penis spines
and harmedid other hominids have had penis spines before. And
I believe there is some genetic data you can point to. Robert,
tell me a little more about penis spines. I think
I'm woefully under educated here, all right, So, yeah, it's
like basically like a cactus penis. I guess you could

(26:12):
describe it as a because basically there's sort of a
reproductive arms race in many organisms, and this is where
spines may serve to stimulate or anchor, uh, the organism
into place, and or it may serve in sexual conflict.
Now I think you're probably out there thinking, like, what,
so some insects have penis spines. That's it, right, No,
I mean like mammals have penis spines, like cats have

(26:34):
pens have like penis spines. Kind of right. Yeah, humans
should wake up every day and just be thankful that,
you know, for a number of things, But one of
the things on the list should be that we don't
have to contend with penis spines um in this case
of the the cave insect. Of the researchers think that
it may have other functions aside from just anchoring it

(26:56):
into place. It might have a role in genital stimulation
or or in or quote, in inflicting harm. So it's
it's kind of hard to figure out that it's like
the brundle fly told us. So there's no such thing
as insect politics. It's all it. And so wait a minute,
that like this could be a sex organ or a
defensive or offensive weapon, well only in so far as

(27:17):
it plays into the the the war, the continual battle
of sexual reproduction. Yeah, when whenever I've read about this
in the past, it's been a biological, uh, survival mechanism,
I guess. And it's this is horrible from an ethical
standpoint of humans, right, But the idea is that the
one without the penis barbs can't get away if they

(27:40):
do not want to mate with the one with the
penis barbs. Once the barbs are attached, they're kind of stuck, right,
So I think that's what you mean by the inflicting harm,
right that it's it's sort of along the lines of, uh,
if those are human beings, we would be referring to
this as like a masochistic act. Now, the the gynosome
in this case, it again, it does not deposit material

(28:04):
like a male penis. There's no semen coming out of it,
there's no sperm deposit. Instead, this gynosome it receives sperm
as well as capsules of nourishment, sort of a gift
or a bribe to encourage lots of mating. That we
see this in a number of different um insects, typically
the spiders too, like they are the spiders that create
a wrapped up gifts. The males bring them to the

(28:27):
females to encourage mating, though sometimes they bring them something
empty to trick them. So this is essentially like an
inverted vagina dentata, you can think of it that way. Yeah,
so the would it be inverted, would it be an
extroverted vagina dentata? Maybe that's yeah, that's probably the correct terminology.

(28:48):
It's probably not, by the way. Also, vegina dentata is
something that we've covered on the show separately, that that
that that was a joke that's not actual like biology.
I guess that you would say it's kind of aversion
I believe diverted. Yeah, it was like turning the turning
out of a pocket, and yeah, that's exactly what I
was thinking of. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's very complicated

(29:08):
to try and sort of fit the the tetris equation
here in one's mind, genital tetris. Now that that act
of gift giving that we're talking about the nourishment. The
researchers have argued here that this is likely what drove
the evolutionary development of the female penis. The dinosame here
to begin with, again getting into this phallic arms race. Now,

(29:31):
why is it funny? I think that's pretty obvious because
it is a study that involves sex and the idea
of a female organism penetrating a male organism. So sex
t Yes, basically, that's that's it. It's it's beenign violation.
Well yeah, as long as you're not one of the
male cave fugs, right yeah, but but yeah, it's it's

(29:51):
basically just a a funny sex headline, right, but it
is still important. It's u it's I think it's such
a startling rever hursal of everything we've come to expect
from sexual reproduction. And as their researchers point out, the
reversal here is in the quote rapid evolution and diversification
unquote of genitalia. So male genitalia is usually the one

(30:13):
to develop quote coercive adaptations, while female genitalia remains relatively simple. Plus,
it's the females doing the competition here for males and
their seminal gifts. So the biological reversal results in a
very robust behavioral reversal. So perhaps with this particular species,

(30:33):
there's more females than males, or there's some kind of
a I don't know if sociological is the right term,
but there's a there's a set up in which like
they have to compete for the the attention of the
males in order to reproduce. Well, it sounds like the
females would be the ones doing the courtship activities. Yeah,
and it's it's interesting to to look at that. It's

(30:53):
like to say that the biological reversal and then that
reverses the behavior as well. Uh. I really like this
because I think flipping things around like this, it shows
us that sexual reproduction is all about just the combination
of these two things and the form those things take,
and all the behavior and culture associated with it is
merely a product of natural selection. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting

