November 7, 2019 • 43 mins
Yes, it’s time once more for us to cover the Ig Nobel prizes. This year on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe consider cubical wombat poop, truly dirty money, diaper-changing robots and much more.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we are revisiting a yearly tradition that's
right every year, pretty much about this time, we look
(00:25):
and see what was honored at this year's Ignoble Prizes.
The prizes themselves come out. I believe that the end
of September or the very beginning of October the timing
for us, Yeah, because that's when we want to get
into our Halloween content, and so we always do. We
just steamroll ahead into the Halloween content. And then afterwards, uh,
you know, after especially after the dust is sort of
(00:45):
settled on the Ignobele Prizes, the mainstream media coverage of
the event has died away, then we come back and
we picked through the winners and sometimes we cover absolutely everything.
Sometimes we cover a few choice selections here and there,
and that's going to be the model we're going to
be employing here. Yeah, we're just gonna take a look
(01:06):
at a few highlights that stuck out to us. So
for those who haven't heard before, a quick refresher on
the Ignobles. Yeah, they've been awarded each year since by
the publication the Annals of Improbable Research. The purpose of
the award, according to the editors of Improbable Research, is
to quote honor achievements that first make people laugh and
(01:27):
then make them think. Furthermore, they stressed 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 people's interests in science, medicine,
and technology. And the principal individual here is editor Mark Abrams. So, yeah,
(01:48):
every year it is just a it's you know, it's
making fun of the idea a little bit of the
Nobel Prizes, uh, which which celebrate, you know, key advancements
and and and key samples of work that are really
pushing forward are our understanding of ourselves and the universe nature.
And the Ignoble Prizes tend to highlight more absurd intreats,
(02:11):
but none not necessarily intreaes that are you know, that
are completely useless. And I think that's an important thing
to stress and something we've tried to stress in the
past when covering the event is that studies that are
honored by the Ignoble Prizes maybe snick or inducing. They
may seem a little silly at first glance, but they
(02:31):
are all works of real science, of real ingenuity, and
if nothing else, they are expanding, helping to expand the
the threshold of human understanding. Yeah, I mean, I think
one of our favorite things to explore on this show
is realizing that there's an interesting question in a place
you wouldn't have expected to find it, and that's what
(02:52):
a lot of this research does. And so on that note,
let us turn to the first Ignoble Prize winning study
that we would like to highlight here today, and that
is the two thousand and nineteen award winner in Physics,
awarded to Patricia yang at All for studying how and
why wombats make a cube shaped poop. Wombats are so
(03:15):
cute they are there. They are so adorable to look at.
I mean, obviously the babies, any baby animals going to
be adorable, but even the adults look like living Teddy
Bear creatures, like living Teddy Bear marsu fils. I bet
they're just nightmarish, you know, Given how cute they are.
I'm sure they kill thousands of people every year, now,
(03:35):
I mean to be to be clear, they can protect
themselves and sometimes they do harm humans if provoked or
I think there have been cases where like there was
a wombat that had the mange or something like that
and was therefore a little more agitated. So yes, there
they can. They are kind of tough customers in their
own right, own right. They're not straight up wolverines or anything,
(03:55):
but they can. They can look after themselves. So this
particular their paper, how do wombats make cubed pooh uh?
This came This was presented at the seventy firth Annual
Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, And I
believe this is presented in Atlanta, Georgia, where of course
we record the show. Yeah, I think at least part
of the team is Georgia Tech, right, yeah, yeah, So
(04:17):
the species here vombat us your sinus is a pudgy
herbivore roughly the size of a kind of a thick dog,
like a really thick dog, and it's marsupial. They have pouches,
but since they're burrowers, they have backward pouches so as
not to fill the pouch up with dirt and endanger
the young one that may be within the pouch. So interesting,
(04:40):
So like if they're pulling themselves forward on their belly
through the dirt, the dirt does not go in, right, Yeah,
because we can all imagine the cartoon scenario of it's
just filling up with dirt. Right. They have a slow metabolism.
They feed mostly on grasses and roots, and they're largely
nocturnal or crepuscular, you know, so they're gonna you know,
they're not going to venture out, usually in the brightest
(05:02):
light of the day. They may come out though on
particularly overcast days, and they can again, they can put
up a fight if threatened. And you'll find them in
Australia and in Tasmania. They're cute. They're not endangered, despite
being treated as vermin by some farmers. And oh I
love this. Groups of wombats are are sometimes called a mob,
sometimes just called a group, but sometimes they're also known
(05:23):
as a wisdom of wombats. Oh man, that's better than
a murder of crows. That is, I just imagine these wise,
cute elder wombats that have so so much wisdom to
share with the world. I don't mean to be mean,
but they don't necessarily look wise. They do look they
look more clever than wise. Well, what would you what
would you refer to them as? Like a snuggle of wombats.
(05:45):
It would be a snugg e of wombats. That's pretty good,
A slank it of wombats, A slank it of wombats.
I like that. But one of the more puzzling attributes
of the wombat has long been their poop, because it
is cubic. And we're not talking necessarily perfectly cubic in
a geometric geometrical sense, but yet for a world mostly
(06:08):
to void, pretty much completely devoid of natural squares, certainly
natural biological squares, this is pretty darned cubic. Yeah, totally.
I mean, if you come across these things in nature,
you would think they were made by humans. Yeah. They
look kind of like chocolate marshmallows, like really square chocolate
marshmallows if you see a picture of them, Yeah, not
(06:30):
the cylindrical marshmallows, like the more old school like carved
out ones with corners. Granted, I think the images that
we're both looking at here they're dried a little bit,
but still even fresh out the shoot. They are there.
They are cubic in nature. It is really hard to
imagine how these things are made just picked. I mean,
I don't know how much time one wants to spend
(06:50):
contemplating a wombad anus, but like, it just doesn't seem
like a normal thing that would emerge physically from a
what I would assume to be rounded anus. Well, the
wombat anus is not immune from the inquiry of science,
and that's where Yang and her team come in. Uh
and again, Yeah, Yang is local, based out of the
School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, where she's a
(07:12):
postdoctoral fellow. So since she's local, maybe we should have
her on the on the show. Because she's not just
a one time Ignoble winner, she's a two time Ignoble
winner because she and co author David who also shared
the two thousand fifteen Ignoble Physics Prize for testing the
biological principle that nearly all mammals and empty their bladders
in about twenty one seconds plus or minus thirteen seconds.
(07:35):
I don't know. The plus or minus thirteen seconds buys
you a pretty big window there. But yeah, I find
myself very often thinking about this one in the bathroom. So,
having turned away from the world of urine, the researchers
were interested by this puzzle of the wombat poop, so
they looked at how differences and wombats digestive processes and
(07:55):
soft tissue structures informed this curious structure. So they investigated.
They used the digestive tracts of wombats that have been
euthanized following motor vehicle collisions in Tasmania. Uh so you
have to you have to have some actual bodies to
look at there, and then it seems like a reasonable
way to go about getting them. They found that the
shape occurred towards the very end of the intestines. As
(08:19):
the matter became increasingly firm, it became clear that quote
varying elastic properties of wombats intestinal walls allowed for the
cubic formation. And the result is a cube, the only
organic cube in nature, they say. And it's not made
Yang stresses by the two typical human methods of creating cubes.
(08:39):
We because we tend to mold a cube or we
cut a cube. Right, we slice a cube out of
something via you know, subtractive manufacturing. But this is a
third way. This is the way of the wombat where
it is it is it is formed through the you know,
the excretion process of the lower intestines. So this would
(09:00):
be not cutting a cube, not molding a cube. Maybe
pinching a cube. Yeah, pinching a cube and then excreting
a cube. Now you're probably wondering, well, what is the
why of all of this? Right, if the wombat is
doing something entirely different with its poop, there has to
be a reason. Well, scientists believe it comes down to
the fact that these burrowing, nocturnal herbivores depend largely on
(09:21):
their sense of smell. They largely communicate by smell, and therefore,
like various other animals that are also smell dependent, their
fecal matter is their calling card. I mean, you have
a dog, you know how the how they behave there
the sort of the the the heightened importance of fecal
matter in the dog world. Yeah, out on a walk
in the neighborhood. Poop is like a Facebook status update.
(09:43):
It's like you know that you're interested, you want to
check it out, Like we just see something we don't
want to step in maybe the in the sense data
there is just telling us not to step in it.
But to a dog with heightened far heightened sensibilities, there's
a lot of data in the sense emerging from bat poop.
