Friday coffee break: Ig Nobel Prizes 2009

VIA NEAT-O-RAMA: The 19th annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded Thursday night at Sander’s Theater on the Harvard campus. The awards are given to "honor achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think." A few of the winners:

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland’s police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means “Driving License”.

See the entire list of winners at Improbable Research.

O RLY?

Conservative Ideals Drive Hummer Ownership: "A team of researchers has found that Hummer owners say their vehicle choice is strongly related to their personal morals...." (wired)

Dead Salmon + MRI = Red Herring

Neuroscientist Craig Bennett bought a salmon to test an fMRI machine and work out some protocols.

So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”
The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.”

Those involved got a laugh out of the situation, until the scans came back and showed that activity was detected in different areas of the brain when the fish was “shown” the pictures. Remember, the fish was dead.

The result is completely nuts — but that’s actually exactly the point. Bennett, who is now a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods.

Which is not to say that scans aren’t a useful research tool, but that they must be carefully monitored to avoid false positive results. (wired.com)

Science marches on: research shows men can't think after talking to pretty women

Men lose their minds speaking to pretty women: Talking to an attractive woman really can make a man lose his mind, according to a new study. (telegraph.co.uk)

Science marches on: what to do when zombies attack

"If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively." [Don't get me started on the fact that one of the researchers insists that his surname ends in a question mark...] (BBC news)

House cats know what they want and how to get it from you

Anyone who has ever had cats knows how difficult it can be to get them to do anything they don't already want to do. But it seems that the house cats themselves have had distinctly less trouble getting humans to do their bidding, according to a report published in the July 14th issue of Current Biology... (euerkalert)

Oh.

Researchers from Cleveland State University, for a recent journal article, assessed the physical traits of 195 female characters from the first 20 James Bond films, revealing that more were brunette than blond and that at least 90 percent were young, slim and of above-average looks. [Daily Telegraph (London), 6-7-09, via newsoftheweird.com]

Science marches on: survey finds men prefer food over sex

"A new study asking Australians to rank which everyday experiences give them the most pleasure has quashed the long-standing assumption that men prefer sex over food."

The survey was conducted by an ice-cream company, so your mileage may vary...

Science marches on: the duck edition

Via newsoftheweird.com:

According to research announced in May by pediatrics professor Jennie Noll of the University of Cincinnati, the more often that teenage girls tart themselves up in online presentations, the greater the sexual interest they provoke. [Forbes-HealthDayNews, 5-26-09]

Two scientists from Britain's University of Oxford, on a three-year study costing the equivalent of nearly $500,000, found that ducks may be even more comfortable standing under a sprinkler than paddling around in a pond. Lead researcher Marian Stamp Dawkins concluded that ducks basically just like water. [The Guardian, 5-20-09]

To kill? A mockingbird.

Mockingbirds may look pretty much alike to people, but they can tell us apart and are quick to react to folks they don't like. Birds rapidly learn to identify people who have previously threatened their nests and sounded alarms and even attacked those folks, while ignoring others nearby, researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This shows a bird is much more perceptive of its environment than people had previously suspected," said Douglas J. Levey, a professor in the zoology department of the University of Florida. (USA Today, 5/19/2009; hat tip to newsoftheweird.com)

Monday coffee break: vampires?

Physicists prove that vampires could not exist (io9)

Science marches on

University of California researchers, on a Pentagon contract, announced in January success at rigging a live flower beetle with electrodes and a radio receiver to enable scientists to control the insect's flight remotely. Pulses sent to the bug's muscles or optic lobes can command it to take off, turn left or right, or hover, according to a report in MIT Technology Review, and the insect's "large" size (up to a whopping four inches in length) would enable it to also carry a camera, giving the beetle military uses such as surveillance or search and rescue. The researchers admired the native flight-control ability of the beetle so much that they abandoned developing robot beetles (which required trying to mimic nature). [MIT Technology Review, 1-29-09, via newsoftheweird.com]

and:

Doctoral student Daniel Bennett filed a lawsuit against Britain's Leeds University in February because custodians had mistakenly thrown out research that he had been working with for the last seven years. Bennett is studying the rare Butaan lizard of the Philippines and over the years, to examine its diet, had painstakingly sifted through jungle dirt to gather over 70 pounds of its feces, which Bennett believes is worth far more than the ($720) Leeds has offered him. [Daily Telegraph, 2-5-09, via newsoftheweird.com]

and:

"Reproduction is no fun if you're a squid," said a biologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, referring especially to the deep-sea squid. Finding a mate a mile down in pitch-darkness is hard enough, but the combination of males that are smaller and fearful of being overpowered and females whose reception of sperm involves being stabbed makes the insemination process especially traumatic. Sperm deposits can be extensive and burdensome to the female and are delivered by the reckless slashing of the skin by the male. In fact, according to a December report in Germany's Der Spiegel, in the darkness the male sometimes misses the female altogether and inseminates himself. [Spiegel Online, 12-23-08, via newsoftheweird.com]

and:

Princeton University scientists, reporting in January on research in Peru, said they observed aggressive, carnivorous behavior for the first time among dung beetles, which decapitated and ate millipedes. Dung beetles were not known previously to be fussy eaters (except for a 2006 study in which they seemed to prefer horse dung to camel dung or sheep dung). [Daily Telegraph (London), 1-21-09, via newsoftheweird.com]