(31:16):
and it makes me sort of think, like where's it
going as well, not just with insects, but with like
all species. You know, although for the most part, I
mean for the last like millions some odd years, most
of our species have stayed the same reproductive wise, but
things can change well, and it especially when we start
changing ourselves. It's also one of those studies that just
raises the possibility like what if what if things had

(31:36):
gone the other way? What if we were in a
world where the vast majority almost all organisms that engage
in sexual reproduction entailed at the female penetration of the
male and uh and we were looking at a weird
cave bug that did the opposite, right, Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah,

(31:57):
it does put it all into perspective. Yeah, alright, we're
gonna take a quick break and we come back. We
have one more study here for you from the two
thousand seventeen Igno Bells. Thank you, Thank alright, we're back.
So I'm gonna take us from inverted genitals to an
entirely different place. This is the Peace Prize for the

(32:18):
Igno Bells this year. Uh and it revolves around the
Dijury Do you guys familiar with the dijury do? Oh? Yes? Yeah,
I'm actually can our producer Alex insert the sound of
a Dijury do in here so that our audience kind
of gets an idea of what we're talking about. No, wait,

(32:40):
that was a digury don't. Here we go, and if
nothing else, I think everybody should recognize that sound from
any like Australian exploitation film or something mystical. Now, was
there a bunch of digury do and howling three the marsupials?

(33:03):
I feel like there was. I mean, if there wasn't
it was that was a colossal failure on their part. Well,
if there was, those marsupials would sleep better than most people.
No way. Yeah, we've got some facts here. Folks did
red playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnea syndrome
in a randomized control trial. That is the paper that
I'm talking to you about today. The essential idea here

(33:26):
is they demonstrated that regular playing of the dig Rey
Do is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnea and snoring.
So do either you guys snore? Do you have sleep apnea?
I don't have apnea. My dad does, but I snore
a decent amount I have. I have relatives who have
snoring issues. But yeah, I don't have it myself. So

(33:46):
have you ever thought to yourself, like, what if I
just played the Digrey Do a little bit more? Would
that make it better? Science says yes. So this is
the the play that like you're playing the DIGITALI do
music to settle down for the evening. Are you listening
to it or you just have having it in your life.
It doesn't even have to be right before you go
to bed. Explain Okay, So these researchers, they took twenty
five patients who had apnea or hypopnia in an index

(34:10):
between fifteen and thirty. That's you know, a measurement system
that they use for like how bad these conditions can get. Uh,
And they had them do did red lessons for four
months and the participants played did you red for about
six days a week for about twenty five point three
minutes a day, and it's significantly improved both there and

(34:32):
their partners. Sleep disturbances. Now we might wonder, like what's
the biological function here, like what is going on? Well, okay,
sleep disorders of this type, they're caused by the collapse
of the upper airway. So the most effective intervention is
usually what's called positive airway pressure therapy. So that's like
when you see people who have the masks, they go
to sleep with positive pressure. Yeah. To be honest, like

(34:55):
when I have sinus problems, what I end up doing
is just pushing on my my sinuses round my nose.
I think it's a similar effect, but this is obviously
like more methodical than what I'm doing. Okay. Uh. For
some patients though, that's not suitable, so they need other interventions.
The researchers involved in this experiment they had heard just

(35:15):
heard from a Digredo instructor. He said, hey, um, my
students and I we've had a complete reduction in our
snoring and we're not sleepy during the daytime after we've
been practicing digre Do for several months. And they thought,
wait a minute, is this because digre do is training
the muscles in their upper airways? So okay. They set

(35:36):
up this methodology and they recruited patients at study centers
in Switzerland. Then they randomized these patients into an intervention
group and a control group. And then they excluded candidates
who are currently trying out that positive airway pressure therapy
and any drugs that act on the central nervousism, as
well as anybody who was trying to lose weight or

(35:56):
way too much or drank too much alcohol, as all
these things could be contributing factors. The patients in the
intervention group took the dig red classes and they learned
the following things. I've never played a Digury do before,
so I didn't this was new to me. Uh. Circular
breathing is a technique that enables you to maintain sound