It's interesting stuff. And so while it's something like a
while something like a cat hides its poop because it
(10:05):
doesn't want to be known to either it's many prey
animals or it's many predators. Wombats are a different matter today.
Wombats don't have many natural predators, uh certainly adult wombats,
and they use their piled feces to mark territory and
to communicate with other wombats. And and they don't live
on a prairie. Their ups and down to the topography
(10:27):
of their natural habitat, and placing their poops at higher
at elevations such as a tops some rocks, on top
of a log, or on a ledge, it makes it
stand out more visually to other wombats. And again they
don't have great, great a sense of sight, but still
you put it up there on a ledge, more wombats
are able to see it, and then the wombats can
(10:49):
come in and take a more informed a smell of
the wombat poop and learn something about about its maker.
So the wombat rectum is sort of designed by evolution
to create poop monuments like testaments to the will of
the wombat that occupies this territory, poop that stays put. Basically,
(11:12):
which is interestingly quite the exact opposite of the round
goat feces that many of you've probably seen emerging from
the rear end of a goat, which is believed to
have evolved to roll downhill and essentially self hide in
hilly or mountainous terrain, so as better maybe to throw
off a cougar that could be pursuing yours. Right, Yeah,
(11:32):
like for the goat, it's better that the poop just
gets lost, but for the wombat, the wombat has very
specific needs that require the poop to remain in sight
and to be found. And so yeah, it's basically with
the wombats, it's it's highly adaptive to be able to
poop cubes that stay put. It's part of their language
of expression. Now, naturally, there are potential bio mimetic possibilities here.
(11:57):
In the future, Young says, we might see human created
is produced not by molding or cutting, but by this
sort of excretion. So I can't help but wonder if
this will be the future of our Valentine's Day chocolates.
Oh yes, like a like a mechanical industrial anus for
pooping out chocolate and exactly that shape, exactly delicious, So
that's the physics price. And uh yeah, I just love
(12:19):
this story because when wombats are such interesting creatures and
and this is ultimately extremely insightful like this is this
is not this is something that yes, it's laughable because
it's poop poop from a cute marsupial, But on the
other hand, it's it really illustrates something amazing about evolution
and uh and it also highlights where we might go
(12:40):
in the future when it comes to making cubicle candy.
And if you want to learn more about this, Patricia
Yang also has a website Patricia Yang dot net. Excellent. Well,
maybe we should take a quick break and then when
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(14:33):
we're back Dirty Money. This is this year's Economics Prize
for the Igno Bells. This went to Habibi Cadeck, Timothy A. Voss,
and Andreas Voss for testing which country's paper money is
best at transmitting dangerous bacteria. The paper was called Money
and Transmission of Bacteria in Anti Microbial Resistance and Infection
(14:56):
Control in and So the authors here start out with
pretty obvious fact. Cash gets handled a lot. It changes hands.
You touch it, I touch it. Tom Atkins probably touched it.
Ted goes to the bathroom and then he touches it.
You sneeze, Then you handle it. Then you pay for
your lunch with it. Somebody pays me the gambling debts
they owe me with that same money. It seems like
(15:18):
a pretty obvious vector for disease transmission. When you were
a kid, you probably heard this, and if you like
me or a parent, you've probably said this, don't put
that money in your mouth. It's filthy, right, I mean,
for some reason, When I was reading about this research,
the thing that kept popping into my mind is that
episode of Parks and Recreation where you find out that
(15:38):
all the Pawnee citizens drink from water fountains by putting
their mouth over the fountain. Part. I had completely forgotten
about this until you mentioned it. Yeah, there was also
a skit from the Upright Citizen's Brigade, right, Yes, that
we can't go into full detail about here, but you
can probably figure it out what somebody who chose to
(15:58):
pay for things with befouled pennies that they themselves had
intentionally befouled. Right. But, as we know, not all physical
substrata are equally hospitable to germs. So the authors here
tested different national currencies to see how well they transmitted
various multi drug resistant bacteria, including methicillin resistant staff Alococcus
(16:20):
aureus or m R s a UH, an extended spectrum
of beta lactomaces producing E. Coli and vankomycin resistant, and
tero coxi or vr E. So UH. Here's the method.
The author has got a bunch of different bank notes
from different countries, including the euro, the US dollar, Canadian dollar,
the Croatian kuna, the Romanian leu, the Moroccan deerham, and
(16:45):
the Indian rupee. And they first of course started off
sterilizing the cash with UV radiation. You don't want to
bring in any pre existing germs. Uh. Then they inoculated
the money with incubated strains of the bacteria they were testing,
and then the cash was left out to dry for
several lengths of time, I think three hours, six hours,
and twenty four hours. And then the experimenters tested which
(17:08):
bank notes allowed bacterial colonies to survive after the various
drying periods. And then in the second experiment, they also
tested the effects of people rubbing the bank notes with
sanitized hands. Would the would the bacteria transfer from the
infected bank notes to people's hands? So which money came
out on top? Well, the Romanian lou was one of
(17:29):
the most germ friendly. It yielded all three drug resistant
pathogens after three and six hours of drying, and it
was the only currency that still had a pathogen after
a full day of drying, and that pathogen was vr E.
The Canadian and US dollar yielded only m R s A.
So I assume it's the U S money that Scrooge
McDuck swims through in his vault. Oh well, maybe he
(17:52):
had it purified, you know, because I've always heard the
Scrooge McDuck was actually a bit of germofog. Oh yeah,
they take after Howard use Uh. Okay, So the Euro
yielded only the E. Coli strain after three and six hours,
and vr E after three hours, the rupie only vr E.
The Croatian Kuna did not yield any of the pathogens
(18:13):
at any period. So in the second stage of the experiment,
they study the transmission of bacteria from bank notes to
hands after rubbing. The Euro did not transmit bacteria to hands,
but the US dollar and the Romanian lou did, though,
and they make sure to point out that all the
money was sterilized with UV radiation after the testing, so
(18:35):
it was safe to return to circulation. Uh. And the
authors also point out that this means the type of
bank note paper in circulation could have epidemiological implications. They
think major variables here are probably like the materials used
in creating the fiber of the bank notes. The Romanian Lou,
for instance, which seemed to be the most germ friendly,
(18:58):
has plastic con tent that is designed to improve durability
and make it harder to counterfeit, but it also seems
to create a more pathogen friendly environment that many of
the other fibers and materials used in paper money don't create.
So this would be like the when we've ever handle
currency that basically has like a little clear plastic windows
(19:18):
in it. Uh yeah, it could be that, or it
could be more spread out through. I don't know exactly
what's going on with the Romanian loop, but it has
polymer content that apparently is germ friendly or even you know,
not just German friendly, but like antibiotic resistant germ friendly.
But the Croatian kuna, you can take that and just
stick it directly in your mouth. Uh No, I mean,
(19:40):
I wouldn't recommend that, but it seems like in this
particular test the kuna turned out very well. So maybe
this is something other countries should consider and test out
when designing the next generation of paper notes. Maybe take
some inspiration from how the Croatian kuna has made. It
seems to be an inhospitable environment for all of the
pathogens tested. I don't know if the something that has
(20:00):
ever even figured into currency design before have like they
ever considered how well currency transmits bacteria and just how
gross money is. Yeah, I mean, granted there is less
of it that is used on a daily basis for
many populations, uh, you know, using our cards more often,
electronic payments, etcetera. But still there's a lot of cash
(20:23):
out there, and it's troubling to think about how, you know,
how dirty it is that you get sick for money. Uh,
you know, not in a spiritual sense, which I think
we're all accustomed to, but you know, in an actual
biological sense. You know, even if it's kuna. I just say,
don't put money in your mouth. Don't put it in there, Okay.
So also I wanted to talk about one not for
(20:45):
a long time. Just a quick look at the two
thousand nineteen Anatomy Prize which was awarded to Roger Museet
and Boris ben gud Ifa for measuring scrotal temperature asymmetry
and naked and cloth postmen in France. And it's not
just postman this. They still they studied bus drivers too,
(21:05):
and then people whose professions you don't even know. Uh.
The original research was published in the journal Human Reproduction
in two thousand seven. So humans are mammals showing bilaterally
symmetrical anatomy. If you split us in half lengthwise, you
will mostly see the halves as mirror images of one another.
But we're not perfect examples of bilateral symmetry. You've got
(21:28):
internal organs that are oriented off center. Maybe the hard
is a little more to one side, the liver more
to the other, and so forth. Uh. And apparently this
extends to some aspects of the human scrotum. So the
authors here begin by noting a discrepancy in the anatomical literature.
