Why do people start yawning when others yawn? Let's take a look at the tortoise

Scientists know a bit more about contagious yawning – one of science's utter mysteries – than they did a year ago, thanks to a study called No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise, Geochelone carbonaria. The study's authors say their experiments, conducted with seven tortoises, might help eliminate some of the many competing theories as to why humans yawn when they see other humans yawn.

Writing in the journal Current Zoology, Anna Wilkinson, Isabella Mand and Ludwig Huber of the University of Vienna, Austria, and Natalie Sebanz of Radboud University in the Netherlands, explain: "This study aimed to discriminate between the possible mechanisms controlling contagious yawning by asking whether contagious yawning is present in a species that is unlikely to show empathy or nonconscious mimicry: the redfooted tortoise, G carbonaria.

The researchers say that although tortoises have not been known (by humans) to mimic each other, the animals do sometimes respond to things they see around them, making them "ideal subjects for examining this question".

The tortoises, named Alexandra, Moses, Aldous, Wilhelmina, Quinn, Esme and Molly, were not "experimentally naive, but they had never previously been involved in a contagious yawning task or any similar experiment," the study notes.

The researchers trained Alexandra to open her mouth whenever they waved a little red square near her head. "This took six months," they write, and "the resulting behaviour appeared highly similar to a naturally occurring tortoise yawn". Alexandra thus became the "demonstrator", the individual who yawned in plain view of her fellows.

In one experiment, the other tortoises watched as Alexandra yawned a single time. In a second, Alexandra yawned several times in succession. In the third and final experiment, the observer tortoises watched videos of a tortoise (a) yawning and (b) not yawning. The scientists conclude with the suggestion that "tortoises do not yawn in a contagious manner".

The monograph ends with a statement expressing gratitude to their colleagues. Perhaps lacking for warmth, it says, "Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank the cold-blooded cognition group at the University of Vienna for their helpful comments."

(Thanks to Stefano Ghirlanda for bringing this study to my attention.)

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Sweet harmonies for the apicultural researcher who has analysed, and accompanied, the sounds of bees

Professor Norman E Gary is the rare academic who plays clarinet while he is covered with live bees, and often in public.

An emeritus professor of apiculture at the University of California (Davis), Gary also plays Dixieland music in a human ensemble called the Beez Kneez Jazz Band. He generally goes solo for the bee-encrusted gigs.

Hollywood has used Gary's bee-wrangling talents, though seldom his clarinet, in more than a dozen movies. Among them: The X Files; Fried Green Tomatoes; Invasion of the Bee Girls; and Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh.

Several of Gary's scientific activities involve vibration, a general physics phenomenon of which music is just a part. Gary has microwaved bees. He has also analysed one of the lesser-known (to most humans) sounds that bees produce. Details appear in a monograph published with colleague SS Schneider in 1984 in the Journal of Apicultural Research. They gave their article the title "Quacking": A Sound Produced By Worker Honeybees After Exposure To Carbon Dioxide.

Gary has published more than 100 academic papers, many of them about bees. In one of the earliest, called The Case of Utter vs Utter, he took a fond look back at a court case decided in 1901 in Goshen, New York, starring two brothers from the Utter family.

The brothers disagreed – Utterly, of course – about many things. The question here was: did the bees associated with one brother, a beekeeper, eat the peaches growing on trees owned by the other brother, a fruit grower? Perhaps the most enjoyable account appeared soon after the trial, in the Rocky Mountain bee journal. The anonymous writer says: "It was amusing to see the plaintiff try to mimic the bee, on the witness stand as he swayed his head from one side to the other, raised up on his legs and flopped his arms. His motions were so utterly ridiculous and so contrary to the real acts and achievements of the bees, that everyone in the courtroom, including the jury, laughed, and laughed heartily."

The court ruled against that Utter, and for the other. This established a legal precedent favorable to wandering bees. It also inspired, almost 60 years later, the young Gary as he began his more-than-60-year-long career of collaborating with and studying tiny, honey-making musicians.

Thanks to David Kessler for bringing this to my attention.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Why do some sheep cling together, and others take off on their own?

To know why certain sheep cling to each other while others split off on their own, a person would need to know the size of the group, and also something about the personalities of the individual sheep. Scientists at the Macaulay Institute in Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen, sought this very knowledge when they looked at the loiterings of sheep.

Pablo Michelena, Angela Sibbald, Hans Erhard, and James McLeod (the names of the scientists, not the sheep) wrote up their study, Effects of Group Size and Personality on Social Foraging: The Distribution of Sheep Across Patches. It appeared in 2009 in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

The four scientists observed the meanderings of 58 female Scottish Blackface sheep in fields, under tightly controlled conditions. First they gave each of them a personality test, noting which were bold enough to explore objects with novel smells (lavender, mint, thyme, marjoram, garlic, or coffee) and exotic shapes (a baby's rattle, a bottle brush, and various baby's teething rings).

Then they let the sheep loose, in groups of two, four, six, or eight, in grassy arenas that each had some patches of especially desirable (in the scientists' opinion) greenery. That extra-yummy fodder, sprung from extra-fertilised soil, was allowed to grow especially long so as to be extra-noticeable to the sheep.

In the scientists' view, the sheep faced a dilemma: "In our study, sheep faced a trade-off between maximising their access to a preferred, but limited, resource and staying together as a group."

More often than not, groups broke apart. And here personality came to the fore, say the scientists: "bold sheep ... tended to split into subgroups at smaller group sizes than shy sheep". That was the study's major finding. The scientists discovered that after a split, the n ew, little groups would often be of equal size.

The idea that each sheep might have a uniquely distinctive personality is quite modern, academically speaking. Until recently such individuality in non-human animals had never been documented by scientists.

Michelena, Sibbald, Erhard and McLeod write about the newness of the notion. They say: "Comparative psychologists and behavioral ecologists have recently documented consistent intraspecific differences between individuals in traits such as aggressiveness, activity, exploration, risk taking, fearfulness, and emotional reactivity."

When they say "recently" they mean 1998, when a treatise in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London persuaded many biologists that some pumpkinseed sunfish are shy, and others are bold.

Michelena, Sibbald, Erhard and McLeod note that earlier studies did point the way towards these personality insights. A prime example, they say, is the distractingly named The Relation Between Dominance and Exploratory Behavior is Context-Dependent in Wild Great Tits, which delighted ornithologists in 2004.

Marc Abrahams

Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

How the brain responds to the destruction of vast amounts of money

If you have never watched someone rip up large amounts of cash, you may be unsure as to how the different parts of your brain would respond in the event that you did see someone tearing valuable banknotes into tiny, worthless shreds. A new study may help you how to predict what would happen.

The study is called How the Brain Responds to the Destruction of Money. It tells how the brains of 20 Danish persons, all of them adults with no history of psychiatric or neurological disease, responded as they watched videos of somebody destroying lots of Danish money.

If you are not Danish, you might now expect that your brain would respond in rather the same way, were this to involve your own native currency (pounds, euros, dollars, or whatever). The study makes no specific claims for non-Danish brains or money, however.

This neuroscience research was performed by Uta Frith and Chris Frith of University College London, together with Joshua Skewes, Torben Lund and Andreas Roepstorff of Aarhus University, Denmark, and Cristina Becchio of the University of Turin, Italy.

Here, in the scientists' words, is what the volunteers saw: "A series of videos in which different actions were performed on actual banknotes with a value of either of 100 kroner (approximately 13 euro/$18) or 500 kroner (approximately 67 euro/$91), or on valueless pieces of paper of the same size ... We contrasted actions that were appropriate to money (folding or looking at valuable notes or valueless paper) and actions that were inappropriate (tearing or cutting notes or paper)."