(36:18):
for a long period of time by inhaling through your
nose while maintaining airflow through the instrument itself and use
your cheeks as bellows. Okay, so this is like the
first kind of important part of this, and then the
second is to optimize the complex interaction between your lips,
your vocal tract, and the circular breathing I just mentioned,

(36:40):
so that the vibration in the upper airway is more
readily transmitted down to the lower airway. Well, I guess
one thing to keep in mind here is that with
dig redo music, you don't hear a bunch of a staccata.
You don't hear you don't heart, you hear long droning tone.
It's sustained. Yeah, yeah, exactly, which I imagine also helps
contribute to this. Right now, I've got a question, are

(37:02):
there any drone or doom metal bands that incorporate digury
Do they have to be there have to be I'm
almost positive there is. Yeah, And but do you think
they're from Australia or somewhere else? I don't know. You
get into an interesting area where it would be like
a like a an aboriginal uh subset of drone music,
kind of like traditional drawne music, like what happens when

(37:23):
you run a digury do through an R and JAMP.
I mean, I have to admit, like most sun Oh
records sound like they have digitally do in the background anyways.
But so here's the thing, how do you measure this? Well,
it turns out there's several indexes to measure the effect
on sleep, and so they brought these patients in, they
gave them these indexes as surveys, and then they used

(37:47):
cardio respiratory sleep studies on them, and finally they gave
the patients just a generic health and quality of life
survey just to find out, you know, what's all going on,
making sure everything's working the right way. They found this
The patient's quality of sleep actually didn't differ significantly between
the people who played Didjury Do and the people who didn't,

(38:08):
but their partners reported less sleep disturbance. They also observed
a significant effect of the digury Do playing on apnea
or hypopnia. Uh. And so actually when they compared this
to the positive airway pressure therapy, they found they're similar,
but the dijury Do has a slightly smaller effect. But essentially,

(38:32):
like if you're out there and you're listening and you're like, oh,
this is a problem for me, maybe you have to
wear one of those masks at night or something like that,
Maybe play digury do instead, Like you know what it
reminds me of, Well, we would say, obviously, following your
doctor's recommendation, but yeah, give dijury do a try. Yeah, yeah,
do do both well and then imagine how well you
sleep if you do. One of the great things about

(38:53):
the digury Do that I've I've picked up on is
that even if you don't play it, or you never
play it, uh, it still looks great propped up in
a corner. Always. Discussion started, well, I was thinking about
how this reminds me of. This leads us back to cats.
We've done some research into cats before on this and
on brain stuff, talking about cat purring and the function

(39:15):
of cat purring as like a method of healing both
the cat and maybe people who are on the cat
or like the cats laying on or something like that.
So the digury Do kind of made me think the
same thing, like, there's something there's an act of the
vibration that's that's working on here. But obviously also they're
building up actual muscles and responses inside the respiratory system.

(39:36):
So why is it funny? Well, because the sound and
the look of the instrument is abusing. Everybody giggles at
the dig re Do, right, because but why is it important?
This is an actual thing that can relieve a disorder
that many people suffer from. You know, most people would
go that's a ridiculous thing. Why would we Why would
re research that? If the dig rey Do instructors said hey,

(39:57):
this may actually have some benefits to your pati most
people would just go, oh yeah, sure, that's anecdotal. But
they did the research and they found out that it's
a real thing. Well it comes back around the idea
of of science as the slime mold. You know, opening
every cabinet and even the cabinets that seem a bit
silly that we seem reluctant to, you know, to to
to give much credence to the science, is going to

(40:19):
look in there and see if there's anything worth happening.
You know, this makes me think we could do probably
whole episodes on the medical science of wind instruments, Like
we gotta go from this to bagpipe long right, you
know the the inverse is that a condition like I'm
suffering from bagpipeline. Oh man. So you're a bagpipe player
and you maybe it's actually not funny because this is

(40:41):
literally killed people. But yeah, bagpipe along is a thing
that where your bagpipe becomes infested with fungus without you
realizing because you're continually, yeah, as you as you're continually
experiencing this constricted airflow through this fungus filled cavity, you
are feeding all of these these horrible particles into your

(41:01):
lungs and people don't realize what's going on, and it
can kill you. Oh man, that sounds like a great
idea for an episode. Not to be a downer, guys,
remember that they can help people. Good ay mate. If
you play bagpipes, also play the digit do I don't think.
I don't think that they reverse the conditions. But you'll
feel better about one thing while you're feeling worse about

(41:23):
the other. Al Right, we actually have one more before
we close out this installment of our two thousand seventeen
Ignobell series, and it is the fluid dynamics prize that
sounds exciting. Wait, we already did fluid dynamics with those
cats somehow. I guess rayology is slightly different than fluid dynamics,
or maybe fluid dynamics is a is a larger subset category.