Is the human scrotum on average hotter on one side
(21:48):
than the other? Uh? Some previous reports said that it's
equally hot on both sides, while others reported that the
left side of the scrotum is generally hotter than the right. Interesting,
And of course this comes down to the fact that,
of course, on one side is one testicle, on the
other side is the other testicle. And of course part
of the whole uh design of of the testicles has
(22:09):
to do with the fact that there's a there's an
importance of maintaining certain temperatures. Absolutely, I mean, this is
highly reproductively significant information. Temperature of the male reproductive organs
plays a role in gamme eat production and thus in fertility. So,
in fact, the major biological purpose of the scrotum, as
you alluded to, seems to be thermoregulation to move the
(22:30):
testicles near or away from the body to help keep
them as close to optimal temperature as possible. Yeah, this
is why sometimes if if fertility doctors may ask, okay,
are you are you going to a hot tub all
the time? Do you have a really hot laptop setting
on your lap a lot? You know these sorts of
questions because you know that they are susceptible to outside
(22:53):
temperatures exactly. So the authors here wanted to get new
data to help clear up these discrepant reports, and so
their method bids were quote retrospective analyzes of scrotal temperatures
in mid age twenty to fifty two years, measured every
two minutes with probes connected to a data collector in
three experiments, so three different experiments. They tested this out
(23:14):
both naked and clothed in a number of different body positions.
They also tested it on yes postal workers who were
working in a standing position for ninety minutes at a time,
and they also tested out on bus drivers who were
working in a sitting position for ninety minutes at a time,
and they found that, especially in the clothed state, left
(23:36):
scrotal temperature was higher, significantly higher than right scrotal temperature. Now,
why is this? They offered a number of possible explanations,
including differences in blood flow and cutaneous heat receptors, bilateral
differences in testicular volume, so if like one testicle is
bigger than the other, that might also affect temperature. But
(23:57):
then finally, one thing they pointed out as a possible
explanation is the resting position of the penis, which really
seems to naturally go more one to one side than
the other. And they side a study from nine by
Bogart at All that found that the penis is naturally
positioned to the left in about eighty nine percent of cases.
(24:19):
So really it was an inside job the whole time.
It seems very likely to be. This study is really
interesting to and it is looking at like the clothed
human and the naked human, especially because you really have
to think at times like how how to what extent
does clothing, you know, change the definition of of the
biological human experience? You know, oh sure, I mean clothing
(24:41):
is a technological innovation. It comes fairly recently and our
evolutionary history, and is reasonable to say this might somewhat
change our reproductive behaviors and and how the body's reproductive
organs respond to the environment. So like, part of the
environment our bodies were shaped for might not necessarily be
(25:02):
having like the testicles tightly packed against the body within
some kind of container all the time, right right though, though,
I mean to our credit like that that I think
was a huge accomplishment. Like if you think back to
a time when when human you know, human beings did
not have underwear, meaning they did not have as much
control on like how tightly bound parts of their body
(25:24):
were to their person. These are things that can get
in the way of say, chasing after prey or doing
you know, any kind of physical activity. Sure, but then
you're saying their pluses and minuses. I think so yeah,
But then you know, the other side is, like the
human body, the testicles have evolved so that they there's
a self regulation of temperature. Uh, the scrotum is supposed
to be the one in charge of how closely compact
(25:47):
the testicles are, not the individual who picks out their
underwear in the morning. Right, So obviously this is a study.
We can all identify why this study is hilarious because
he's dealing with French postman whither without their underwear on,
and temperature differences between one testicle and the audit bus
drivers too. Yes, it's it's even funnier actually if you
(26:08):
start reading into the like their full explanation of their methods,
because they talk about, uh, like, the methods that are
used to determine testicular volume. There are like units of
measure for that, and I think like special special apparatus.
Uh some it's called an orchidometer or something. This is
the probe that was mentioned. No, I think that. I
think the orchidometer, the problem is something like that. It's
(26:31):
to measure testicular volume. I don't know exactly what the
deal with the probe was that they didn't like have
a diagram that I found. But still, again, this gets
down to human biology, reproductive system. So it is an
important study, sure. I mean, as we said at the beginning,
of testicular temperature is reproductively significant. This could be useful
(26:51):
in a clinical setting when studying things about fertility. Right,
I mean, it's not impossible to imagine it could influence
under a design in the future either either reasonably so
with you know a situation where a doctor is saying, like, okay,
we it makes more sense for both testicles to be
the same temperature, so we're going to create underwear in
(27:12):
which the penis is positioned out of the way of
the testicles. Or perhaps more likely, you have a situation
where somebody who just wants to sell some underwear looks
at this study and starts saying, Hey, you don't want
to be one of those asymmetrical testical temperature people. You
want to have both testicles the same temperature, and the
only way you're gonna do that is by buying this
(27:33):
special pair of thirty dollar underwear. Well against that person's
marketing concerns, I think the study found that while the
I think the major differences were when people were clothed,
but they're also were some asymmetries even when people were naked,
depending on like what position they were in. All right, well,
on that note, we're going to take another break, but
when we come back, we will discuss diaper changing machines. Alright,
(28:02):
we're back. Why do the idea of a mechanical diaper
changer horrify me, Yes, it horrifies me. And yet it
is also, I think a grand goal in human technology. Yeah,
it's kind of utopian. It's like at the same time
enticing and terrifying. It's a thing that you want but
(28:24):
you know you should not have. It is the very
sort of thing that Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park
would be irate over. Right. They were so concerned with
whether or not they could they didn't stop to think
if they should exactly. So, I've changed a few diapers
in my time, and uh, and I think I've even
wondered about the possibility of a robotic robotic diaper changer.
(28:45):
It's the kind of thing you fantasize about as you
are essentially wrestling with an infant or a toddlery, and
especially the infant, trying to to to get at the
foul diaper off of them, all the while keeping them
from say, getting their own foot into the poop, uh
or and then then flinging the poop on the wall
with said foot trying to avoid being peed upon, especially
(29:09):
if it's a boy, and then if there's a girl.
There are other concerns about about where and where you
don't want poop. It's it's it is a high. You know,
we talked before about how driving is a cognitively demanding task.
Changing a baby's diaper is a cognitively demanding task. And uh,
and so you you you fantasize, you think, I really
wish a robot could come in here and do this.
(29:29):
But on the other hand, I don't think a robot could.
And I feel like this has also been exit. I
feel like the Jetson's probably had a diaper changing robot.
I could find no evidence of it, But I feel
like this idea has also worked its way into fiction
in the past. And so this year's Ignaled Bells. The
Engineering prize, in fact, went to Iranian inventor I'm men
(29:51):
Fata Bakas for inventing a diaper changing machine for use
on human infants. Now, this is a patent. It's US
patent number one zero zero three four five eight two,
granted on July thirty one, two thousand eighteen. And I'm
going to read to you from the abstract quote. A
washer and diaper changing apparatus includes a main chamber, a
(30:13):
glass window, a seat, a leg, holder, a safety belt,
a diaper removing arm, a sprinkler, and a dryer. The
main chamber is configured to receive an infant therein. The
glass window is placed on a top wall of the
main chamber. The seat is movably coupled to the main
chamber and configured for placement of the infant on the seat.
The leg holder is movably coupled to the main chamber
(30:35):
and configured to support at least one leg of the infant.
The safety belt is coupled to the seat and configured
to retain the infant on the seat. The sprinkler is
placed inside the main chamber and configured to spray water
to wash at least a portion of the infant at
least a portion of the infant. Yes, like some too,
I guess all of the infant. Why why am Why
am I picturing those like sealed up, self cleaning public
(30:58):
bathrooms that out in some places, like it came across
these in Switzerland. I don't know I've seen one of these.
It's like a public bathroom. You go in it's a
small little building, and then you use the toilet, and
then when you're done, like the door shuts and like
a light comes on outside and it says like cleaning.
Oh wow, that sounds remarkable. I guess they're a little robotic.
I don't know, sprayers and wipers and stuff in there.
(31:20):
I don't know what happens on the inside. I couldn't see.
Oh surely somebody has has trapped themselves and found out,
I should hope. So I have to admit what it
made me think of was the surgery pod in the
sci fi horror film Prometheus. Uh. Horrifying scene, but I
think actually one of the most effective parts of the movie.
Oh yeah, yeah, because if you haven't seen it. Basically,
(31:40):
the idea is that it is a surgery pod created
for a specific male individual and an elderly individual, and
it's supposed to take care of any needs that that
individual has. And then our heroine in the film eventually
has to use it to remove a zeno more from herself.