The Danes had their heads inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner (fMRI), which recorded their brain activity. The researchers also asked each volunteer some questions, including, "How did it make you feel?" All of this, says the document, "confirmed that participants felt less comfortable during observation of destroying actions performed on money".

An additional finding: the volunteers felt more "aroused" when watching anything happen to money than when watching the same things happen to worthless paper.

The scientists find the brain scans to be especially interesting. The activity patterns, they say, are similar to something they have seen before. The "use of concrete tools, such as hammers or screwdrivers, has been associated with activation of a left hemisphere network including the posterior temporal cortex, supramarginal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and lateral precuneus. Here we demonstrate that observing bank notes being cut up or torn, a critical violation of their function, elicits activation within the same temporo-parietal network. Moreover, this activation is the greater the higher the value of the banknote."

They caution that the story must be more complex, that your brain probably regards money in several – differing – ways. They note the existence of published studies that "suggest that money can also act as a drug".

(Thanks to Martin Gardiner for bringing this to my attention.)

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

A surprising study shows that classic (pre-1900) ethics books are twice as likely to go missing as other philosophy books

"One might suppose that ethicists would behave with particular moral scruple," begins the little monograph, looking you straight in the eye while snorting and grinning, textily. The two co-authors, philosophy professors who specialise in ethics, thus embark on what they call a "preliminary investigation" of their fellow ethics experts.

Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside, and Joshua Rust of Stetson University in Deland, Florida, surveyed almost 300 attendees of a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Tell us, they asked in a variety of ways, about the ethical behaviour of ethicists you have known. Schwitzgebel and Rust offered candy to anyone who agreed to complete the survey form. They report that "a number of people stole candy without completing a questionnaire or took more than their share without permission".

The ethics experts in aggregate indicated that in their experience, on the whole, ethicists behave no more ethically than do other persons. The paper, published in the journal Mind, pauses for just a moment to suggest a broader context. "Police officers commit crimes," it says, "Doctors smoke. Economists invest badly. Clergy flout the rules of their religion."

Schwitzgebel also wrote a study, on his own, called Do Ethicists Steal More Books?, which elbowed its way into the face of readers of the journal Philosophical Psychology.

Schwitzgebel drew up lists of philosophy books – some specifically about ethics, others not. Then, using information available through computer networks, he examined the status of every copy of those books in 19 British and 13 American academic library systems.

Schwitzgebel looked separately at what happened to newish books (Buchanon's Ethics, Efficiency and the Market; Baron's Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology, Hurd's Moral Combat; and suchlike best-sellers), and to older ones (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; Kant's Critique of Judgment; Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil; and other beloved masterworks).

It was roughly the same story. The ethics books, whether youthful or aged, went missing more often than did the not-quite-so-relentlessly-about-ethics books.

The youthful, "relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books".

The aged, "classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing". (For those older books, Schwitzgebel looked only at the American libraries, muttering that "the British library catalog system proved impractically unwieldy".

Recently, Schwitzgebel has written in his blog about what he calls "the phenomenology of being a jerk". He identifies two important components of jerkhood. "First: an implicit or explicit sense that you are an 'important' person." "Second: an implicit or explicit sense that you are surrounded by idiots."

To determine whether you yourself might be a jerk, Schwitzgebel suggests, look at those two simple criteria. He adds the almost mandatory thought: "I can't say that I myself show up as well by this self-diagnostic as I would have hoped."

Marc Abrahams

Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Do pyschologists make better novelists? What happened when one researcher applied his powers of human understanding to the literary form

An eminent psychologist confided to me: "Whenever any group of really good research psychologists gets together socially, after a few drinks they always – and I do mean always – talk about why novelists are so much better at it than we are." One psychologist came at the question from a different direction. He became an unpublished novelist, and then published a monograph telling other psychologists how they can further their careers in this same manner.

J Kelly Moreno, professor of psychology at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, wrote a case study called The Psychologist as Novelist. It appears in the journal Professional Psychology: Research and Practice.

No mere navel gazing, this. Professor Moreno methodically analyses his actions, accomplishments and emotions, so that his peers can learn to become literarily productive persons. "This article", he writes, "invites psychologists to apply their knowledge of human behaviour and facility with the written word to the modern novel."

Professor Moreno counsels psychologico-literati-wannabees to begin with the beginning. "Steps for starting are itemised," he explains, "as is other information pertinent to persisting in the face of opposition and resistance."

Professor Moreno's CV, on his website, lists four works of fiction, with indications of their fate. Here's the complete list: Moreno, JK (1998). Scared to Death. Unpublished short story. Moreno, JK (2000). The Porno Judge. Unpublished short story. Moreno, JK (2002). A Duty to Warn: A Novel. Unpublished manuscript. Moreno, JK (2006). Reality Testing: A Novel. Unpublished manuscript.

Professor Moreno's monograph adds flesh – and news of a third unpublished novel – to that bare skeletal description. (We also learn there of a third short story, called Hallucination. It was published a few months after the monograph appeared.)

The Psychologist as Novelist is a quintuple-page read. Despite being non-fiction, it is undeniably literary, sometimes conjuring in just a few sentences a tiny world of plot, emotion and dramatic conflict.

Professor Moreno brings us right along with him into the first crazy swirl of the life literary:

"I penned my first novel, A Duty to Warn (Moreno, 2000), a psychologist's legal–ethical–moral dilemma ... Eighty rejection letters later, I finally secured a literary agent. One year after that, I fired her because the manuscript never left her office."

"Frustrated, I started my second book ... Several dozen rejection letters (and rewrites) later, the book landed a top-flight literary agent with a stable of well-known and prize-winning authors."

But then, at the very brink of possible literary stardom, comes sudden disaster.

The agent asks him to make changes to the manuscript. An innocent first-time novelist might unthinkingly do just that. Happily, Professor Moreno is beyond that stage. And so, he writes, "Unwilling to do this, I am, once again, without representation."

Here the story takes a satisfying twist. "So", reveals Professor Moreno, "I've started my third book."

One almost cannot help but nod, perhaps in helpless admiration, at the final sentence of The Psychologist as Novelist, which counsels all of us to be "persistent, clever and patient".

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

28 hours at the piano is enough to vex anyone - but not these researchers

German and Austrian researchers analysed what happened to pianist Armin Fuchs when he spent more than a full day playing over and over again, nonstop, an oddly-named piece of music by a French composer. They also analysed what happened to the music. This was a tour de force of artistic and neurological repetition.

The research team – Christine Kohlmetz, Reinhard Kopiez and Marc Bangert of the Hanover University of Music and Drama, and Werner Goebl and Eckart Altenmuller of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Vienna – published a pair of monographs in 2003 describing what they measured in the pianist.

The study titles, like the performance, are lengthy. One, in the journal Psychology of Music, includes the phrase "Electrocortical Activity in a Pianist Playing 'Vexations' by Erik Satie Continuously for 28 Hours".

When Satie composed the piece in 1893, he added an instruction that the performer should: "play this motif 840 times in succession".

Twenty-first-century researchers Kohlmetz, Kopiez, Bangert, Goebl and Altenmuller explicitly question whether 19th-century composer Satie "was aware of the effect his work might have on a pianist, especially with regard to his or her consciousness and motor function".

Do the maths and you'll see that Fuchs, the intrepid piano player, averaged 30 performaces an hour. That's a lot of Vexations, in two-minute-long chunks.