(41:45):
I know fluid dynamics is. Certainly it's an area that
always intrigues me because for starters that they do have
a at least one huge conference a year, and you
see a lot of cool papers coming out of it,
and it ranges tremendously because, for instance, one of the
best fluid dynamic papers and the most enthralling that I
came across, was a paper that dealt with how uh

(42:08):
nuclear fallout moves through a metropolitan environment, you know, with
like flows of radioactive material hitting buildings like cascading up
buildings and so forth, and how we might be able
to to map the flow of these materials. Yeah, hey,
I got a fun footnote to that. The most expensive

(42:30):
book in the world is a book that was written
by Leonardo da Vinci and it's owned by Bill Gates,
and it's about fluid dynamics, and it's written backwards. You
have to you have to read mirror to left. It's well, yeah,
it's written so that you have to use a mirror
to actually read it. Wow. Yeah, it's impressive. Well you
should ask Bill Gates sometime. Yah. Sounds point and the

(42:52):
whole things actually standing on well you know. But but
one of the great things about fluid dynamics is that, yeah,
it certainly touches on some some rather grandiose topics, but
it also is just everywhere around us. Like I I
have not looked up a study about this, but every
time I'm making a smoothie in the morning in the blender,
I think about fluid dynamics. Somebody out there has surely

(43:14):
applied some serious scientific thinking to what's going on with
my blender, Like how how the stuff blends or in
many cases doesn't blend. How you end up with that
section of smoothie on the top that's doing nothing while
the bottom part is swirling around. I would imagine they
need a better blender or whatever. Those like chains are
like those smoothie kings, the one we have here and
with the big square looking they must have like scientists

(43:38):
on their teams whose whole job is to figure out
like how well these things can come up through straws.
I've read about this. I think the best solution is
to stick your hand down in there while it's going. Yeah, well,
that's what I was thinking. You were going with the
cat thing. Don't follow my advice, folks. All right, Well,
this particular study is titled A Study of the Coffee
Spilling Phenomena in the Impulse Regime. So are we in

(44:04):
the low impulse regime right now? I think we're in
the high impulsori. I love that that phrase of the
low impulse regime sounds like a band. I would be
really into it. It sounds like something Captain Piccard would say.
So basically, this paper asked the question, from a fluid
dynamic standpoint, why does spillage occur with coffee also with wine?

(44:24):
And how might we limit it? This is the great
thing about the papers. It touches on a universal experience.
I am the guy who inevitably always spills coffee on themselves.
I don't know what it is A trail of brown
look like. And to the point where my wife like
knows when I've bought coffee and have been driving in
the car because she's just like, there's coffee stains everywhere.
What is wrong with you? I eat like a raccoon,

(44:46):
and apparently with coffee, I just like throw the cup
at my face. I guess I don't know, but yeah,
even just like when it has a lid on it
and I move it around, it somehow gets everywhere. This
is one of my favorite features of classic animation. If
you watch old Disney movies, they're always depicting cups of
liquids sloshing around crazily while people are consuming them. You

(45:09):
know what I'm talking about, Like people swinging a beer
stein or a wine glass or something like that, and
it's just splashing and slashing all over the place. When
that kind of movement tends to uh, it tends to
be everywhere in these old cartoons, like the people are
kind of slashing back and forth. The action is kind
of slashing. I guess animation historians have probably have a

(45:29):
have some terminology to throw behind them. Yeah. I would
imagine it has something to do with like the form
at the time that like the animators and illustrators are
probably trying to figure out how best to render liquid
in cartoon format, same as like with c G. I
like when it's super impressive how great water is rendered.
I guess part of what I'm thinking of is that

(45:50):
it's always like in classic animation, actions and the themes
they signify or exaggerated. Like if you watch old Disney movies,
whenever somebody's drinking some thing, usually it's in some kind
of feast scene that's signaling gluttony or something like that.
And so there's all this depiction of excess, and maybe
the slashing is one aspect of that. I immediately thought