But she's having a sort of uh improvised with the machine,
(32:03):
and it's terrifying, just like, not so much even I mean,
certainly it's terrifying when the thing starts cutting into her,
but just her climbing into it, realizing what's about to
happen makes for some some great sci fi horror. Uh.
So yes, I thought about that throughout reading this patent. However,
the patent does have some sketches, and when you look
(32:24):
at them, the design looks less like a high tech
surgery pod and more like a washing machine or an ovenswher.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, a dishwasher, not a washing machine. Yeah.
It's like a front loader, but it doesn't have a
spin cycle. Not this this version. Maybe a future model will.
So um A man uh of Pato Baka is an
(32:45):
associate professor of Islamic Azad University in Iran, and his
engineering research involves nanostructures and nanoparticles. So he's so, this
is a legit engineer here that has developed this. Uh.
Here's a little more from his patent quote. The apparatus
may be said to be automatic and some implementations, and
(33:06):
that once the infant is placed inside the apparatus, various
steps may in some cases be carried out automatically without
needing the operator to touch the infant or interact manually
with the diaper or infant during the changing process, which
may create a more sanitary environment for the ambient area
and the operator's hands. So I looked for more background
(33:27):
on this concept, and I wasn't able to find much
to really shed light on just like how serious he
is with the proposal as and you know not as
and is he does he seriously see this as a
place our technology will get to within a human lifespan?
Or is this more of a sort of an engineering
thought experiment? If you could create this thing that we
sometimes standsize about existing, how might we go about it?
(33:49):
What might an apparatus like that look like? Sure? Because
I mean again jokes asiety. As you mentioned earlier on,
it is a job that people really probably would like
to source if they felt they could do it safely,
and if it if it is a thought experiment, though,
it is kind of a perfect thing to think about
when contemplating the idea of having machines that operate alongside
(34:13):
humans or upon humans in a human environment, because I
I can think of very few examples of such a
highly sensitive and specialized job for a machine than changing
the diaper of an infant, because granted we desire a
mechanical baby changer. Because number one, it's a gross job.
Number two, it can be challenging or frustrating to do,
(34:35):
and number three it absolutely has to be done. Yeah,
it is a job that is in extremely high demand
and nobody wants to do. And certainly we've already thrown
machines at jobs that felt that all three of these
bullet points, such as sewer cleaning robots, you know, creating
some sort of a mechanical device that goes through like
a pipe and helps clean it out or at least
(34:57):
go down there and look and see what the clog
might But there's far less risk in cleaning a sewer,
right right, Yeah, unlike a clog in a city sewer system.
A human infant is one the most valuable thing in
your life. Number two, it's afforded legal protection, like it
is a person and if you if you don't take
care of it correctly, you could go to prison. And
(35:21):
also it's susceptible to pain and injury. Getting more into
the personhood part, like this is this, this is a
human child and not a sewer clock. However, like a clock,
the baby is limited in its ability to fend for itself,
which which I think also ties into the horror of
letting the machine have a go with the diaper. Now, granted,
we already live in an age of robot assisted surgery,
(35:43):
such as various you know, prostate surgeries. But in these cases,
we're talking about the machine having an advantage in a
in its ability to use tiny instruments that humans would
would have, you know, a little more difficulty operating. And
then there's also going to be a human operator in
the room for those and I guess presumably with this
diaper changing device, the language of it tends to imply
(36:05):
that it's sort of hands off, or it could be
hands off the robotic baby changer. However, it doesn't really
benefit from tiny tools. It doesn't really have an advantage
over human hands or more specifically a human ability to
roll with what is often a puzzle again, how to
wipe the poop without the child getting a foot in
the poop, how not to be pete upon, how to
keep the child from rolling over, grabbing the diaper and
(36:28):
flinging it, etcetera. You've ever performed this task, you know
that a lot of things can go wrong and will
go wrong on the diaper changing table. Yeah, I mean,
I see a huge difference here in that, like robot
assisted surgery is not for the purpose of allowing the
doctor to not have to do the surgery right to
like increase the doctor's capability to increase increase the efficiency
(36:51):
of the surgery. And I do not see a way
in which having the machine involved improves the efficiency of
changing a baby's diaper. As such, I would say that
this sort of machine seems to me to be more
of an end game of robotics, because creating machines that
can work alongside us in human habitats, that's challenging. Word,
(37:12):
It's it's hard to imagine a more challenging place than
the than the diaper changing station. To throw a machine,
uh though, that's you know, one of the reasons perhaps
that he was pursuing the patent, you know, kind of
again kind of a mechanical thought experiment. And it does
serve as an interesting way to discuss home robotics. I mean,
I think this highlights interesting questions about the future of
(37:33):
robotics and and it reveals our intuitions that they are
already there about Like, what are the kinds of places
where least comfortable with allowing robots to be implemented? I mean,
even if you came up with a pretty good robotics
system that worked pretty much all the time, people still
probably just not feel comfortable with, like allowing robotic arms
(37:55):
to be moving around near their near their baby, right,
like one of my for very understandable reasons. Yeah, like
like one of my I think a very positive area
of robot exploration is in elder care, particularly in among
Japanese robotics companies. And in that case too, you know
you're looking at aging population with fewer individuals to look
(38:17):
after them. And also you're dealing with environments where if,
for instance, if you need help getting up and down
from a toilet, which is something that you know that
that cannon will happen with with individual of advanced age,
that might be the kind of situation where you would say, yes,
I would prefer to have a robotic helper with to
engage with me in a situation like that. However, you
(38:40):
know you're still dealing with you know, you know, a
rational individual and not a complete infant. Who again, it's
just so many problems come to mind when you imagine
just sticking the baby inside of the diaper changing device
and letting it do its thing. Like best case scenario,
you put the baby in and you just get an
air a message. It's like trying to operate any printer,
(39:03):
or all you want to do is is get this
one thing done, But there are a million things that
can and do go wrong, and you just end up
having to do something else, change the diaper yourself. In
this case, with printers. I think we've talked about this
on the show before, haven't we That like, printers seem
to follow an inverse law of technological advancement, where like
as most technology becomes better and better and more and
(39:23):
more user friendly, printers always go in the opposite direction,
like every year they get worse and more incompatible with everything.
Oh yeah, the last time I went to buy one,
I was thinking, you know, Apple makes pretty good uh computers,
but they make a pretty good printer. I'm gonna buy
that printer. I don't care if it's overpriced. And of
course they don't make a printer their printers that are
compatible with their machines. But it's almost as if they're like, no,
(39:46):
we're not touching that. That's just too complicated. It would
be bad for our brand. Have the printer. We'll do
the printer when we do the baby changing robot, all right,
So we're gonna go ahead and call it there, because
let's see, we covered poop, We cover more poop, more poops, qurotums,
bacteria you might associate with poop, right, Yeah, the diaper
(40:07):
robots really just a good haul overall. Now, once again
we did not cover all of the winners here. We
didn't even list them. There were some more interesting ones.
There was one about the health effects of eating pizza,
specifically Italian pizza made in Italy. Does it prevent cancer?
I believe that one got picked up in in the
(40:27):
media a lot. Yeah, there's another one that I think
we want to return to at some point, just as
a follow up to an episode we did earlier this
year about the facial feedback hypothesis. And this had to
do with the psychologists involved in early research on the
facial feedback hypothesis participating in failed replications of their own work,
and and that leads to an interesting, bigger discussion about, uh,
(40:49):
you know, the role, like how you communicate scientific validity
and whether effects are quote real or not. H So
that's worth revisiting, I think absolutely. If you want to
check out the full list of twenty nineteen winners. In fact,
if you want to check out the full list of
all winners from the very beginning of the Igno Bells.
Head on over to www. Dot Improbable dot com. That's,
(41:14):
of course Improbable Research. There the publication that puts out
the awards each and every year. And if you want
to check out past episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
go check out our past Ignobel Prize episodes because again
we've been doing them every year. We always come. Sometimes
we cover all the winners, sometimes we cover just a
selection of the winners. But with without fail, they always
(41:36):
highlight some some wonderful studies that also invoke laughter. Every year.
It's f calicious. They make you laugh, they make you
think yes, yeah. And if you want to check out
all those episodes, Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com
is the website. If you want to check out our
other podcast, Invention pod dot com is the place to
find Invention, a journey through human techno history. Believe what,
(41:59):
it's November right now. We're doing a lot of food
related inventions over at Invention, including canning, which which is
really fascinating you you take it for granted, but canning
technology is amazing, no doubt. Check it out huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
(42:20):
to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio is the iHeart Radio app,
(42:40):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Number
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we are revisiting a yearly tradition that's
right every year, pretty much about this time, we look
(00:25):
and see what was honored at this year's Ignoble Prizes.