By affixing wires to Fuchs's head and using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to continuously monitor gross electrical activity in his brain, the researchers discovered that "the pianist experienced different states of consciousness throughout the performance, ranging from alertness to trance and drowsiness".

Fuchs's playing grew inconsistent during the periods of drowsiness. But when alert, the man was a model of consistency. "Most importantly," says the study, "whilst in deep trance, which included effects such as time-shortening, altered perception and characteristic changes in the EEG, the pianist managed not only to keep on playing but also to maintain a constant tempo, hence executing complex motor schemes at a high level of performance."

The second study, published in the Journal of New Music Research, gives a much finer-grained "tempo and loudness analysis". It boasts that "non-linear methods revealed that changes in loudness and tempo are of a highly complex nature, and both parameters unfold in an 18-dimensional space. This has never before been demonstrated in performance research".

Vexations is not one of Erik Satie's most beloved compositions – not yet anyway. Although brief (when played, contrary to instructions, just a single time), it meanders along in a way that's neither quick nor catchy.

But Satie pioneered something of value – the technique ("play this motif 840 times") that the music business would refine many years later, with significant payoff. Radio disc jockeys demonstrated in the 1950s that, by persistently, diligently repeating a song, they could ensconce it into the minds of many listeners, who would ever after believe it be one of their very most favourite tunes.

(Thanks to Jim Cowdery for bringing this to my attention.)

See a video of the performance at www.youtube.com/watch?v=km9GiejF5OQ

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

The winners of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes include work on the pain-relieving effects of swearing, researchers who studied techniques to collect whale snot, and more. The Igs honor research that "first, makes you laugh, then, makes you think," according to Marc Abrahams, the master of ceremonies and the editor of Annals of Improbable Research.

read more

Chlamydial conjunctivitis, or why you should always keep your eyes closed during sex

"Can Chlamydial Conjunctivitis Result From Direct Ejaculation Into the Eye?" ask Simon Rackstraw, ND Viswalingam and Beng T Goh of the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. That question forms the title of a study they published in 2007 in the International Journal of STD and Aids. Drs Rackstraw, Viswalingam and Goh describe the plights of four patients, and disclose the detective work involved in diagnosing and treating them.

Conjunctivitis, whether caused by the sexually-transmitted disease chlamydia or by some other irritant, also goes by the name "pink eye". It's a catch-all description for inflammation of the conjunctiva, the membranes that line the eyelid and the surface of the eye.

The doctors finger the bacterium chlamydia trachomatis as the likely culprit in as many as 9% of the severe conjunctivitis cases seen by casualty departments. They imply that most doctors would blindly – and perhaps wrongly – assume that manual transmission was involved: that patients had rubbed their own eyes with their own hands after those hands had come in contact with infected fluids, either their own or those of a partner.

The mechanical aspect of their tales had a dull sameness. One patient said that "symptoms in her right eye started a week following sexual intercourse with a known male partner who had ejaculated into the eye". Another, a man, "had a casual encounter four months previously and recalled this partner ejaculating into his eye during oral sex".

The Sherlock-Holmesian big clue, the study relates, was that "none of the patients were found to have chlamydia detected within the genital tract on testing, but all gave a history of a recent sexual partner having ejaculated into the affected eye".

But the story remains incomplete, because "unfortunately, in these cases we were unable to test the sexual partners to see if they had chlamydia".

The doctors reached a sort of conclusion, undoubtedly meant to guide the thoughts of any medical personnel who might have limited understanding as to the ways one can contract conjunctivitis. "It is likely", they write, "that this mode of transmission is underestimated, as a history of ejaculation into the conjunctiva is not normally asked for."

(Thanks to Ivan Schwab and Maarten Keulemans for bringing this to my attention.)

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Coconuts can be responsible for nasty head injuries, as a study in The Journal of Trauma reveals

Knowingly or not, Indian government officials acted in accord with published medical advice when they ordered recently that coconuts be removed from the trees at Mumbai's Gandhi museum for fear that a nut would descend on to the head of President Obama. Should those officials wish to more fully educate the public, they could distribute copies of the study Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts by Dr Peter Barss, which appeared in the November 1984 issue of The Journal of Trauma.

As a young Canadian doctor newly relocated to Papua New Guinea, Barss wondered what were the most common kinds of traumatic injuries that produced patients for the Provincial Hospital in Alotau, Milne Bay Province. He discovered that "2.5% of such admissions were due to being struck by falling coconuts".

Few individuals perished from coconut strikes. One who did was "a man who had come down to visit the coast from his home in the mountains of the island, where there are few palm trees. He was perhaps unaware of the dangers of falling coconuts. He was standing beneath a tree as another man kicked down a coconut. It struck him squarely on the top of his skull; he dropped, and died within a few minutes."

Barss touches on the Newtonian mechanics of a free-falling coconut, explaining that:

"An average unhusked, mature dry coconut may weigh from one to more than two kilograms. A nut whose husk is soaked with water, or a green coconut, can weigh as much as four kilograms. When such a mass is accelerated by gravity, after falling from a height approximately equal to a 10-storey building, and then comes to rest by being suddenly decelerated on to someone's head, it is not surprising that severe head injuries sometimes occur."

Important and interesting though the physics may be, the report's most important impact, like that of a plummeting coconut, is on human health. Barss's hard-hitting conclusion is: "The physical forces involved in a direct blow to the skull by a falling coconut are potentially very large. Glancing blows will, of course, be less serious."

Thanks to Indian officials and perhaps also to Barss, Obama's recent visit to Mumbai was devoid of coconut trauma.

Barss has in his career treated many kinds of injuries specific to the parts of the world in which he was living at the time. Visitors to what are for them far-off climes would do well to consult the medical literature for a quick heads-up on what to watch out for when they arrive. Barss specialised for several years in illnesses and injuries characteristic of the South Pacific. His reports include: Injuries Caused by Pigs in Papua New Guinea (Medical Journal of Australia, 1988); Grass-Skirt Burns in Papua New Guinea (The Lancet, 1983); Penetrating Wounds Caused by Needle-Fish in Oceania (Medical Journal of Australia, 1985); and Inhalation Hazards of Tropical "Pea Shooters" (Papua and New Guinea Medical Journal, 1985).

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

A mathematical model of human thoughts and emotions? You have to be joking

Human thoughts and emotions are so complicated and hard to define that almost no sane person tries to describe them with mathematics. One attempt, done seriously, came to be regarded almost as a joke. Another, done as a joke, drew all-too-serious admiration.

In 1936, Kurt Lewin, a German psychologist in the US, produced a book full of it's-kinda-sorta-like-this descriptions. He titled it Principles of Topological Psychology. There is nothing kinda-sorta-like-this about topology. Imprecise definitions would be worthless to a topologist.

Lewin's book contains little maths, but lots of inscrutable passages. Here's one: "We must emphasise that not only psychological facts but also the 'bodily'- biologial facts do not belong to the physical space. This makes it clear that in the following when we speak of psychological regions, forces, or changes we are not dealing with figments of the imagination but with facts which have the same reality and kind of existence as biological facts in general". Nowadays Lewin's book is mostly a mild embarrassment.

In 1943, Americans Jerry Lettvin and Walter Pitts, then in their early 20s, and destined for legendarily great careers in brain science and other fields, pulled a prank. The duo wrote a thoroughly nonsensical monograph called A Mathematical Theory of the Affective Psychoses.

This glittering intellectual fool's gold is a hodgepodge of mathematical equations and jargon, ending with the declaration: "As remarked above, these are no periodic orbits in the large, and unless continually disturbed, the particle will ultimately settle toward one of the equilibria."

Lettvin and Pitts, to their shock, received plaudits – and also offers of research funding, which they declined.