(46:11):
of Fantasia and Mickey carrying. So this particular paper is
a South Korean paper and it was published in Achievements
in the Life Sciences, and it's by you On Han
from two thousand sixteen. And I'm not going to summarize
a lot of the paper because a lot of the
paper is just sort of breaking it down in from

(46:33):
a fluid, dynamic standpoint, what's happening with a slashing cup
of coffee or a slashing goblet of wine. But the
fun part is that this article doesn't just doesn't just
describe what's happening. It presents solutions. So wait, you're telling
me I might have some solutions from my coffee problems. Yeah,
I'm saying that when you when we're done with this section,

(46:54):
you will have new ideas to implement in your coffee consumption.
And you're handling of a coffee mug apart from sippy cups. Um, basically, well,
they get there in a way. There's sort of the
cipy cup. They do recommend you could you could hold
the coffee mug with a like a small plate on
top of it, just cover the coffee mug. That seems obvious.
You don't a scientist to point that out. But yeah,

(47:17):
maybe if we didn't have an open container of liquid,
we wouldn't have to deal with sloshing. But I assume
solutions than that. They well, we'll see if you think
they're better. Uh, here's a quote from the paper. Moreover,
we showed that either walking backwards or holding the cup
the cup with a claw hand posture lead to significant

(47:39):
changes in the driving force frequency spectrum, suggesting a method
to suppress residents. So one of the ideas here is, yes,
simply walk backwards with your coffee mug. But the other
is that I have a feel like I would spell
even more with that, but okay, I'm listening. The other
is to have your make a claw with your hand

(48:00):
and hold the coffee mug top down, not bottom up,
so you're holding your coffee like you're some sort of
like a cartoon vampire carrying it around from the top.
Crane game. Yeah, it's like the crane game where instead
of grabbing a bunch of like cheap stuffed animals, you're
grabbing a single coffee mug. I know this is a

(48:21):
better method. It makes you look kind of stupid, but
it is a better method according to the scientific data. Now.
I know, Robert, you haven't seen the new season of
Twin Peaks. Joe, you have, right. No, actually, okay, so
neither of you going to don't spoil it. I'm just
gonna say it. There is a character named Dougie in it,
and Dougie holds coffee in the claw method, but he
does two handed claw where he grabs it from the

(48:42):
side and he holds it with both of his hands
are clawed and he holds onto it tightly like that. Man,
I have a totally different idea of the claw hold,
and it comes from my day's serving in restaurants. Where
the claw was. How you fit three water glasses in
the same hand. You've got this clutch, but it's underneath, right, Yeah,
from the bottom where they each like they fit between

(49:02):
the first finger and that. Well, I'm not going to
describe all that, but yeah, you can get three water
glasses in one hand if you use the claw. What
was the spillage like with that? Not too much? Actually, okay,
it might have hit on a similar property. But that's
the other thing that comes to mind. In the service industry,
you can't really use the top down claw method to
bring someone their coffee at a restaurant. They're going to
think you're yeah, they're gonna say, take that back. You're

(49:25):
you're basically sticking your hand in my beverage. But it
looks like here that they have come up with a
design that could fix that problem. Yes, let's carry it
in your mouth and then spit it out into the
cup at the table. Well, at least it would be closed, right,
and then you're prepared for a wonderful cinematic response to
any jokes that that the customer may may share. But now,

(49:45):
in addition to providing new ways to carry existing coffee mugs,
this study does present an alternate coffee cup design. Quote.
It is evident that a decrease in the radius of
the cup can significantly increase the resonance frequency by dividing
the cup into smaller cylindrical cells. So there's like, how

(50:07):
this looks. It's like a coffee cup, but it looks
like it's got a bunch of like syringes with the
top sawed off inside of Its possible to drink out of.
It looks impossible to drink off. It looks a bit
silly for sure, I mean straw. Yeah, basically the picture
looks like a glass like cocktail tumbler, and inside it

(50:28):
there are all of these glass vials. It's packed with
test tubes. So imagine if you drink your coffee out
of a bunch of test tubes that have been lashed together,
as opposed to a single broad drinking vest. I mean,
what this looks like is you'd be sipping out of
the bottom two test tubes and the rest would just
be pouring into your eyes. Yeah, exactly what. You couldn't