The prizes themselves come out. I believe that the end
of September or the very beginning of October the timing
for us, Yeah, because that's when we want to get
into our Halloween content, and so we always do. We
just steamroll ahead into the Halloween content. And then afterwards, uh,
you know, after especially after the dust is sort of
(00:45):
settled on the Ignobele Prizes, the mainstream media coverage of
the event has died away, then we come back and
we picked through the winners and sometimes we cover absolutely everything.
Sometimes we cover a few choice selections here and there,
and that's going to be the model we're going to
be employing here. Yeah, we're just gonna take a look
(01:06):
at a few highlights that stuck out to us. So
for those who haven't heard before, a quick refresher on
the Ignobles. Yeah, they've been awarded each year since by
the publication the Annals of Improbable Research. The purpose of
the award, according to the editors of Improbable Research, is
to quote honor achievements that first make people laugh and
(01:27):
then make them think. Furthermore, they stressed 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 people's interests in science, medicine,
and technology. And the principal individual here is editor Mark Abrams. So, yeah,
(01:48):
every year it is just a it's you know, it's
making fun of the idea a little bit of the
Nobel Prizes, uh, which which celebrate, you know, key advancements
and and and key samples of work that are really
pushing forward are our understanding of ourselves and the universe nature.
And the Ignoble Prizes tend to highlight more absurd intreats,
(02:11):
but none not necessarily intreaes that are you know, that
are completely useless. And I think that's an important thing
to stress and something we've tried to stress in the
past when covering the event is that studies that are
honored by the Ignoble Prizes maybe snick or inducing. They
may seem a little silly at first glance, but they
(02:31):
are all works of real science, of real ingenuity, and
if nothing else, they are expanding, helping to expand the
the threshold of human understanding. Yeah, I mean, I think
one of our favorite things to explore on this show
is realizing that there's an interesting question in a place
you wouldn't have expected to find it, and that's what
(02:52):
a lot of this research does. And so on that note,
let us turn to the first Ignoble Prize winning study
that we would like to highlight here today, and that
is the two thousand and nineteen award winner in Physics,
awarded to Patricia yang at All for studying how and
why wombats make a cube shaped poop. Wombats are so
(03:15):
cute they are there. They are so adorable to look at.
I mean, obviously the babies, any baby animals going to
be adorable, but even the adults look like living Teddy
Bear creatures, like living Teddy Bear marsu fils. I bet
they're just nightmarish, you know, Given how cute they are.
I'm sure they kill thousands of people every year, now,
(03:35):
I mean to be to be clear, they can protect
themselves and sometimes they do harm humans if provoked or
I think there have been cases where like there was
a wombat that had the mange or something like that
and was therefore a little more agitated. So yes, there
they can. They are kind of tough customers in their
own right, own right. They're not straight up wolverines or anything,
(03:55):
but they can. They can look after themselves. So this
particular their paper, how do wombats make cubed pooh uh?
This came This was presented at the seventy firth Annual
Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, And I
believe this is presented in Atlanta, Georgia, where of course
we record the show. Yeah, I think at least part
of the team is Georgia Tech, right, yeah, yeah, So
(04:17):
the species here vombat us your sinus is a pudgy
herbivore roughly the size of a kind of a thick dog,
like a really thick dog, and it's marsupial. They have pouches,
but since they're burrowers, they have backward pouches so as
not to fill the pouch up with dirt and endanger
the young one that may be within the pouch. So interesting,
(04:40):
So like if they're pulling themselves forward on their belly
through the dirt, the dirt does not go in, right, Yeah,
because we can all imagine the cartoon scenario of it's
just filling up with dirt. Right. They have a slow metabolism.
They feed mostly on grasses and roots, and they're largely
nocturnal or crepuscular, you know, so they're gonna you know,
they're not going to venture out, usually in the brightest
(05:02):
light of the day. They may come out though on
particularly overcast days, and they can again, they can put
up a fight if threatened. And you'll find them in
Australia and in Tasmania. They're cute. They're not endangered, despite
being treated as vermin by some farmers. And oh I
love this. Groups of wombats are are sometimes called a mob,
sometimes just called a group, but sometimes they're also known
(05:23):
as a wisdom of wombats. Oh man, that's better than
a murder of crows. That is, I just imagine these wise,
cute elder wombats that have so so much wisdom to
share with the world. I don't mean to be mean,
but they don't necessarily look wise. They do look they
look more clever than wise. Well, what would you what
would you refer to them as? Like a snuggle of wombats.
(05:45):
It would be a snugg e of wombats. That's pretty good,
A slank it of wombats, A slank it of wombats.
I like that. But one of the more puzzling attributes
of the wombat has long been their poop, because it
is cubic. And we're not talking necessarily perfectly cubic in
a geometric geometrical sense, but yet for a world mostly
(06:08):
to void, pretty much completely devoid of natural squares, certainly
natural biological squares, this is pretty darned cubic. Yeah, totally.
I mean, if you come across these things in nature,
you would think they were made by humans. Yeah. They
look kind of like chocolate marshmallows, like really square chocolate
marshmallows if you see a picture of them, Yeah, not
(06:30):
the cylindrical marshmallows, like the more old school like carved
out ones with corners. Granted, I think the images that
we're both looking at here they're dried a little bit,
but still even fresh out the shoot. They are there.
They are cubic in nature. It is really hard to
imagine how these things are made just picked. I mean,
I don't know how much time one wants to spend
(06:50):
contemplating a wombad anus, but like, it just doesn't seem
like a normal thing that would emerge physically from a
what I would assume to be rounded anus. Well, the
wombat anus is not immune from the inquiry of science,
and that's where Yang and her team come in. Uh
and again, Yeah, Yang is local, based out of the
School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, where she's a
(07:12):
postdoctoral fellow. So since she's local, maybe we should have
her on the on the show. Because she's not just
a one time Ignoble winner, she's a two time Ignoble
winner because she and co author David who also shared
the two thousand fifteen Ignoble Physics Prize for testing the
biological principle that nearly all mammals and empty their bladders
in about twenty one seconds plus or minus thirteen seconds.
(07:35):
I don't know. The plus or minus thirteen seconds buys
you a pretty big window there. But yeah, I find
myself very often thinking about this one in the bathroom. So,
having turned away from the world of urine, the researchers
were interested by this puzzle of the wombat poop, so
they looked at how differences and wombats digestive processes and
(07:55):
soft tissue structures informed this curious structure. So they investigated.
They used the digestive tracts of wombats that have been
euthanized following motor vehicle collisions in Tasmania. Uh so you
have to you have to have some actual bodies to
look at there, and then it seems like a reasonable
way to go about getting them. They found that the
shape occurred towards the very end of the intestines. As
(08:19):
the matter became increasingly firm, it became clear that quote
varying elastic properties of wombats intestinal walls allowed for the
cubic formation. And the result is a cube, the only
organic cube in nature, they say. And it's not made
Yang stresses by the two typical human methods of creating cubes.
(08:39):
We because we tend to mold a cube or we
cut a cube. Right, we slice a cube out of
something via you know, subtractive manufacturing. But this is a
third way. This is the way of the wombat where
it is it is it is formed through the you know,
the excretion process of the lower intestines. So this would
(09:00):
be not cutting a cube, not molding a cube. Maybe
pinching a cube. Yeah, pinching a cube and then excreting
a cube. Now you're probably wondering, well, what is the
why of all of this? Right, if the wombat is
doing something entirely different with its poop, there has to
be a reason. Well, scientists believe it comes down to
the fact that these burrowing, nocturnal herbivores depend largely on
(09:21):
their sense of smell. They largely communicate by smell, and therefore,
like various other animals that are also smell dependent, their
fecal matter is their calling card. I mean, you have
a dog, you know how the how they behave there
the sort of the the the heightened importance of fecal
matter in the dog world. Yeah, out on a walk
in the neighborhood. Poop is like a Facebook status update.
(09:43):
It's like you know that you're interested, you want to
check it out, Like we just see something we don't
want to step in maybe the in the sense data
there is just telling us not to step in it.
But to a dog with heightened far heightened sensibilities, there's
a lot of data in the sense emerging from bat poop.
It's interesting stuff. And so while it's something like a
while something like a cat hides its poop because it
(10:05):
doesn't want to be known to either it's many prey
animals or it's many predators. Wombats are a different matter today.