Jerry Lettvin has told the story many times. Lettvin has not been shy about telling interviewers, either. A 1998 book called The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography includes his loving account of the prank.

Undoubtedly, modern academics who cite the Lettvin/Pitts paper do so with deeply deadpan humour. The examplar is Professor Andrew Adamatzky of the University of the West of England, who, in 2005, published a study that begins:

"In the early 1940s Jerome Lettvin and Walter Pitts created a mathematical model of emotional developments to simulate mental disorders. Using differential equations they represented a mental state by two variables: intensity of emotions and intensity of activity. A mental evolution thus was portrait by domains in phase spaces, where an increase of emotion intensity reflects a transition from impassivity to normal feeling to strong emotions and then to abnormal excitement, and, an increase of intensity of activity pushes a person from a stupor to a hyperactivity. Lettvin-Pitts's ideas, enriched by Robert Plutchik's three-dimensional structure of emotions, unfold themselves several decades later into the field of dynamical, non-linear, psychology."

Marc Abrahams

Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Are traditional promotion methods as good as promoting people at random?

Last month, three Italian researchers were awarded an Ig Nobel prize for demonstrating mathematically that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random. But their research was neither the beginning nor the end of the story of how bureaucracies try – and fail – to find a good promotion method.

Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo, of the University of Catania, Sicily, calculated how a pick-at-random promotion scheme compares with other, more enshrined methods. They gave details in the journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications.

The three based their work on the Peter Principle – the notion that many people are promoted, sooner or later, to positions that exceed their competence. They cite the works of other researchers who had taken tentative steps in the same direction, but they fail to mention an unintentionally daring 2001 study by Steven E Phelan and Zhiang Lin at the University of Texas at Dallas, published in the journal Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory.

Phelan and Lin aimed to see whether, over the long haul, it pays best to promote people on supposed merit (we try, one way or another, to measure how good you are), or on an "up or out" basis (either you get promoted quickly or you get the boot), or by seniority (live long and by that measure alone you will prosper). As a benchmark, a this-is-as-bad-as-it-could-possibly-get alternative, they also looked at what happens when you promote people at random. They got a surprise: random promotion, they admitted, performed better than almost every alternative. Phelan and Lin seemed (at least in my reading of their 25-page-long paper) almost shocked by what they found.

But where Pluchino, Rapisarda and Garofalo would later, independently, hone and raise this discovery for the world to admire, Phelan and Lin merely muttered, ever so quietly in the middle of a long paragraph, that "this needs to be further investigated in our future studies". They moved on to other things.

Human beings, many of them, are clever. Always there is potential to devise a new, perhaps better method of choosing which individuals to promote in an organisation. Phedon Nicolaides, of the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht, recently suggested in a newspaper in Cyprus what he sees as an improvement on random promotion: randomly choose the people who will make the promotion decisions.

A very different, non-random method was devised for use by the United States Air Force. Details appear in a 170-page paper prepared in 2008 by Michael Schiefer, Albert Robbert, John Crown, Thomas Manacapilli and Carolyn Wong of the Rand Corporation. But regardless of its merits, this scheme may be doomed to rejection purely because it has a curious name. The report is called The Weighted Airman Promotion System.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

How does the power-hungry individual respond to a bad reaction? Take a look at the eyebrows

An experiment measured what happened when power-driven people gave speeches to an audience that responded with blatant, deliberate acts of boredom.

The researchers, Eugene Fodor and David Wick of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, wrote up the details in a blandly titled monograph, Need for Power and Affective Response to Negative Audience Reaction to an Extemporaneous Speech, in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Fodor and Wick found some power-seekers and power-avoiders. They used a standard psychological method to identify these people. Fodor and Wick then asked each to give a three-minute persuasive speech to an audience. A wee, special audience – a woman and a man trained and rehearsed for the occasion.

They "predicted that power-motivated participants would exhibit higher levels of electromyographic activity in the brow supercilii when confronted by a negative audience reaction to their speech". In this they used an established method, trusting that the electrical activity level in the forehead-frowning muscles would reliably indicate a person's anxiety level.

For some speechgivers, the audience showed interest. But for others, not: "Fifteen seconds into the speech, the young woman crossed her legs and began looking at her hands. The young man shifted in his chair. The woman continued looking around. The man looked at his watch, then briefly out of the window. Approximately one min into the speech, the actors looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. They then looked back at the participant delivering the speech. Both continued to shift their gaze, rarely looking at the participant. Near the end, the woman gave off a visible sigh. The man, for his part, twiddled his thumbs a lot, looked at the clock a few times, yawned at specific junctures..."

The results of the experiment: under this kind of duress, the power-hungry persons, compared with the non-power-hungry individuals, had noticeably greater eyebrow-furrowing muscle electrical activity.

Fodor and Wick end their report with an eyebrow/anxiety-raising cautionary note for anyone who aspires to leadership. They specifically mention politicians and labour-management negotiators: "The findings ... suggest that certain occupations may pose repeated exposures to stress of a kind that can threaten cardiovascular health for persons high in power motivation."

Marc Abrahams

Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

All you need is a spectrometer. I mean, geez. Was that so hard?

Materials and Methods
Both samples were prepared by gently desiccating them in a convection oven at low temperature over the course of several days. The dried samples were then mixed with potassium bromide and ground in a small ball-bearing mill for two minutes. One hundred milligrams of each of the resulting powders were then pressed into a circular pellet having a diameter of 1 cm and a thickness of approximately 1 mm. Spectra were taken at a resolution of 1 cm-1 using a Nicolet 740 FTIR spectrometer. Figure 2 shows a comparison of the 4000-400 cm-1 (2.5-25 mm) infrared transmission spectra of a Granny Smith apple and a Sunkist Navel orange.

Conclusions
Not only was this comparison easy to make, but it is apparent from the figure that apples and oranges are very similar. Thus, it would appear that the comparing apples and oranges defense should no longer be considered valid. This is a somewhat startling revelation. It can be anticipated to have a dramatic effect on the strategies used in arguments and discussions in the future.

Scott Sandford, NASA Ames Research Center, for the Annals of Improbable Research.

(Via David Dobbs)

Image: Some rights reserved by TheBusyBrain

Great article from "The Annals of Improbable Research" on "Artificae Plantae: The Taxonomy, Ecology and Ethnobotany of Simulacra." It is about time someone did this research:

A previously unacknowledged plant family of significant economic importance plants has been flourishing around us for many years. The fact that this immense and diverse family has been heretofore ignored by most botanists is astonishing--its members are found worldwide in nearly every society. This family is more than a botanical curiosity. It is a scientific conundrum, as the taxa:

1.lack genetic material,
2.appear virtually immortal and
3.have the ability to form intergeneric crosses with ease, despite the lack of any evident mechanism for cross-fertilization.

I wonder where they'd place the play-dough gingko tree Isaiah made?

Sharon

Hairdressers of the Ancien Régime did a good sideline as maths checkers

Some mathematicians pay attention to hairdressers more than other mathematicians do. Two modern scholars focused their attention very differently when they wrote about history's most famous numerico-tonsorial collaboration.

In 1784, mathematicians joined forces with hairdressers on a scale probably never attempted before or since. A century and a half later, Raymond Clare Archibald looked back at it in wonder. Archibald's monograph called Tables of Trigonometric Functions in Non-Sexagesimal Arguments spanned 12 full pages in the April 1943 issue of the about-as-lively-as-you-might-expect journal Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation.

Archibald, a professor of mathematics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, exemplified terseness. He often abbreviated himself as RC Archibald. This monograph identifies him simply as RCA.

