The unimolar toothbrush misses the IgNobel

“I probably have a thousand toothbrushes in my house.” An industrial designer who used to design toothbrushes told me this. Then, I asked him, “What was the strangest toothbrush that you had to design?” He said it was an electric toothbrush with a small rounded brush at the end for use of elderly folk who only have one molar left to clean. I did not know how to react in just one way. I was caught between admiring the indomitable hygienic efforts of single-molared folk and the marketing fellow who really had to persistently chisel away at the obvious to reveal this very special market segment.

I would have nominated that unimolar toothbrush and the ones that pushed for it, for an IgNobel award either for Health or Economics. The IgNobel awards are given every year, around the same time as the more prestigious Nobel Prizes are. The IgNobel awards are given for works “that make us laugh, then make us think.” But looking at the winners of the IgNobel awards last Oct. 2 held at the Sanders Theater at Harvard, it seemed like the unimolar toothbrush would have faced stiff competition under the category of Health or Medicine.

This year’s IgNobel for Medicine went to those who just showed us that we seem to get better if we take expensive fake medicines than if we take cheap fake medicines. This work was done by Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore) and their work is entitled “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy.” This is one study that “celebrates” the role of placebos in healing since there was absolutely no difference in the placebo pill that the subjects were given, except that one is priced lower. They were of course “fooled” by the researchers by being told they were new analgesics that could ease pain. The results showed that those who paid higher for the same placebo pills reported significantly less pain from the electric shocks administered to their wrists, than the ones who paid less. This clearly showed how we unconsciously influence our own response to a drug by the price we paid for it, even if it is not a drug at all.

And it seems like we fool ourselves all the time, not just about drugs but even about snacks. Take potato chips, for instance. The IgNobel award for Nutrition went to Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for “electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.” Their work appeared in “The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips.” The study revealed that when the overall sound level was raised or in the high frequency sounds (2kHz-20kHz), the chips were perceived to be “fresher and crisper.” As to why you would want to fool yourselves or customers this way, is something I still have to ponder.

But pondering is what the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland seemed to have done a lot of when they legally adopted the doctrine that “plants have dignity.” I actually had to read through a 24-page document they issued entitled “The Dignity of Living Beings With Regard to Plants. Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake,” explaining the whole process of how we should view plants. And how else could they have done this but by means of yes, a Decision Tree. I am not making this up. They actually arrived at a decision about the dignity of plants using a decision tree. Look it up, it is on page 5 of the document. Why do I have this strange feeling that someone in the Swiss chamber also felt a chuckle when they realized this? 

I like it when plants and other animals have their way with humans so I take special delight in citing the IgNobel Prize for Archaeology. It went to Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for “measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.” The work is entitled “The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach.” I felt a deep roar of irony down my chest imagining all that we know now to be true about our past based on fossil evidence, could just be the random work of a couple of bored armadillos who according to the study are known “to move archeological materials across stratigraphic layers.” Were it not for radioactive dating, all that we thought were the sacred artefacts of our ancient past could have been really just peelings from last week courtesy of yellow armadillos having a party. But I doubt if the animals involved in the next experiment were enjoying themselves.

The IgNobel for Biology went to three researchers who decided to see which jumped higher: fleas in cats or fleas in dogs. These researchers were Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse. For veterinarians who are probably the only ones who would want to hold this precious knowledge, their work is entitled “A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835).” Oh and yes, the dog fleas would be your bet if there ever would be a high jump contest against cat fleas.

The IgNobel for Cognitive Science is a celebratory research on intelligent slime molds. I know humans who have such a poor sense of direction that they are even confused over who is the “you” in “You Are Here” indicated in maps. Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hok­kaido University, Japan, Hiroyasu Yamada of Nagoya, Japan, Ryo Koba­yashi of Hiroshima University, Atsushi Tero of Presto JST, Akio Ishiguro of Tohoku University, and Ágotá Tóth of the University of Szeged, Hungary, in their work entitled “Intelligence: Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism,” discovered that even slime molds can solve puzzles. However, believe it or not, they still have not found out why politicians cannot talk in clear, complete sentences. 

For the IgNobel on Economics, we have some academics revealing some light into the current economic may­hem and show us the dates of our most economically profitable seasons. The IgNobel for Economics went to Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, “for discovering that a professional lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.” Their study is entitled ”Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?” The study revealed that participants in their “normal cycle” earned about $335 per five-hour shift during ovulation, $260 per shift in the period after ovulation, and $185 per shift during menstruation. Useful though this maybe for a particular workforce, I do not think this aids the economic profitability of laborers like science writers. And even if your fertility peaks and troughs influence your earnings, do not ever bank on Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola to aid you in your reproductive choices. The IgNobel for Chemistry went to Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide BUT they share the prize with Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for their research “Spermicidal potency of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola” for discovering that it is not.

And as what I think is a fitting ending to the irony of the overall human enterprise, the IgNobel for Physics went to Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for “proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.”

What a tangled web we weave, indeed. 

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