(50:50):
throw it back, and that's for sure, and it would
be really you would have to mix your cream and
sugar in a different cup. Entirely before you even pour it.
The thing that gets me about this, really, both of
these suggestions, both the coffee cup design and the coffee
mug handling UH method, is that what if these what
if this is the way? What if these are the

(51:11):
changes we need for a better system of drinking and
carrying coffee around. But we're ultimately going to just be
too vain to to change, because, yes, drinking out of
this bizarre contraption that looks like a bunch of test
tubes look silly. Carrying your coffee mug around with a
claw hole looks silly, and but there are other things

(51:32):
that we've seen in life where the sillier looking method
is more successful and we don't do it because it
looks silly. I'm gonna offer a really stupid method, but
it's my method. I pretty much never spilled my coffee
because I never fill my cup more than two thirds
of the way, well, because I don't want to get
the fear. But the thing is, Joe, I I have
there's been so many times where I've been coming in

(51:54):
from my front porch, So I work on my front
porch a lot. What I'm teleworking and I always have
a coffee mug with me, and sometimes the coffee mug
you know it's down to the last little bit, but
you can still, trust me, you can still slash the
heck out of a cup of coffee when you have
less than a fourth of a cup. Yeah. So if
you're like trying to grab hold of a child or

(52:15):
something like, yeah, or if you you know, you you
have a laptop and you have the coffee mug of
the laptop. But the thing that this reminded me of,
and I am not a sports person at all, but
but I heard it was either a radio lab or
this American Lonfe episode in the last several years about
the granny shot in basketball about how this is the
most effective way to make a free throw. So describe

(52:35):
the granny shot. The granny shot is the it's generally
associated with if you don't know how to bowl, or
you don't know how to throw a basketball, you simply
hold it in your hands and you just you sort
of stand legs apart, legs of kimbo. Yeah, and you
just dangle it down there between your legs and then
throw it up underhanded, underhanded, a double handed, underhand throw

(52:56):
with legs of kimbo so you're saying that people using
this method to get a higher frequency percentage of shots
than people who don't use it. Yeah. Basically, the idea
is that it's been proven that this is the most
effective method even in the really especially in the NBA.
UM and those who utilize this method um make more

(53:17):
free throws. But it's pretty rare that you'll see this
during a game because it looks stupid. Yeah, because there's
this idea that if you throw the ball that way,
you don't know what you're doing, that it it has
less than next to it. Even if it's more effective,
even if it could ultimately, you know, make a difference
in winning games, it's still something. It's a line that
most basketball players are not willing to cross. Sounds like

(53:39):
there's a window for somebody to come in and moneyball
all this thing. I guess, Yeah, but but I wonder
I'm sorry, I just use moneyball as a verb like
I'm some ad executive. Well, let's quickly pivot away from
that and we'll move back to the Yeah. But but
it it raises the question, what again, what if this
is the best way, this is the scientifically verified way
to drink coffee and We're just all going to ignore

(54:01):
it as we've been ignoring it because, like I said this,
this this came out last year and nothing has changed.
Now that it's getting it's making the rounds with the
Ignoble prizes, is it more likely that people will listen
to it? Will you? Will there be like one person
in a given workplace that embraces the crazy test tube
filled the coffee mug. If those tubes were available on

(54:23):
the market and they weren't like prohibitively expensive, I'd give
it a shot. Yeah, maybe we should. We could, we
could be an experiment. Well, maybe listeners out there will
try it themselves. If you don't try the test tube
oriented coffee mug been, try the top down claw method
of holding the cup and let us know how it goes.
All right, So there you have it. Four down, um,

(54:46):
six to go. Yeah, So follow us on our next
episode about Ignobles. We're gonna release this right one after
the other, sequentially, I believe, is how they say it.
But you know what, if you've got any questions for
us about coffee mug or weird insect genitalia or how
you make liquid cats, where can they get in touch
with us? Joe, Well, you can go to stuff to

(55:07):
Blow your Mind dot com, where you've got everything we do,
including Robert's excellent blog posts. He'll do some space music,
he'll do some monsters. I don't know we're gonna get
any monsters in November. Surely we will, even though we've
just Yeah, surely I can find a monster too to
throw in the November mix. But that's, of course where
you can get all of our podcasts. But also you
can go wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to

(55:28):
us right now, so you probably know how to do that.
If you're not subscribe, subscribe and you can always email
us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot
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(55:48):
Does it how stuff works dot com, November twenty four,
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