Though some mathematicians are bald, he was not. A former student wrote that Archibald "was striking in appearance, his hair wavy and beginning to grey, worn a little longer than was generally the custom".

Archibald sketched the basics of the hairdresser story.

The French government wanted new, improved "tables of the sines, tangents, etc, and their logarithms". The fellow in charge, the not-so-terse Gaspard Clair François Marie Riche de Prony, whose portraits credit his head with an abundant, curvilinear garden of hair, assembled a team. De Prony got three or four mathematicians to do the heavy mental lifting, seven or eight people to perform the tedious calculations, and — here the story took its little twist — "70 or 80" people to check the work.

These checkers, Archibald said, were "endowed with no great mathematical abilities. In fact, they were mainly recruited from among hairdressers whom the abandonment of the wig and powdered hair in men's fashions had deprived of a livelihood."

Archibald devoted only one paragraph to those hairdressers, otherwise stubbornly persisting in an almost obsessive description of the sines, cosines and other, sometimes tangential, niceties of the story. The project produced "17 large folio volumes", he has us know, of which "eight volumes were devoted to logarithms of numbers to 200,000".

In contrast, Ivor Grattan-Guinness practically babbled about the ex-coiffeurists. An emeritus professor of history of mathematics and logic at Middlesex Polytechnic, Grattan-Guinness sports healthy hanks of white hair in the photos of him that I have seen. His monograph called Work for the Hairdressers: The Production of de Prony's Logarithmic and Trigonometric Tables appeared in 1990 in the Annals of the History of Computation.

He wrote: "Many of these workers were unemployed hairdressers: one of the most hated symbols of the Ancien Régime was the hairstyles of the aristocracy, and the obligatory reduction of coiffure 'as the geometers say, to its most simplest expression' left the hairdressing trade in a severe state of recession. Thus these artists were converted into elementary arithmeticians."

Everything was carefully organised, Grattan-Guinness explained, "to avoid multiplication and division and to reduce the calculations to sums and (especially) differences, which the hairdressers could fairly be expected to handle."

The hairdressers finished their work in less than three years. Historians have (so far as I'm aware) ignored whatever they did after that.

Marc Abrahams

Marc Abraham is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Researchers find that wave functions can affect humans too

Everyone oscillates, one way and another. We vibrate, we hum, we bounce. We have our ups and downs. Some of this oscillation attracts the attention of a researcher named Tainsh.

In 1972, Michael A Tainsh published a monograph called Oscillation of Human Performance as a Personality Measure, in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills. Tainsh was then based at the University of Aston, an institution whose very name oscillates. In its current phase, the name is Aston University.

Tainsh wrote to me about his monograph, saying it was inspired by a 45-year-old book:

"May I suggest that you read the work of Spearman and his seminal work The Abilities of Man written, if I recall correctly, in 1927. The concept of oscillation is described fully in the chapter of the same name."

I followed his suggestion. Spearman – Charles H Spearman, professor of philosophy of mind at the University of London – indeed rolled out the concept of human oscillation. Spearman then issued a rousing call: "Finally, there is the great task of determining how this tendency to oscillate correlates with sex, race, social stratum, parentage, and above all with vocational success."

Tainsh is one one of the few people who answered that call.

Tainsh explains that his 1972 paper "is very brief and difficult to decipher unless you understand the background, which was three years of PhD work based in UK and USA ... The purpose of the work was to describe the 'fits and starts' of human performance in terms of wave functions as many engineers would find quite normal if they were examining linear systems. This was quite new to psychologists and my PhD was well received."

In 1975, Tainsh and a colleague published a study, perhaps distantly related to the oscillation work, called The Influence of Travelling on Decision-Making, in which they "concluded that there was a reduction in the travellers' capacities to make logical decisions following a 100-mile bus journey." Two years later, Tainsh published a solo study with almost the same title (he removed the word "The" from the beginning). Though short – less than a page – the later report packs in a tremendous amount of information before reaching its final sentence, which says: "Apparently, the influence of long-distance travelling on logical thinking may be significant but quite small."

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Want to make your company more efficient? Don't promote people based on merit--do it at random. That's the conclusion of a study from Alessandro Pluchino and his team at the Universitá di Catania. Pluchino's study is one of the winner's of this year's Ig Nobel prize, a parody of the Nobel Prize given by the Annals of Improbable Research for achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."

The efficiency study is based on the Peter principle, a principle named after Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter that postulates, "Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence." 

The study explains:

So in mathematical terms, at least, it makes the most sense to promote incompetence--sometimes.

The other winners of the Nobel prize are equally strange and thought-provoking. They include a study that shows how asthma symptoms lessen on roller-coaster rides, a remote-controlled helicopter that captures whale snot, and a study that documents oral sex in fruit bats. Check out the full list of winners here.

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

Every year, the crew behind the Annals of Improbable Research honor research that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think." These awards, known as the Ig Nobels, honor some of the most entertaining research published in the past year. The competition is fierce, and the prizes highly coveted. But without further ado! This year, the winners are...

The 20th annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded Thursday night for "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." Organised by the same people who produce Annals of Improbable Research, the prizes commemorate the world's funniest research, and sometimes the world's biggest villains (BP is a winner this year). Here's a list of the 2010 prizes, with text from the official award announcements.

Researchers who used a remote control helicopter to collect samples of whale snot and demonstrated that, "on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes" were among those honored last night with Ig Nobel Prizes, the annual recognition granted to scholarly work that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think." The awards, made by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, come out just before -- but hardly presage -- the Nobel prizes. In one other award -- and this was almost too easy, wasn't it? -- the group honored BP (and three researchers who wrote a paper on the subject) "for disproving the old myth that oil and water don't mix." A full list of the winners is available here.

Britain lands a national record four wins at awards for scientific research that makes people laugh first and think later

Britain has once again proved a country to be reckoned with in science after landing a national record four wins at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony at Harvard University.

Researchers from across the UK were honoured for achievements that included proof that swearing relieves pain, a means of collecting whale snot with a remote-controlled helicopter and the first documented case of fellatio in fruit bats.

Not to be confused with the real (and more lucrative) Nobel prizes, which are due to be announced next week, the "Igs" are awarded to scientists whose work makes people laugh first and think later.

The ceremony, hosted by the Harvard-based journal Annals of Improbable Research, took place last night with the much-coveted prizes handed out by real Nobel laureates. Recipients were allowed a maximum of 60 seconds to deliver their acceptance speech, a time limit enforced by an eight-year-old girl.

Commenting on the strong showing of UK scientists this year, Marc Abrahams, the master of ceremonies, told the Guardian: "The nation may agonise over its place in the world, but in this one thing at least, Britannia rules."

The Ig Nobel 2010 winners were:

Medicine prize

Psychologists Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest at the University of Amsterdam share the award for discovering that breathing difficulties brought on by asthma can be alleviated by repeated rollercoaster rides.

Physics prize

Awarded to Lianne Parkin and her team at the University of Otago in New Zealand for demonstrating that people are less likely to slip over on icy footpaths if they wear their socks outside their shoes instead of inside.

Biology prize

A description of the sexual antics of the short-nosed fruit bat earned the award for Gareth Jones at Bristol University and collaborators in China. The team showed that females who performed oral sex on their mates copulated for longer. "It is the first documented case of fellatio by adult animals other than humans to my knowledge, and opens questions about whether female animals can manipulate males via sexual activity, perhaps in this case to improve their chances of successful fertilisation," Jones told the Guardian. He planned to demonstrate the behaviour at the ceremony using puppets.