Wombats don't have many natural predators, uh certainly adult wombats,
and they use their piled feces to mark territory and
to communicate with other wombats. And and they don't live
on a prairie. Their ups and down to the topography
(10:27):
of their natural habitat, and placing their poops at higher
at elevations such as a tops some rocks, on top
of a log, or on a ledge, it makes it
stand out more visually to other wombats. And again they
don't have great, great a sense of sight, but still
you put it up there on a ledge, more wombats
are able to see it, and then the wombats can
(10:49):
come in and take a more informed a smell of
the wombat poop and learn something about about its maker.
So the wombat rectum is sort of designed by evolution
to create poop monuments like testaments to the will of
the wombat that occupies this territory, poop that stays put. Basically,
(11:12):
which is interestingly quite the exact opposite of the round
goat feces that many of you've probably seen emerging from
the rear end of a goat, which is believed to
have evolved to roll downhill and essentially self hide in
hilly or mountainous terrain, so as better maybe to throw
off a cougar that could be pursuing yours. Right, Yeah,
(11:32):
like for the goat, it's better that the poop just
gets lost, but for the wombat, the wombat has very
specific needs that require the poop to remain in sight
and to be found. And so yeah, it's basically with
the wombats, it's it's highly adaptive to be able to
poop cubes that stay put. It's part of their language
of expression. Now, naturally, there are potential bio mimetic possibilities here.
(11:57):
In the future, Young says, we might see human created
is produced not by molding or cutting, but by this
sort of excretion. So I can't help but wonder if
this will be the future of our Valentine's Day chocolates.
Oh yes, like a like a mechanical industrial anus for
pooping out chocolate and exactly that shape, exactly delicious, So
that's the physics price. And uh yeah, I just love
(12:19):
this story because when wombats are such interesting creatures and
and this is ultimately extremely insightful like this is this
is not this is something that yes, it's laughable because
it's poop poop from a cute marsupial, But on the
other hand, it's it really illustrates something amazing about evolution
and uh and it also highlights where we might go
(12:40):
in the future when it comes to making cubicle candy.
And if you want to learn more about this, Patricia
Yang also has a website Patricia Yang dot net. Excellent. Well,
maybe we should take a quick break and then when
we come back we can talk about dirty money. Hey, everybody,
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(14:33):
we're back Dirty Money. This is this year's Economics Prize
for the Igno Bells. This went to Habibi Cadeck, Timothy A. Voss,
and Andreas Voss for testing which country's paper money is
best at transmitting dangerous bacteria. The paper was called Money
and Transmission of Bacteria in Anti Microbial Resistance and Infection
(14:56):
Control in and So the authors here start out with
pretty obvious fact. Cash gets handled a lot. It changes hands.
You touch it, I touch it. Tom Atkins probably touched it.
Ted goes to the bathroom and then he touches it.
You sneeze, Then you handle it. Then you pay for
your lunch with it. Somebody pays me the gambling debts
they owe me with that same money. It seems like
(15:18):
a pretty obvious vector for disease transmission. When you were
a kid, you probably heard this, and if you like
me or a parent, you've probably said this, don't put
that money in your mouth. It's filthy, right, I mean,
for some reason, When I was reading about this research,
the thing that kept popping into my mind is that
episode of Parks and Recreation where you find out that
(15:38):
all the Pawnee citizens drink from water fountains by putting
their mouth over the fountain. Part. I had completely forgotten
about this until you mentioned it. Yeah, there was also
a skit from the Upright Citizen's Brigade, right, Yes, that
we can't go into full detail about here, but you
can probably figure it out what somebody who chose to
(15:58):
pay for things with befouled pennies that they themselves had
intentionally befouled. Right. But, as we know, not all physical
substrata are equally hospitable to germs. So the authors here
tested different national currencies to see how well they transmitted
various multi drug resistant bacteria, including methicillin resistant staff Alococcus
(16:20):
aureus or m R s a UH, an extended spectrum
of beta lactomaces producing E. Coli and vankomycin resistant, and
tero coxi or vr E. So UH. Here's the method.
The author has got a bunch of different bank notes
from different countries, including the euro, the US dollar, Canadian dollar,
the Croatian kuna, the Romanian leu, the Moroccan deerham, and
(16:45):
the Indian rupee. And they first of course started off
sterilizing the cash with UV radiation. You don't want to
bring in any pre existing germs. Uh. Then they inoculated
the money with incubated strains of the bacteria they were testing,
and then the cash was left out to dry for
several lengths of time, I think three hours, six hours,
and twenty four hours. And then the experimenters tested which
(17:08):
bank notes allowed bacterial colonies to survive after the various
drying periods. And then in the second experiment, they also
tested the effects of people rubbing the bank notes with
sanitized hands. Would the would the bacteria transfer from the
infected bank notes to people's hands? So which money came
out on top? Well, the Romanian lou was one of
(17:29):
the most germ friendly. It yielded all three drug resistant
pathogens after three and six hours of drying, and it
was the only currency that still had a pathogen after
a full day of drying, and that pathogen was vr E.
The Canadian and US dollar yielded only m R s A.
So I assume it's the U S money that Scrooge
McDuck swims through in his vault. Oh well, maybe he
(17:52):
had it purified, you know, because I've always heard the
Scrooge McDuck was actually a bit of germofog. Oh yeah,
they take after Howard use Uh. Okay, So the Euro
yielded only the E. Coli strain after three and six hours,
and vr E after three hours, the rupie only vr E.
The Croatian Kuna did not yield any of the pathogens
(18:13):
at any period. So in the second stage of the experiment,
they study the transmission of bacteria from bank notes to
hands after rubbing. The Euro did not transmit bacteria to hands,
but the US dollar and the Romanian lou did, though,
and they make sure to point out that all the
money was sterilized with UV radiation after the testing, so
(18:35):
it was safe to return to circulation. Uh. And the
authors also point out that this means the type of
bank note paper in circulation could have epidemiological implications. They
think major variables here are probably like the materials used
in creating the fiber of the bank notes. The Romanian Lou,
for instance, which seemed to be the most germ friendly,
(18:58):
has plastic con tent that is designed to improve durability
and make it harder to counterfeit, but it also seems
to create a more pathogen friendly environment that many of
the other fibers and materials used in paper money don't create.
So this would be like the when we've ever handle
currency that basically has like a little clear plastic windows
(19:18):
in it. Uh yeah, it could be that, or it
could be more spread out through. I don't know exactly
what's going on with the Romanian loop, but it has
polymer content that apparently is germ friendly or even you know,
not just German friendly, but like antibiotic resistant germ friendly.
But the Croatian kuna, you can take that and just
stick it directly in your mouth. Uh No, I mean,
(19:40):
I wouldn't recommend that, but it seems like in this
particular test the kuna turned out very well. So maybe
this is something other countries should consider and test out
when designing the next generation of paper notes. Maybe take
some inspiration from how the Croatian kuna has made. It
seems to be an inhospitable environment for all of the
pathogens tested. I don't know if the something that has
(20:00):
ever even figured into currency design before have like they
ever considered how well currency transmits bacteria and just how
gross money is. Yeah, I mean, granted there is less
of it that is used on a daily basis for
many populations, uh, you know, using our cards more often,
electronic payments, etcetera. But still there's a lot of cash
(20:23):
out there, and it's troubling to think about how, you know,
how dirty it is that you get sick for money. Uh,
you know, not in a spiritual sense, which I think
we're all accustomed to, but you know, in an actual
biological sense. You know, even if it's kuna. I just say,
don't put money in your mouth. Don't put it in there, Okay.
So also I wanted to talk about one not for
(20:45):
a long time. Just a quick look at the two
thousand nineteen Anatomy Prize which was awarded to Roger Museet
and Boris ben gud Ifa for measuring scrotal temperature asymmetry
and naked and cloth postmen in France. And it's not
just postman this. They still they studied bus drivers too,
(21:05):
and then people whose professions you don't even know. Uh.
The original research was published in the journal Human Reproduction
in two thousand seven. So humans are mammals showing bilaterally
symmetrical anatomy. If you split us in half lengthwise, you
will mostly see the halves as mirror images of one another.
But we're not perfect examples of bilateral symmetry. You've got
(21:28):
internal organs that are oriented off center. Maybe the hard
is a little more to one side, the liver more
to the other, and so forth. Uh. And apparently this
extends to some aspects of the human scrotum. So the
authors here begin by noting a discrepancy in the anatomical literature.