Writing about the research for the Huffington Post last year, the primatologist Frans de Waal said: "The fellatio story on bats is a bright spot in an otherwise miserable record that denies animals the pleasure principle, homosexuality, and other forms of non-reproductive sex."

Peace prize

Awarded to psychologist Richard Stephens and others at Keele University for confirming that swearing relieves pain. Stephens, who began the study after striking his thumb with a hammer, found volunteers could tolerate more pain if they repeated swearwords rather than neutral words. He suspects that "swearing induces a fight-or-flight response and nullifies the link between fear of pain and pain perception".

Engineering prize

The task of monitoring dangerous bugs in whales at sea is a formidable one. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and others at the Institute of Zoology in London developed a way to collect fluids ejected from whales' blowholes by attaching petri dishes to the underside of small, remote-controlled helicopters and hovering them overhead.

Transportation prize

Working with Japanese scientists, Mark Fricker and Dan Bebber at Oxford University used slime mould to model an effective railway network. In the experiment, cities were represented by porridge oats that were linked to one another as the slime mould grew. "The Ig Nobel awards are great. They are a wonderful vehicle for putting some science into the public domain in a fun and interesting way," said Fricker.

Management prize

To Alessandro Pluchino and team at the University of Catania for demonstrating mathematically that companies work more efficiently if staff are promoted at random.

Public health prize

Awarded to Manuel Barbeito at the Industrial Health and Safety Office in Maryland for scientific studies that found microbes cling to beards, making more hirsute men a potential laboratory hazard.

Chemistry prize

For research in 2005 that overturned the long-held belief that oil and water do not mix, the prize was awarded to Eric Adams at MIT and others, including researchers at BP.

Economics prize

Awarded jointly to the executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, AIG and Magnetar for "creating and promoting new ways to invest money – ways that maximise financial gain and minimise financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof."

Researchers who used a remote control helicopter to collect samples of whale snot and demonstrated that, "on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes" were among those honored last night with Ignobel Prizes, the annual recognition granted to scholarly work that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think." The awards, made by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, come out just before -- but rarely presage -- the Nobel prizes. In one other award -- and this was almost too easy, wasn't it? -- the group honored BP (and three researchers who wrote a paper on the subject) "for disproving the old myth that oil and water don't mix." A full list of the winners is available here.

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: Slime mold puts in another prizeworthy performance, winning researchers their second Ig Nobel award for humorous scientific achievements.

Brain damage can give gamblers an edge in certain circumstances, a study shows

Brain damage can sometimes give gamblers a winning edge, an American study suggests. The researchers take a flier at explaining how and why certain brain lesions might, in some circumstances, help a person to triumph over others or over adversity.

The study – Investment Behavior and the Negative Side of Emotion – published in the journal Psychological Science, renders its tantalising, juicy question into lofty academese. The five co-authors, led by Baba Shiv, a marketing professor at Stanford University, ask: "Can dysfunction in neural systems subserving emotion lead, under certain circumstances, to more advantageous decisions?"

The team experimented with people who had abnormalities in particular brain regions – the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the right insular or somatosensory cortex. Medically, those can be a sign that something's amiss in how the person handles emotions.

Each brain-damaged person got a wad of play money, and instructions to gamble on 20 rounds of coin tossing (heads-you-win/tails-you-lose, with some added twists). Other people who had no such brain lesions got the same money and the same gambling instructions.

The brain-damaged gamblers pretty consistently ended up with more money than their healthier-brained competitors. The researchers speculate that when "normal" gamblers encounter a run of unhappy coin-toss results, they get discouraged and become cautious – perhaps too cautious. Not so the people with brain-lesion-induced emotional disfunction. Encountering a run of bad luck, they plough on, undaunted. And then enjoy a relatively handsome payoff. At least sometimes.

The study notes that this brain damage side-benefit might occasionally even save someone's life.

They cite the case of a man with ventromedial prefrontal damage who was driving under hazardous road conditions: "When other drivers reached an icy patch, they hit their brakes in panic, causing their vehicles to skid out of control, but the patient crossed the icy patch unperturbed, gently pulling away from a tailspin and driving ahead safely. The patient remembered the fact that not hitting the brakes was the appropriate behaviour, and his lack of fear allowed him to perform optimally."

Shiv has an eye for non-standard ways of exploring human behaviour. He sometimes teaches a course called The Frinky Science of the Mind.

In 2008, he and three colleagues were awarded an Ig Nobel prize for demonstrating that expensive fake medicine is more effective than cheap fake medicine.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

The Ig Nobel Awards would be the highlight of the Boston scientific social season – if there were such a thing. For 20 years, the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research - live on stage, and now via webcast- have honored scientists who work makes people laugh, then makes them think. Click here for the webcast link. This year’s “Twentieth 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize” ceremony, takes place this Thursday, September 30, as always, at Sanders Theater in Harvard’s gothic Memorial Hall. To describe the sold-out event as a peer-reviewed combination of Laugh In, Monty Python and FiresignTheater would be a cliché. And no one under the age of 45 would get it. Zach Galifianakis and Chelsea Handler with Ph.Ds? Not exactly. Just think wry, smart, hilarious. But don’t trust the editors of NNB. See for yourself during a live webcast. Or check out the Improbable journal or website, where MC Marc Abrahams keeps it coming all year. Below, Abrahams - taking a break from a Harvard Square meeting with IG diplomats- offers a preview of this year’s ceremony. A highlight — a mini-opera about the bacteria on a woman’s tooth. Check out the website for clips of past events, including “The Best of Sweetie Poo,” a little girl who arrives at the podium when speakers go over their time limit to repreatedly annouce “Please stop. I’m bored.” Here’s a sample of some of the 2009 winners. MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over.BIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.Finally, Abrahams describes the 24/7 lectures. Not what you might think.

Mice laced with poison can be used to kill unwanted brown tree snakes, research shows, but the problem is delivering them to the right place

If you're going to lace dead mice with poison, and drop them from helicopters into a rainforest in Guam in such a way that they become entangled high in the trees where they might murder the brown tree snakes, but you want to avoid (as much as possible) having the toxically tasty mouse corpses fall all the way to the ground, where they could instead get gobbled by coconut crabs, perhaps you should graft them on to something like a parachute.

Peter Savarie, Tom Mathies and Kathleen Fagerstone, of the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, did just that. At a symposium in 2007, they told all about it in a report called Flotation Materials for Aerial Delivery of Acetaminophen Toxic Baits to Brown Treesnakes.

Tree snakes have lived in Guam only since the late 1940s, Savarie, Mathies and Fagerstone explain. Critics maintain that the snakes have: eaten to near extinction some native birds, lizards and fruit bats; preyed on poultry; bitten small children; and "cause[d] power outages by climbing on electrical transmission wires". Thus came a clamour to get rid of the snakes.

The most obvious way to do that, to certain biologists, is get dead mice, "treat" them with acetaminophen, stuff the tempting acetaminophen/mouse treats in PVC tubes, and put those where the snakes are. "However," complains the report, "PVC tubes are not practical for delivery of baits to remote areas of jungle or the forest canopy. Further, it is important that baits entangle in the canopy and not fall to the ground, where they can be scavenged by non-target animals such as crabs."

Shortly past the turn of the century came an innovation. Small parachutes "hand dropped from a helicopter have been used as flotation devices for entangling dead mice in the forest canopy". Those early tests used parachutes made of either plastic or corn starch – but the one can take years to biodegrade, and the other dissolves too quickly in the wet.

Savarie, Mathies and Fagerstone tried several alternatives.

In a trial run, thawed frozen dead mice "attached to biodegradable jute netting by a 30.5cm-long cotton thread to a rear leg were deployed by hand from a US Navy Knighthawk MH-60S helicopter from about 30 meters above ground level".

Then came the tests with parachutes, some made of paper, some of a biodegradable plastic-like material called Ecofilm. The scientists also tried, in place of parachutes, paper streamers, paper plates and paper cups.

To track these plummeting agglomerations, the researchers glued a radio transmitter to each mouse's abdomen.

Each configuration gets the job done, says the team. "However, a problem with the two parachutes and the paper plate and paper cup is that threads have to be secured to them for attaching the dead mice. This is a time-consuming effort."

The best arrangement for dropping thawed, frozen, poisoned, dead, radio-equipped mice from a helicopter into a tree, they indicate, is to attach a paper streamer to some cardboard, and hot-glue the cardboard to a rear leg of the mouse.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Nursing lecturer imparts embarrassing knowledge in research document

Nurses must acquire some skills that non-medical people find embarrassing, disgusting, maybe even childish. Such knowledge can be difficult to obtain from the standard medical books and journals. A monograph called How to Perform a Digital Removal of Faeces aims to remedy one such gap in the literature.

Gaye Kyle, a senior lecturer at the faculty of health and human science at Thames Valley University in Slough, researched the subject in depth. She published her findings in the journal Continence Essentials.

There exists an official document that purports to provide the digital-removal information a nurse needs to know. But Kyle finds that document wanting. She complains that: "The publication of Digital Rectal Examination and Manual Removal of Faeces – Guidance for Nurses by the Royal College of Nursing addressed many issues concerning the professional and legal aspects of the manual (digital) removal of faeces. However, the document did not give detailed guidance on how to actually carry out the procedure."

Kyle is can-do when it comes to how to. What must be discussed she discusses, prissy diplomatic mincing be damned. "Digital removal of faeces is a procedure that many healthcare workers are not confident about performing," she writes. "However, in some patients it is a necessary part of their routine bowel care".

Some aspects of the situation strike her as dangerous and ludicrous. "Some nurses are actively refusing to undertake digital removal of faeces on spinal cord injury patients either because they have not been trained or, even more alarmingly, because they think they are not allowed to perform the procedure at all."

Kyle uses plain language to describe the entire procedure, listing 25 distinct, specific actions. These range from the philosophical to the hands-in. For each action, she states a rationale, removing the guesswork that would stymie many an unconfident healthcare professional.

Why should one ensure privacy? "To help the patient relax and minimise embarrassment."

Why should one "place water-based lubricating gel on gloved index finger... for patients receiving this procedure on a REGULAR basis"? The reason is practical and also commonsensical: "To facilitate easier insertion of index finger."

Kyle explicates technical minutiae, but only when and where such is needed to provide a clear, unambiguous understanding. "Gently rotate the finger 6–8 times in a clockwise motion and withdraw", she directs, then goes on to tell how many times the rotation may be repeated.

Kyle has given us a case study in the way vital knowledge can remain hidden and difficult to get at, especially when it pertains to matters or matter that can remain hidden and difficult to get at.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

The stock market can bring out some strange metaphors in people

In struggling to make sense of the stock market, people reach and stretch for metaphors. Sometimes they even contort, dislocate, and mangle. In 1995, Geoff P Smith of the University of Hong Kong made a grand unified effort to gather and classify those metaphors.

Smith congealed the metaphors and his thoughts into a monograph called How High Can a Dead Cat Bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock Market. It appeared in the journal Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching.

Smith collected mostly from three sources: the South China Morning Post's business supplement, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Asia Business News television programme.

Here are verbatim snippets, which I present in the form of a mixed-metaphor story.

"Strong bears came out of the woods determined to drag the market down."

"The bears had their claws firmly dug in and were not letting go."

"Optimists saw the makings of a baby bull, but naysayers warned it could be a bum steer ... after last year's grizzly bear market."

"Speculators played a cat-and-mouse game with stocks."

"The stock remained a dog."

"Investors [ran] like a herd of startled gazelles."

"The market was very nervous."

"The market was having trouble focusing on issues."

"Sick dollar ... groggy dollar ... dollar cringes."

"The market was suffering vertigo."

"The market started to drift and lose direction."

"[The market] precariously balanced on the 10,050 mark."

"The index hovered."

"[The market was] losing its footing."

"The index fell off the cliff."

"The Hang Seng Index dropped like a brick." (This one's a simile. I know, I know.)

"[The] index continued its tailspin."

"The market seemed to have come out of its freefall."

"Stock prices took a rollercoaster ride and ended up in the subway."

"The bounce was more technical than substantial."

"Those hoping for a big rebound to catapult it out of this bear trap would probably be disappointed."

"The question every trader will be asking himself this week is: just how high can a dead cat bounce?"

Surveying the hodgepodge of stock phrases and market-driving hype, Smith sighs: "Rarely do commentators say 'These events are totally unpredictable; I haven't the slightest idea what caused them to occur.'"

The possibility flaunts itself that no one quite understands what the stock market's doing. If that's the case, everyone's unlikely to come up with metaphors that truly fit. But that won't stop them from trying. Smith tells why, at the end of his report:

"A group with a significant stake in the maintenance of an impression of certainty are the financial 'gurus' whose words and actions can have profound effects on the way markets move ... To a lesser extent, a host of commentators, analysts and advisers benefit from the illusion that market events are controlled and rational and can be explained and predicted."

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and founder of the Ig Nobel prize

The sexual unification of Germany appears to have resulted in lots of talk, but not much action, researchers find

A study called The Sexual Unification of Germany tells what happened, on paper and in some people's heads, when East Germany hooked up with West.

After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners.

Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Sharp focused on a single question: "What happened to GDR [German Democratic Republic] sexuality when it was confronted with the sexual mores of West Germany?" "The answer," she writes, "appears to have been an explosion of discourse surrounding sex."

In other words: lots of talk, not much action. In press accounts, though, the joint was jumping. For a little while, anyway. Sharp describes one of the main storylines: "While the traditional behavior of conquering armies (killing the men and raping the women) was obviously inappropriate for Western men after the collapse of Communism, something very similar seemed to be happening on a metaphorical level ... The context was the ideological battle between East and West, the cold war being slogged out in the arena of sexuality, with orgasmic potential replacing nuclear capacity."

The tabloid press enjoyed a circulation-boosting "brief obsession with GDR sexuality". And a grand yet debilitating obsession it was: "GDR women were represented as products for the fantasies of Western men, while the East German men were dismissed as both socially and sexually inadequate."

Sharp recounts a West German man's televised claim that "GDR women are not really uglier than West German women, and they dress as well. But the real advantage is that they are more [modest, undemanding, easily satisfied]".

On the other side of the former fence, a GDR sexologist named Dr Kurt Starke "linked findings about women's greater sexual enjoyment to the social policies of the GDR". The daily tabloid Bild-Zeitung countered with the headline "Do GDR women really come more often? The orgasm professor is talking rubbish" above a story in which an East German nurse named Adelheid said: "We really don't have more orgasms in the GDR. Not me, anyway, because I have to work up to 12 hours a day and that doesn't leave much time for love."

For the most part, Sharp tells of two Germanies united first by hype about sex, and then by disappointment as most people's sex lives, no matter where they lived, remained humdrum.

The report ends with a deflating comment from journalist Regine Sylvester, who tried to sum up both her own experience and that of the entire nation. The supposed "sex boom" that happened right after unification, Sylvester opined, "did not turn the Federal Republic into a noisily copulating society, nor did the official taboos turn the old GDR into an ascetic one."