Is the human scrotum on average hotter on one side
(21:48):
than the other? Uh? Some previous reports said that it's
equally hot on both sides, while others reported that the
left side of the scrotum is generally hotter than the right. Interesting,
And of course this comes down to the fact that,
of course, on one side is one testicle, on the
other side is the other testicle. And of course part
of the whole uh design of of the testicles has
(22:09):
to do with the fact that there's a there's an
importance of maintaining certain temperatures. Absolutely, I mean, this is
highly reproductively significant information. Temperature of the male reproductive organs
plays a role in gamme eat production and thus in fertility. So,
in fact, the major biological purpose of the scrotum, as
you alluded to, seems to be thermoregulation to move the
(22:30):
testicles near or away from the body to help keep
them as close to optimal temperature as possible. Yeah, this
is why sometimes if if fertility doctors may ask, okay,
are you are you going to a hot tub all
the time? Do you have a really hot laptop setting
on your lap a lot? You know these sorts of
questions because you know that they are susceptible to outside
(22:53):
temperatures exactly. So the authors here wanted to get new
data to help clear up these discrepant reports, and so
their method bids were quote retrospective analyzes of scrotal temperatures
in mid age twenty to fifty two years, measured every
two minutes with probes connected to a data collector in
three experiments, so three different experiments. They tested this out
(23:14):
both naked and clothed in a number of different body positions.
They also tested it on yes postal workers who were
working in a standing position for ninety minutes at a time,
and they also tested out on bus drivers who were
working in a sitting position for ninety minutes at a time,
and they found that, especially in the clothed state, left
(23:36):
scrotal temperature was higher, significantly higher than right scrotal temperature. Now,
why is this? They offered a number of possible explanations,
including differences in blood flow and cutaneous heat receptors, bilateral
differences in testicular volume, so if like one testicle is
bigger than the other, that might also affect temperature. But
(23:57):
then finally, one thing they pointed out as a possible
explanation is the resting position of the penis, which really
seems to naturally go more one to one side than
the other. And they side a study from nine by
Bogart at All that found that the penis is naturally
positioned to the left in about eighty nine percent of cases.
(24:19):
So really it was an inside job the whole time.
It seems very likely to be. This study is really
interesting to and it is looking at like the clothed
human and the naked human, especially because you really have
to think at times like how how to what extent
does clothing, you know, change the definition of of the
biological human experience? You know, oh sure, I mean clothing
(24:41):
is a technological innovation. It comes fairly recently and our
evolutionary history, and is reasonable to say this might somewhat
change our reproductive behaviors and and how the body's reproductive
organs respond to the environment. So like, part of the
environment our bodies were shaped for might not necessarily be
(25:02):
having like the testicles tightly packed against the body within
some kind of container all the time, right right though, though,
I mean to our credit like that that I think
was a huge accomplishment. Like if you think back to
a time when when human you know, human beings did
not have underwear, meaning they did not have as much
control on like how tightly bound parts of their body
(25:24):
were to their person. These are things that can get
in the way of say, chasing after prey or doing
you know, any kind of physical activity. Sure, but then
you're saying their pluses and minuses. I think so yeah,
But then you know, the other side is, like the
human body, the testicles have evolved so that they there's
a self regulation of temperature. Uh, the scrotum is supposed
to be the one in charge of how closely compact
(25:47):
the testicles are, not the individual who picks out their
underwear in the morning. Right, So obviously this is a study.
We can all identify why this study is hilarious because
he's dealing with French postman whither without their underwear on,
and temperature differences between one testicle and the audit bus
drivers too. Yes, it's it's even funnier actually if you
(26:08):
start reading into the like their full explanation of their methods,
because they talk about, uh, like, the methods that are
used to determine testicular volume. There are like units of
measure for that, and I think like special special apparatus.
Uh some it's called an orchidometer or something. This is
the probe that was mentioned. No, I think that. I
think the orchidometer, the problem is something like that. It's
(26:31):
to measure testicular volume. I don't know exactly what the
deal with the probe was that they didn't like have
a diagram that I found. But still, again, this gets
down to human biology, reproductive system. So it is an
important study, sure. I mean, as we said at the beginning,
of testicular temperature is reproductively significant. This could be useful
(26:51):
in a clinical setting when studying things about fertility. Right,
I mean, it's not impossible to imagine it could influence
under a design in the future either either reasonably so
with you know a situation where a doctor is saying, like, okay,
we it makes more sense for both testicles to be
the same temperature, so we're going to create underwear in
(27:12):
which the penis is positioned out of the way of
the testicles. Or perhaps more likely, you have a situation
where somebody who just wants to sell some underwear looks
at this study and starts saying, Hey, you don't want
to be one of those asymmetrical testical temperature people. You
want to have both testicles the same temperature, and the
only way you're gonna do that is by buying this
(27:33):
special pair of thirty dollar underwear. Well against that person's
marketing concerns, I think the study found that while the
I think the major differences were when people were clothed,
but they're also were some asymmetries even when people were naked,
depending on like what position they were in. All right, well,
on that note, we're going to take another break, but
when we come back, we will discuss diaper changing machines. Alright,
(28:02):
we're back. Why do the idea of a mechanical diaper
changer horrify me, Yes, it horrifies me. And yet it
is also, I think a grand goal in human technology. Yeah,
it's kind of utopian. It's like at the same time
enticing and terrifying. It's a thing that you want but
(28:24):
you know you should not have. It is the very
sort of thing that Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park
would be irate over. Right. They were so concerned with
whether or not they could they didn't stop to think
if they should exactly. So, I've changed a few diapers
in my time, and uh, and I think I've even
wondered about the possibility of a robotic robotic diaper changer.
(28:45):
It's the kind of thing you fantasize about as you
are essentially wrestling with an infant or a toddlery, and
especially the infant, trying to to to get at the
foul diaper off of them, all the while keeping them
from say, getting their own foot into the poop, uh
or and then then flinging the poop on the wall
with said foot trying to avoid being peed upon, especially
(29:09):
if it's a boy, and then if there's a girl.
There are other concerns about about where and where you
don't want poop. It's it's it is a high. You know,
we talked before about how driving is a cognitively demanding task.
Changing a baby's diaper is a cognitively demanding task. And uh,
and so you you you fantasize, you think, I really
wish a robot could come in here and do this.
(29:29):
But on the other hand, I don't think a robot could.
And I feel like this has also been exit. I
feel like the Jetson's probably had a diaper changing robot.
I could find no evidence of it, But I feel
like this idea has also worked its way into fiction
in the past. And so this year's Ignaled Bells. The
Engineering prize, in fact, went to Iranian inventor I'm men
(29:51):
Fata Bakas for inventing a diaper changing machine for use
on human infants. Now, this is a patent. It's US
patent number one zero zero three four five eight two,
granted on July thirty one, two thousand eighteen. And I'm
going to read to you from the abstract quote. A
washer and diaper changing apparatus includes a main chamber, a
(30:13):
glass window, a seat, a leg, holder, a safety belt,
a diaper removing arm, a sprinkler, and a dryer. The
main chamber is configured to receive an infant therein. The
glass window is placed on a top wall of the
main chamber. The seat is movably coupled to the main
chamber and configured for placement of the infant on the seat.
The leg holder is movably coupled to the main chamber
(30:35):
and configured to support at least one leg of the infant.
The safety belt is coupled to the seat and configured
to retain the infant on the seat. The sprinkler is
placed inside the main chamber and configured to spray water
to wash at least a portion of the infant at
least a portion of the infant. Yes, like some too,
I guess all of the infant. Why why am Why
am I picturing those like sealed up, self cleaning public
(30:58):
bathrooms that out in some places, like it came across
these in Switzerland. I don't know I've seen one of these.
It's like a public bathroom. You go in it's a
small little building, and then you use the toilet, and
then when you're done, like the door shuts and like
a light comes on outside and it says like cleaning.
Oh wow, that sounds remarkable. I guess they're a little robotic.
I don't know, sprayers and wipers and stuff in there.
(31:20):
I don't know what happens on the inside. I couldn't see.
Oh surely somebody has has trapped themselves and found out,
I should hope. So I have to admit what it
made me think of was the surgery pod in the
sci fi horror film Prometheus. Uh. Horrifying scene, but I
think actually one of the most effective parts of the movie.
Oh yeah, yeah, because if you haven't seen it. Basically,
(31:40):
the idea is that it is a surgery pod created
for a specific male individual and an elderly individual, and
it's supposed to take care of any needs that that
individual has. And then our heroine in the film eventually
has to use it to remove a zeno more from herself.
But she's having a sort of uh improvised with the machine,
(32:03):
and it's terrifying, just like, not so much even I mean,
certainly it's terrifying when the thing starts cutting into her,
but just her climbing into it, realizing what's about to
happen makes for some some great sci fi horror. Uh.
So yes, I thought about that throughout reading this patent. However,
the patent does have some sketches, and when you look
(32:24):
at them, the design looks less like a high tech
surgery pod and more like a washing machine or an ovenswher.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, a dishwasher, not a washing machine. Yeah.
It's like a front loader, but it doesn't have a
spin cycle. Not this this version. Maybe a future model will.
So um A man uh of Pato Baka is an
(32:45):
associate professor of Islamic Azad University in Iran, and his
engineering research involves nanostructures and nanoparticles. So he's so, this
is a legit engineer here that has developed this. Uh.
Here's a little more from his patent quote. The apparatus
may be said to be automatic and some implementations, and
(33:06):
that once the infant is placed inside the apparatus, various
steps may in some cases be carried out automatically without
needing the operator to touch the infant or interact manually
with the diaper or infant during the changing process, which
may create a more sanitary environment for the ambient area
and the operator's hands. So I looked for more background
(33:27):
on this concept, and I wasn't able to find much
to really shed light on just like how serious he
is with the proposal as and you know not as
and is he does he seriously see this as a
place our technology will get to within a human lifespan?
Or is this more of a sort of an engineering
thought experiment? If you could create this thing that we
sometimes standsize about existing, how might we go about it?
(33:49):
What might an apparatus like that look like? Sure? Because
I mean again jokes asiety. As you mentioned earlier on,
it is a job that people really probably would like
to source if they felt they could do it safely,
and if it if it is a thought experiment, though,
it is kind of a perfect thing to think about
when contemplating the idea of having machines that operate alongside
(34:13):
humans or upon humans in a human environment, because I
I can think of very few examples of such a
highly sensitive and specialized job for a machine than changing
the diaper of an infant, because granted we desire a
mechanical baby changer. Because number one, it's a gross job.
Number two, it can be challenging or frustrating to do,
(34:35):
and number three it absolutely has to be done. Yeah,
it is a job that is in extremely high demand
and nobody wants to do. And certainly we've already thrown
machines at jobs that felt that all three of these
bullet points, such as sewer cleaning robots, you know, creating
some sort of a mechanical device that goes through like
a pipe and helps clean it out or at least
(34:57):
go down there and look and see what the clog
might But there's far less risk in cleaning a sewer,
right right, Yeah, unlike a clog in a city sewer system.
A human infant is one the most valuable thing in
your life. Number two, it's afforded legal protection, like it
is a person and if you if you don't take
care of it correctly, you could go to prison. And
(35:21):
also it's susceptible to pain and injury. Getting more into
the personhood part, like this is this, this is a
human child and not a sewer clock. However, like a clock,
the baby is limited in its ability to fend for itself,
which which I think also ties into the horror of
letting the machine have a go with the diaper. Now, granted,
we already live in an age of robot assisted surgery,
(35:43):
such as various you know, prostate surgeries. But in these cases,
we're talking about the machine having an advantage in a
in its ability to use tiny instruments that humans would
would have, you know, a little more difficulty operating. And
then there's also going to be a human operator in
the room for those and I guess presumably with this
diaper changing device, the language of it tends to imply
(36:05):
that it's sort of hands off, or it could be
hands off the robotic baby changer. However, it doesn't really
benefit from tiny tools. It doesn't really have an advantage
over human hands or more specifically a human ability to
roll with what is often a puzzle again, how to
wipe the poop without the child getting a foot in
the poop, how not to be pete upon, how to
keep the child from rolling over, grabbing the diaper and
(36:28):
flinging it, etcetera. You've ever performed this task, you know
that a lot of things can go wrong and will
go wrong on the diaper changing table. Yeah, I mean,
I see a huge difference here in that, like robot
assisted surgery is not for the purpose of allowing the
doctor to not have to do the surgery right to
like increase the doctor's capability to increase increase the efficiency
(36:51):
of the surgery. And I do not see a way
in which having the machine involved improves the efficiency of
changing a baby's diaper. As such, I would say that
this sort of machine seems to me to be more
of an end game of robotics, because creating machines that
can work alongside us in human habitats, that's challenging. Word,
(37:12):
It's it's hard to imagine a more challenging place than
the than the diaper changing station. To throw a machine,
uh though, that's you know, one of the reasons perhaps
that he was pursuing the patent, you know, kind of
again kind of a mechanical thought experiment. And it does
serve as an interesting way to discuss home robotics. I mean,
I think this highlights interesting questions about the future of
(37:33):
robotics and and it reveals our intuitions that they are
already there about Like, what are the kinds of places
where least comfortable with allowing robots to be implemented? I mean,
even if you came up with a pretty good robotics
system that worked pretty much all the time, people still
probably just not feel comfortable with, like allowing robotic arms
(37:55):
to be moving around near their near their baby, right,
like one of my for very understandable reasons. Yeah, like
like one of my I think a very positive area
of robot exploration is in elder care, particularly in among
Japanese robotics companies. And in that case too, you know
you're looking at aging population with fewer individuals to look
(38:17):
after them. And also you're dealing with environments where if,
for instance, if you need help getting up and down
from a toilet, which is something that you know that
that cannon will happen with with individual of advanced age,
that might be the kind of situation where you would say, yes,
I would prefer to have a robotic helper with to
engage with me in a situation like that. However, you
(38:40):
know you're still dealing with you know, you know, a
rational individual and not a complete infant. Who again, it's
just so many problems come to mind when you imagine
just sticking the baby inside of the diaper changing device
and letting it do its thing. Like best case scenario,
you put the baby in and you just get an
air a message. It's like trying to operate any printer,
(39:03):
or all you want to do is is get this
one thing done, But there are a million things that
can and do go wrong, and you just end up
having to do something else, change the diaper yourself. In
this case, with printers. I think we've talked about this
on the show before, haven't we That like, printers seem
to follow an inverse law of technological advancement, where like
as most technology becomes better and better and more and
(39:23):
more user friendly, printers always go in the opposite direction,
like every year they get worse and more incompatible with everything.
Oh yeah, the last time I went to buy one,
I was thinking, you know, Apple makes pretty good uh computers,
but they make a pretty good printer. I'm gonna buy
that printer. I don't care if it's overpriced. And of
course they don't make a printer their printers that are
compatible with their machines. But it's almost as if they're like, no,
(39:46):
we're not touching that. That's just too complicated. It would
be bad for our brand. Have the printer. We'll do
the printer when we do the baby changing robot, all right,
So we're gonna go ahead and call it there, because
let's see, we covered poop, We cover more poop, more poops, qurotums,
bacteria you might associate with poop, right, Yeah, the diaper
(40:07):
robots really just a good haul overall. Now, once again
we did not cover all of the winners here. We
didn't even list them. There were some more interesting ones.
There was one about the health effects of eating pizza,
specifically Italian pizza made in Italy. Does it prevent cancer?
I believe that one got picked up in in the
(40:27):
media a lot. Yeah, there's another one that I think
we want to return to at some point, just as
a follow up to an episode we did earlier this
year about the facial feedback hypothesis. And this had to
do with the psychologists involved in early research on the
facial feedback hypothesis participating in failed replications of their own work,
and and that leads to an interesting, bigger discussion about, uh,
(40:49):
you know, the role, like how you communicate scientific validity
and whether effects are quote real or not. H So
that's worth revisiting, I think absolutely. If you want to
check out the full list of twenty nineteen winners. In fact,
if you want to check out the full list of
all winners from the very beginning of the Igno Bells.
Head on over to www. Dot Improbable dot com. That's,
(41:14):
of course Improbable Research. There the publication that puts out
the awards each and every year. And if you want
to check out past episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
go check out our past Ignobel Prize episodes because again
we've been doing them every year. We always come. Sometimes
we cover all the winners, sometimes we cover just a
selection of the winners. But with without fail, they always
(41:36):
highlight some some wonderful studies that also invoke laughter. Every year.
It's f calicious. They make you laugh, they make you
think yes, yeah. And if you want to check out
all those episodes, Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com
is the website. If you want to check out our
other podcast, Invention pod dot com is the place to
find Invention, a journey through human techno history. Believe what,
(41:59):
it's November right now. We're doing a lot of food
related inventions over at Invention, including canning, which which is
really fascinating you you take it for granted, but canning
technology is amazing, no doubt. Check it out huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
(42:20):
to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio is the iHeart Radio app,
(42:40):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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