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Female college students and rats agree on what makes a particular mineral water tasty, research suggests

A study called Similar Preference for Natural Mineral Water between Female College Students and Rats pulls off a nice bit of interspecies diplomacy. Reading it end to end, you would be hard pressed to say who – the college students or the rats – was most intended to benefit from the research.

Written by Esumi Yukiko of Shimane Women's Junior College in Matsui, Japan, and Ohara Ikuo of Kobe Women's University, and published in the Journal of Home Economics of Japan, this six-page monograph describes a simple experiment.

The authors explain their work was partly inspired by a simple fact: "The Society for the Study of Tasty Water, which is sponsored by the Ministry of Public Welfare, proposed hardness to be one of the most important requirements for tasty water."

Therefore, they say, "the objectives of this study are to investigate the best mineral water for drinking by using hardness as an index, and whether the response of rats to mineral water can be extrapolated to that of humans."

Yukiko and Ikua conducted taste tests with 16 healthy female humans, 16 healthy female rats, and 14 different brands (nine Japanese, two Belgian and two French) of bottled water. The water, all of it, was uncarbonated. For good measure, the taste testers also taste-tested tap water.

The women drank from cups, the rats from "drinking tubes". The report specifies that the rats each weighed 160 grams, give or take three grams, and were "housed individually". We are told nothing, not a blessed iota of fact, about the weight of the women, or about their living arrangements.

The report also specifies that "before beginning the experiment, each animal was fed on a commercial stock diet", but says nothing about what the women consumed.

Yukiko and Ikua reached two main conclusions.

First, they write, "appropriate levels of minerals are needed for tasty drinking water, too little being as bad as too much, with around 58.3 milligrams/litre of hardness being most favourable."

Second, and perhaps more memorably: "The present study has demonstrated that the preference for different types of natural mineral water by female college students was similar to that by rats."

Yukiko and Ikua make no claim that theirs is the final word. For one thing, they point out, "the menstrual cycle of the subjects was not considered in this experiment, although taste sensitivity can be influenced by it."

Similar Preference for Natural Mineral Water between Female College Students and Rats is not the only research study to proudly, explicitly comparison-test college students and rats. But it may be the most exhuberant since C Lathan and PE Fields's 1936 classic A Report on the Test-Retest Performances of 38 College Students and 27 White Rats on the Identical 25 Choice Elevated Maze.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Research – from Italy, would you believe – suggests that pizza can be good for your health

A series of Italian research studies suggest that eating pizza might do good things for a person's health.

These benefits show up, statistically speaking and seasoned with caveats, among people who eat pizza as pizza. The delightful statistico-medico-pizza effects do not happen so much, the researchers emphasise, for individuals who eat the pizza ingredients individually.

Back in 2001, Dario Giugliano, Francesco Nappo and Ludovico Coppola, at Second University Naples, published a study in the journal Circulation called Pizza and Vegetables Don't Stick to the Endothelium. The thrust of their finding was that, unlike many other typical Italian meals, pizza does not necessarily cause clogged blood vessels (atherosclerosis) and death.

Silvano Gallus of the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche, in Milan, has cooked up several studies about the health effects of ingesting pizza.

In 2003, together with colleagues from Naples, Rome and elsewhere, Gallus published a report called Does Pizza Protect Against Cancer?, in the International Journal of Cancer. It compares several thousand people who were treated for cancer of the oral cavity, pharynx, oesophagus, larynx, colon, or rectum with patients who were treated for other, non-cancer ailments. Several hospitals gathered data about what the patients said they habitually ate. The study ends up speaking, in a vague, general way of an "apparently favourable effect of pizza on cancer risk in Italy".

A year later, in a monograph in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention, Gallus and two colleagues wrote that: "Regular consumption of pizza, one of the most typical Italian foods, showed a reduced risk of digestive tract cancers."

Also in 2004, another team anchored by Gallus published a monograph called Pizza and Risk of Acute Myocardial Infarction, in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. As you would expect from the title, its purpose was "to evaluate the potential role of pizza consumption on the risk of acute myocardial infarction". Gallus and his team "suggest that pizza consumption is a favourable indicator" for preventing, or at least not causing, heart attacks.

Gallus is in no way claiming that pizza prevents all ills. A Gallus-led study called Pizza Consumption and the Risk of Breast, Ovarian and Prostate Cancer appeared in 2006 in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention. These types of cancer are thought to arise differently than the kinds believed to be warded off by pizza. The study puts its message bluntly: "Our results do not show a relevant role of pizza on the risk of sex hormone-related cancers."

The Gallus studies all hedge their bets a bit. Each says, in one way or another (and here I'm paraphrasing them): "Pizza may in fact merely represent a general indicator of the so-called Mediterranean diet, which has been shown to have potential health benefits."

All of this pertains to Italian-made pizza, metabolised in Italy. No matter how accurate the scientists' interpretations turn out to be, there's no guarantee that they hold true for foreign pizza, or for any pizza eaten anywhere by foreigners.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

Two British studies suggest that pizza is bad for you – whether you're eating it or delivering it

Pizza is dangerous. Pizza is beneficial. If you hold either of these opinions, published research agrees with you, especially research in England and Italy.

Two British studies highlight, darkly, some dangers that accompany pizza that's served too speedily or too heartily. One, a monograph in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, explains that, whatever the good or bad of eating pizza may be, delivering the pies can put you on a collision course with unhappiness.

Dr Chris McLean and his colleague J Bernard at Mayday University Hospital in Croydon say they were inspired by a 1992 report in the journal Injury by Dr MG Dorrell of Edgware General Hospital in north London. Dorrell "described a series of six patients who sustained bony injuries in road traffic accidents during the course of their employment as pizza delivery personnel". Subsequently, the Pizza and Pasta Association, acting in concert with the government, developed a voluntary code of practice for home delivery individuals, with the goal of reducing or even eliminating pizza/transportation-induced bony and other injuries.

McLean and Bernard, a decade after the Edgware pizza study, analysed what happened to three pizza delivery moped drivers who were themselves delivered to Mayday University Hospital. "None of them possessed a full UK driver's licence," they wrote, and "all three were involved in collisions with automobiles." One simply fell off his moped; the other two "somersaulted over their moped handlebars". Piecing together the available evidence, McLean and Bernard tentatively concluded that "non-native workers who lack English language skills and moped driving skills are at increased risk of moped accidents".

Thus, it is known that pizza can be a nexus of havoc even prior to ingestion.

A new report, by James Catton and Dileep Lobo at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham – published appropriately, maybe inevitably, in the medical journal Gut – explains what can happen when someone consumes too much pizza and too much lubricant with too much gusto.

First, they tell what led to the problem: "A previously healthy 16-year-old male student was admitted with acute abdominal pain after eating two large pizzas and drinking five pints of beer." Then they show you the problem, twice. First, a CT image of the young man's woeful belly contents. Then, a quasi-psychedelic colour photo taken during laparoscopic surgery. This is an insider's view, a spelunker/tourist's view of the inside of a seldom-visited cave. During the surgical procedure, we learn from the accompanying text, "a large amount of undigested pizza and beer were evacuated from the peritoneal cavity".

The authors conclude with a few poetically chosen words about the blooming, buzzing confusion that was the patient's guts: "We hypothesise that binge eating and drinking resulted in gastric distension which progressed to acute gastric dilatation and raised intra-abdominal pressure, which may have compromised splanchnic perfusion in our patient."

That's a quick look at some of the biomedical downsides of pizza. Next week, we'll look at some Italian research studies that hint, oh so temptingly, that eating pizza improves your health.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize