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April 14 2011
Can Your Dog Cut a Rug? The DISCOVER Dancing Pet Challenge
Snowball the dancing, Backstreet Boys-loving cockatoo is more than a web meme: he is a scientific conundrum. Bobbing in time to music is a shockingly rare behavior, and even monkeys, capable of learning very complex tasks, find it impossible to get down to the beat even after more than a year of training. It’s marvelous evolutionary serendipity that humans dance, thinks neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel, who has found that our hearing system and motor control are intimately linked. In DISCOVER’s 2011 special issue on the brain, Patel discusses his idea that that animals needed a vocal-learning brain in order to get their groove on:
The implication is that dogs and cats can never do it, horses and chimps can never do it, but maybe other vocal-learning species can do it. I proposed that idea, but it was purely hypothetical until a few years after, when along came Snowball [in 2007].
But more importantly (drumroll), he issues a challenge:
If your pet really does have rhythm, he wants to know about it. “If someone has a dog that can dance to the beat, it will totally refute my hypothesis,” he says, “and that’s progress in ...
February 25 2011
NFL Hopefuls’ New “Smart Shirts” Know Them Inside & Out
The game may be the same, but the gear is different: This Saturday, as NFL prospects try to impress coaches at the Combine workouts, a few players will don smart shirts–souped-up sports attire that measures everything from players’ heart rates to g forces of acceleration.
Designed by Under Armour and Zephyr, this sophisticated shirt is called the Under Armour E39. It weighs less than 0.3 pounds and boasts a load of sensors that sit just below the athlete’s sternum; the sensors include a triaxial accelerometer, a heart-rate monitor, and a breathing-rate monitor. As an athlete practices, trainers can follow the player’s vital signs on their smartphones, laptops, or any other device that can receive Bluetooth data. As Wired explains:
“What we have is something very close to the body’s center of mass that’s measuring the accelerometry data from that center of mass,” Under Armour vice president Kevin Haley told Wired.com.
This smart shirt innovates trainers’ and coaches’ performance evaluation by allowing them to see exactly how runners accelerate–and whether a player’s stride can be improved to gain speed. It does this by separately measuring acceleration and direction change on the left and right sides of a player, ...
February 22 2011
Scientists Look for DNA on Envelopes That Amelia Earhart Licked
Researchers hope to collect spit from someone who died more than 70 years ago: the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart. By extracting the famous flyer’s DNA from old envelopes, researchers hope to finally put to rest one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries.
Earhart disappeared–along with her navigator, Fred Noonan–in 1937, when she was trying to become the first female to fly around the globe. Communication with her plane was lost as she flew near Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. government searched in vain for the two adventurers’ remains, and on January 5, 1939, Earhart was officially pronounced dead. But speculation never stopped on whether the duo died in a crash at sea, or whether they survived for some time on a deserted island.
Just two years ago researchers from the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery found bone fragments on Nikumaroro Island that could be part of Amelia Earhart’s finger. The finding is controversial because a dead sea turtle was also found nearby, raising suggestions that the purported piece of Earhart actually belongs to a turtle. According to National Geographic:
Right now, “anyone ...
February 18 2011
Docs Say a Migraine—Not a Stroke—Caused Reporter’s On-Air Babbling
It turns out that the news reporter who suddenly began speaking gibberish as she covered the Grammy Awards wasn’t suffering from a stroke–doctors conclude that a migraine is to blame.
Serene Branson, a reporter for KCBS-TV, began speaking incoherently during her coverage of the annual music awards ceremony. “As soon as I opened my mouth I knew something was wrong,” Branson told MSNBC. “I was having trouble remembering the word for Grammy…. I knew what I wanted to say but I didn’t have the words to say it.”
Many internet viewers thought she was stricken by an on-air stroke, but physicians from the University of California at Los Angeles scanned her head and tested her blood, and discovered that she was simply the victim of a migraine. It all started with a strong headache, Branson told MSNBC, but then it escalated:
“At around 10 o’clock that night I was sitting in the live truck with my field producer and the photographer and I was starting to look at some of my notes,” she said. “I started to think, the words on the page are blurry and I could notice that my thoughts ...
February 17 2011
Japan Wants to Send a Tweeting Companion-Bot to the Space Station
It’s official: The robots are taking over the space station.
It will start with Robonaut 2, the humanoid maintenance bot that NASA is sending to the International Space Station next week. And now Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to send its own bot to the ISS. JAXA’s humanoid robot will not only talk and Twitter, but it will also act as a space nurse, monitoring the health of the astronauts.
The researchers behind the project say the bot would have a number of attributes that would make it a valuable crew member. For example, they say, it would never have to sleep–so it could keep watch when the flesh and blood astronauts are in dreamland.
And then there are its conversational skills, which would make it a lively companion for those lonley spacefarers. “We are thinking in terms of a very human-like robot that would have facial expressions and be able to converse with the astronauts,” JAXA’s Satoshi Sano told the AP.
Finally, the bot could take up that crutial task: manning a Twitter feed. The researchers note that NASA’s bot has a Twitter feed, but ...
February 14 2011
Triumph: Fake Astronauts Walk on Fake Mars!
The simulated eagle has finally landed, and today, two men have walked upon the red sands of fake Mars. This jaunt along a sandpit in Moscow, the latest episode in the Mars500 project designed to test human endurance, gives the cosmonauts a respite from their past eight months of windowless confinement.
As the BBC reports:
“We have made great progress today,” commented Vitaly Davydov, the deputy head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, who was watching a video feed of the two men. “All systems have been working normally.”
Organized by Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency, the Mars500 project seeks to better understand how humans would endure the psychological and physical effects of the isolation and confinement necessary for a real mission to Mars. The ’500′ in Mars500 indicates the mission’s time frame–the organizers estimated that it would takes 250 days to travel to Mars, and then allotted 30 days for surface exploration before a 240-day return trip. (Technically, the project’s name should be Mars520.)
The six crew members have been conducting experiments during their mission, which began last June, and ...
February 09 2011
Shocker: Artist’s Implanted Head-Cam Causes Medical Problems
Just as Beethoven suffered through hearing loss and Hemingway struggled with depression, an artist at New York University is also suffering for his art, but in a slightly different way: his body has rejected part of the camera that he implanted in his head.
Back in November, Wafaa Bilal, an NYU photography professor, embarked on a novel art experiment: he went to a Los Angeles tattoo shop and had a titanium base inserted behind the skin on the back of his head. Three posts that extended from this insert were then attached to a camera that snapped pictures once a minute, viewable to everyone on his website.
Nobody sticks a camera into his head without a reason–and Bilal had at least two, or maybe three. After the 1991 Gulf War the Iraqi artist became a refugee, and eventually immigrated to the United States. Being on the move so much made him want to keep a record of his past, and there’s no better way to see where you’ve been than to have a camera snapping shots from the back of your head. His other reason has to do with living in the present, as The Chronicle of Higher ...
February 04 2011
Video: See the First Aerial Footage of an Uncontacted Amazonian Tribe
In the rainforest along the border between Brazil and Peru, an indigenous tribe is ignoring the 21st century and living life the old-fashioned way. Experts believe this “uncontacted tribe” has had no direct contact with mainstream society, but the Brazilian government has known about the tribe for 20 years and routinely flies above the settlement to check on the inhabitants’ well-being.
NOw, the BBC has released the first ever video footage of this tribe, which had previously only been seen in photographs:
The footage was filmed in cooperation with the Brazilian government, and was featured on the BBC’s Human Planet series. It was shot in the summer of 2010 along the Peru-Brazil border using a zoom lens that allowed the crew to film from more than a half-mile away.
The Brazilian government flies over the settlements once a year to check on the tribe. As José Carlos Meirelles, the Indian-affairs specialist who led the video expedition, explains to National Geographic:
“They always get scared when they see an aircraft, but this tribe is used to seeing commercial flights—Boeings and local jets—flying over the region…. I prefer to get them scared once a year—and make sure they are healthy, growing ...
February 03 2011
Crowdsourcers Trounce ESPN Pundits on Fantasy Football Picks
Feel free to thump your chest and exchange high-fives before Sunday’s big game, because thanks to crowdsourcing, common folk have outsmarted the ESPN experts.
This past summer, a crowdsourcing company called Crowdflower wanted to see if the wisdom of crowds could best ESPN pundits by making better predictions of the season’s best football players. Against the power of crowdsourced labor from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site, the ESPN list didn’t stand a chance. The results show that the crowdsourcers beat the experts hands down, and the outcome is especially clear in the top 25 players’ ranking.
Before the season started, Crowdflower had 550 workers vote on which one of a pair of players would be the more valuable member of a fantasy league team. Stats on the players were available for those who wanted help, but complete novices were warned off. “If you think football is a game where you’re really only allowed to touch the ball with your feet, this probably isn’t the job for you,” read the advert.
But how exactly does crowdsourcing harness such soothsaying ...
February 01 2011
Facebook Addicts, Rejoice: Airplanes Offer Free Access in February
For all those penny-pinching, world-traveling Facebook-users out there, you’re in luck: you’ll be able to check Facebook during your flight and not pay a dime if you fly during the short, sweet month of February.
Of course this means we all need to prepare ourselves for the inane status updates. Like: “I can see my house from here!” And: “Clouds… wow.”
Participating airlines–including American Airlines, Delta, United Airlines, AirTran Airways, Alaska Airlines, Virgin America, and U.S. Airways–are partnering with Gogo Inflight Internet and Ford to provide airline passengers with free Facebook access. As Mashable reports:
It’ll work like this: Once the travelers are allowed to turn on tablets, phones, laptops and other personal electronic devices, they will be able to access the Gogo Wi-Fi network, and then click on the Ford/Facebook banner to access Facebook.
Of course, the ulterior motive is that you won’t want to stop just at Facebook, in which case you’ll be charged for internet access, starting at around $5. And in March, the Facebook free ride will be over, too.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Map of Facebook Friend Connections Lights Up the World
January 21 2011
Fake Mars Astronauts Are Approaching Fake Mars!
With less than 10,000 miles to go until they reach fake Mars, the fake mission to the Red Planet is going as planned. Which is to say, the space travel simulation project known as Mars-500 project is full of mishaps and surprises, as the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems tests the fake astronauts’ ability to handle anything outer space could throw at them.
The next milestone: the fake arrival in Mars orbit on February 1.
And for being confined to a 1,800-square-foot test module for 520 lonely days, the crew members are doing a stellar job. In their last update, published on the official Mars-500 website on January 14, they give a terse but positive appraisal of their condition:
226th day of the experiment. Scientific equipment is in operable condition. Clarification for implementation of special experiments is carried out. There are no alterations of health state which can interfere with participating in the experiment and realizing of scientific program.
The list of experiments is long, and they’re all meant to test the many difficulties involved in actually traveling to Mars, from astronauts’ overall health ...
January 20 2011
Ping Pong Night at the Museum: Grab Your Paddle and Talk Science
It wasn’t your typical American Museum of Natural History crowd: yesterday evening, a handful of kids and the standard science nerds were joined in the Hall of Ocean Life by ping pong aficionados.
Five ping pong tables—courtesy of co-host SPiN ping pong club—were set up in the hall for the event, “This is Your Brain on Ping Pong.” The evening included time for guests to practice the sport, as well as a panel discussion moderated by museum icthyologist Melanie Stiassny.
The evening’s attempts to connect ping pong and science were, well, a little weak. Stiassny ran through a brief history of life on Earth, with references to the sport dotting her speech like product placements: 500 million years ago the first organisms with nervous systems are on the scene—hey, you need a spinal cord to control a ping pong paddle! “Clearly evolution has a purpose, and that purpose is ping pong,” said Stiassny.
One panelist was legendary actress Susan Sarandon, perhaps most beloved for her role as Janet in Rocky Horror; she’s also an investor in SPiN. Why does she think SPiN is so popular? Sarandon claimed that ...
January 11 2011
Google’s First Science Fair Seeks Volcano-Builders From Around the World
Science geek teens of the world: Google wants to see what you can do.
This morning, the company announced its first worldwide science fair for students between the ages of 13 and 18. Students can participate from anywhere by posting a write-up of their project on the Internet (Google got one high school senior from Oregon to create an example). In its announcement, Google says it hopes this project will encourage talented young scientists to pursue their ideas:
In 1996, two young computer science students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a hypothesis that there was a better way to find information on the web. They did their research, tested their theories and built a search engine which (eventually) changed the way people found information online. Larry and Sergey were fortunate to be able to get their idea in front of lots of people. But how many ideas are lost because people don’t have the right forum for their talents to be discovered?
This science fair sounds fancier than your average high school competition–prizes include a trip to the Galapagos and a jaunt to the physics mecca, CERN. ...
December 01 2010
Great Space Balls of Fire! How to Explain Weird Sightings Over Australia?
Those “green UFOs” that caused a stir in Australia four years ago? Researchers say they definitely weren’t alien spaceships (not like they were going to say anything different), but they still aren’t sure what they actually were.
The three green fireballs were spotted by more than 100 people in the sky over Queensland, Australia on May 16th, 2006. The potential abductees said the lights were brighter than the moon, but not as bright as the sun. A single farmer claims to have seen one of the green balls bouncing down the side of a mountain after hitting the earth.
Stephen Hughes, a researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, has just published a paper on the phenomenon in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. He explained to LiveScience that the main fireballs were most likely caused by a meteor breaking up and burning in earth’s atmosphere:
In fact, a commercial airline pilot who landed in New Zealand that day reported seeing a meteor breaking up into fragments, which turned green as the bits descended in the direction of Australia. The timing of the fireballs suggests they might have been debris from Comet 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann 3.
Hughes believes that the strange color of the meteor shards might be due to electrically charged oxygen molecules around the debris, similar to how electrically charged particles in the upper atmosphere produce the northern lights. But the meteor theory doesn’t explain the farmer’s sighting of the light-ball rolling down the hillside. A foot-wide perfectly spherical meteorite wouldn’t be slowly meandering down a hillside after impacting the earth.
To explain the bouncing ball, Hughes told Live Science that he has a second hypothesis–ball lightning, which he thinks could have been caused by the meteor, though it is usually thought to be caused by storms:
“A transient electrical link between the ionosphere and ground, created by meteors or some other means, could help to solve the mystery of many UFO sightings,” Hughes told LiveScience. “Since such balls would be very insubstantial they would be able to move and change direction very fast as has often been observed.”
Ball lightning is itself poorly understood and controversial: One recent study suggested that the phenomenon might just be a hallucination. But other researchers seem to buy Hughes’ explanation, according to New Scientist:
“It is certainly plausible,” says John Lattanzio, an astrophysist at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. But he adds: “It’s almost impossible to prove anything with such an ephemeral event as this.”
Of course, Hughes told New Scientist that no one else reported seeing the rolling ball that the farmer described:
Hughes … set up an online survey to find out more. More than 100 people, scattered over a 600-kilometre-long strip along Australia’s east coast, reported seeing a bright fireball like the first green ball that Vernon saw, but no else saw the bouncing ball.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Is Ball Lightning Just a Hallucination Caused by Regular Lightning?
Bad Astronomy: A tornado made of fire. Seriously.
Bad Astronomy: Oh, those Falcon UFOs!
Bad Astronomy: NYC Fox station reports Jupiter and balloons as UFOs
Bad Astronomy: Aliens? Yes. UFOs? No.
DISCOVER: 10 Bizarre-Looking Tricks of the Weather (gallery)
Image: Wikimedia commons
November 02 2010
USB Ports on New York City’s Streets: Plug in if You Dare
Would you connect your laptop to a random USB port installed on a wall on a city street? I don’t think I would, but Aram Bartholl, a German artist and architect currently residing in New York City, is betting that some people will be brave enough.
Bartholl explains the purpose of his new art installation on his website:
‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data.
The USB sticks are supposed to act like a spy’s “dead drop,” a spot where two agents transfer information without ever actually meeting. Bartholl is hopeful that people will share something important to them, possibly pictures, art, or words.
Currently the installation is only a five-stick preview, but Bartholl is planning to expand the operation to more sticks and more cities. Check Bartholl’s blog for coming information including “full documentation, movie, map, and ‘How to make your own dead drop’ manual coming soon!”
This isn’t the first of Bartholl’s installations to probe the intersection of our physical and digital lives. His website explains his take on the intersection of art and digital media:
In his art work Aram Bartholl thematizes the relationships between net data space and public every day life. “In which form does the network data world manifest itself in our everyday life? What returns from cyberspace into physical space? How do digital innovations influence our everyday actions?” Through his installations, workshops and performances Bartholl developed a unique way to discuss the impact of the digital era on society.
But in this day of ubiquitous malware, could curiosity kill your computer? It just might if you decide to take a peek at these USB drives and see what’s there. Make sure you use protection! Hit the map below for the locations of the five current sticks and visit Bartholl’s Flickr account for more pictures detailing the installations.
Related content:
Discoblog: When Art Gets Personal: Woman with Skin Disorder Makes Her Body a Canvas
Discoblog: The Guggenheim/YouTube Art Experiment: See Winning Videos Here
DISCOVER: The Art & Science of Slicing up a Human Brain
DISCOVER: Museum-Worthy Garbage: The Art of Over-Consumption (photos)
DISCOVER: Art That Breathes and Grows—Because It’s Made Out of Plants (photos)
DISCOVER: Each Grain of Sand a Tiny Work of Art (photos)
Images: Flickr/agoasi
October 26 2010
Halloween Costume Idea: Pretend You Have a Portal in Your Torso
There are still a few days before Halloween costume frenzy will reach its peak, but we think we have a winner. Forget all those Lady Gaga and Chilean miner costumes: We’re taken with Ben Heck’s ingenious see-through portal t-shirt.
This high-tech costume makes it look like the wearer has a hole in his torso, thanks to a tiny camera on his back, and an LCD screen on his chest that shows the image captured by the camera. Want your own? Here’s a blow-by-blow video of how to build it. There are a few digressions into other projects, but we encourage you to watch through and get all the info you need to avoid the fate of being just another Gaga.
Related Content:
Discoblog: The Best Reader Science Halloween Costume, Revealed!
Discoblog: DISCOVER’s Top Ten Science Halloween Costumes, Part II
Discoblog: DISCOVER’s Top Ten Science Halloween Costumes, Part I
DISCOVER: Wrong By Design: Why Our Brains Are Fooled by Illusions (image gallery)
Image: Ben Heck
October 22 2010
The Guggenheim/YouTube Art Experiment: See Winning Videos Here
In June, the Guggenheim Museum announced a collaborative video contest with none other than YouTube. Yes, you read that right: YouTube, the video website overrun with videos of cats and each tween’s latest shopping spree.
The contest was open to anyone and everyone who has made a video in the last two years. A total of 23,000 videos were submitted and judged by a panel of artists and curators, and the competition’s 25 winners were announced last night. These 25 videos will be on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through the weekend, and all the shortlisted videos will stay online indefinitely. While there was some excitement about the prospects of such a venture, the New York Times isn’t impressed by the final product:
At the time of the announcement, there was much talk about originality and discovery, which sounds rather hollow now, compared with the low quality of the 25 finally selected.
Ouch! When the competition was announced, some feared that it would dumb down the video art world, while others dreamed that it would break the community open to embrace YouTube’s DIY creativity and modern folk art stylings. The critics over at the New York Times seem to think the winning videos did neither, and fell somewhere between sophisticated video art and YouTube folk art:
One way to explain the lackluster quality of the first incarnation of “YouTube Play” is that almost none of the final 25 works, which are being screened in a gallery at the museum this weekend, fit either of those categories…. They seem to occupy a third sphere of slick and pointless professionalism, where too much technique serves relatively skimpy, generic ideas.
You can take a look a the 25 finalists and the additional 100 “shortlisted” videos online. In addition to the “Birds on the Wires” video above, here are some of my other favorites from the top 25:
“Bear untitled — DO Edit” is a tragic love story done in 8-bit by Christen Bach:
This video, called “Words,” has made the rounds of the interwebz before, but I think it deserves another mention, in case you haven’t seen it:
This video, called the “The Huber Experiments–Vol 1,” is a great use of high speed video. Who wouldn’t want to play with their food?
And another video that makes great use of technique, “Bathtub IV” by Keith Loutit:
Other videos that have been getting attention in the media include a video interview/spontaneous music video “Die Antwood – Zef side (official)” with South African Rap Trio Die Antwood, “This Aborted Earth: The Quest Begins,” by Michael Banowetz and Noah Sodano, “Noteboek,” created by Dutch video artist Evelien Lohbeck, and “I Met the Walrus,” by Jerry Levitan, Josh Raskin, James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina. ABC News liked a rap-Disney mash-up:
“Wonderland Mafia,” by Lindsay Scoggins of Tampa, Fla., fuses rap and cartoon. The Disney film “Alice in Wonderland” has been mashed-up with the hip-hop of Three 6 Mafia. Scoggins says the video “is meant to illustrate a disjointed amalgamation of the media one encounters in adulthood (versus) childhood.”
And even the New York Times found something it didn’t hate:
Amid all the artifice of the final 25, Lisa Byrne’s documentary short “Taxi III Stand Up and Cry Like a Man” may burn a hole in your heart. The third in a trilogy, it consists of interviews with taxi drivers who survived paramilitary attacks in Northern Ireland during the conflicts of the 1980s and ’90s.
I’m sure I missed some good videos. If you think I’m completely off base with my choice of favorites–or if you think the New York Times is being too cranky by far–tell me about it in the comments.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Guggenheim & YouTube: The High Art/Low Art Mashup Is Complete
Discoblog: The OK Go Video: Playing With the Speed of Time
Discoblog: “Dance Your PhD” Winner Knows the Molecular Moves
Discoblog: Scientist Dance Styles: Glee Episode, Spanish Whodunnit, Internet Love Orgy
DISCOVER: Museum-Worthy Garbage: The Art of Over-Consumption (photos)
Videos: Youtube.com/play
October 20 2010
“Dance Your PhD” Winner Knows the Molecular Moves
Have you ever seen an amino acid really get down? If not, now is your chance. The winning video produced for Science’s Dance Your PhD contest features an amino acid that knows how to shake its molecules. The contest asks brave researchers to explain their PhDs in the language of dance.
This year’s winner is Maureen McKeague, a chemistry Ph.D. student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She’ll collect a $1,000 prize ($500 for being a finalist, $500 for winning) from Science. With no further ado, here’s the video:
Did you get all that? If a little more explanation would help, here’s how ScienceNOW sums it up:
The lab is exploring a chemical technique called SELEX–systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment–which generates short segments of DNA and RNA called aptamers. These nucleic acids can be designed to stick to almost any target molecule. For McKeague’s Ph.D. research, the target molecule–played by undergraduate student and Scottish folk dancer Charlotte Bradley–is the amino acid homocysteine. High levels of this amino acid are an indicator of cardiovascular disease. McKeague’s aim is to use SELEX to create aptamers to cheaply and accurately measure homocysteine in blood samples.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Dance, Fembot, Dance–Right Into the Uncanny Valley
Discoblog: Scientist Dance Styles: Glee Episode, Spanish Whodunnit, Internet Love Orgy
Discoblog: Very Serious Scientific Study Asks: Which Dance Moves Drive Girls Wild?
Discoblog: Babies Are Born to Bop, Boogie, and Groove
October 12 2010
How & Why to Write a Bacterial Opera for the Ig Nobel Awards
Marc Abrahams enjoys writing operas, but until a few years ago had never even been to one. Abrahams is the editor and co-creator of the Annals of Improbable Research, the science humor magazine that gave birth to the Ig Nobel awards, a marvelous celebration of quirky but intelligent scientific breakthroughs. For the last 15 years Abrahams has been tasked with writing a scientific opera for the ceremony.
This year’s theme was bacteria, so naturally Abrahams wrote an opera about the bacteria living on a woman’s tooth, and their (eventually tragic) efforts to escape. The video of this year’s Ig Nobel ceremony is below (skip to the following times to view the four acts of the bacterial opera: Act I at 54:30, Act II at 1:07:20, Act III at 1:29:10, and Act IV at 1:52:00). Discoblog talked with Abrahams to get the scoop on the bacterial-opera-writing business.
Discoblog: This is the 15th Ig Nobel opera–why did you choose to do operas instead of a ballet, slam poetry session, haiku contest, or something else?
Marc Abrahams: In the Ig’s second year, we realized that we had this once in a lifetime grouping of people there, and we decided to take advantage of it. One of the things we try to stick in is a public event, done in a different way, that everybody has had to sit through too many times. We’ve had a ballet once or twice, we’ve had a fashion show, and I guess it was about the sixth year we got to an opera.
DB: So why does the opera work so well?
MA: Well, the brilliant words of course. (laughs)
Part of it is we take it very seriously. It’s done by very good performers and staged and put together really well, and people don’t expect that. An awful lot of people who come haven’t seen professional opera singers, and when you are in a room with one, it can be quite entrancing and astounding. At the end of the opera, most of the scientists come on and are having the time of their lives doing it.
DB: How do you go about writing an opera on a new topic every year?
MA: Bacteria was the theme we had chosen for the ceremony, and so I came up with the basic plot of the opera, and then since I don’t know a lot about bacteria myself I started reading a lot and calling up friends and scientists. Originally the bacteria were going to live on somebody’s eyelashes because that seemed a natural place, because they could see what the person would.
Then Harriet Provine [microbiologist at Harvard Medical School] almost instantly said, “Well, you know, if you are a bacterium that’s not the place you really want to be living. It’s not moist, there isn’t a lot to eat there.” We decided that the mouth would probably be the ideal place, and that quickly got localized to a front tooth, because then they would have access to the light–all the person has to do is have her mouth open.
Hit the jump for the video.
DB: Any other interesting stories from this year’s opera?
MA: At the end of the opera everything goes very bad for the bacteria when the woman wakes up and brushes her teeth. Our opera stage director, David Stockton, insisted that we really ought to stage this with a giant toothbrush and giant dental floss.
So we had recruited some people to carry the giant toothbrush on and off the stage. They were rehearsing it over and over in the church aisle for about a half hour, holding up this giant skeleton of what would become the toothbrush and marching back and forth and back and forth until they had this down, and they had very furious looks on their faces, here in this very incongruous setting of the church.
But then it comes together the night of the show, especially for me, who wrote these words, watching all this magic happen with these beautiful voices and this great pianist and all this staging and the scientists. Watching them get swept up in this stuff, literally in a couple of cases–because a couple of them grabbed brooms, and at the end of the opera when it’s talking about sweeping away all the old life they were scrubbing that stage and bouncing with excitement.
DB: So they seemed to like being bacteria?
MA: They appeared to like it quite a bit, they didn’t even seem to mind that they died suddenly at the end. Apparently most people really enjoyed being able to be on stage and do a good death scene.
DB: A lot of what the Annals of Improbable Research does is quirky, but what do you hope people take from the opera?
MA: I hope that at least some of the people who see it or hear it will maybe spend a minute going and googling bacteria, or any of the words they hear in there. And if a couple of them get intrigued to the point where they go and read an article somewhere, or pick up a book, or maybe best of all they go talk to someone who works with bacteria, and get some of the juicy stories about it–if even a little bit of that happens, I’m going to be very, very happy.
DB: Are you planning any repeat performances?
MA: I’m hoping for a performance of this opera at some meeting of microbiologists, biologists, or doctors. I would really like to see this bacterial opera get some more performances.
Related content:
Discoblog:Ig Nobel Awards Honor Pioneering Work on Bat Fellatio, Whale Snot, & More
Discoblog: Crunchy Chips and Smart Slime Mold Win 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes
Discoblog: Trippy Lunar Opera: Haydn at the Hayden Planetarium
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Opera makes me want to kill myself.
Image: Annals of Improbable Research/Photo by David Kessler
October 01 2010
Ig Noble Awards Honor Pioneering Work on Bat Fellatio, Whale Snot, & More
The list of wacky science discoveries from the Ig Nobel awards announced last night includes teams who made strides in vital fields like bat fellatio and curing diseases via roller coaster rides.
The awards are given out every year for discoveries that made us both laugh and think. Here’s a full list of the winning teams and projects:
Physics: A group of researchers in New Zealand found that wearing your socks over shoes improves your ability to walk on ice. Team member Lianne Parkin explained to Fox News the reason for her work:
“We live in the south of New Zealand in a very hilly city (we have the steepest street in the world!), and intermittent icy conditions in winter can create major havoc,” she said.
Management: A mathematical study by researchers in Italy found that in some business situations, it is better to promote randomly than the choose the most qualified candidates.
Engineering: A team based in the UK and Mexico found the perfect way to collect whale snot–send a remote controlled helicopter in to do it for you. The team members explained the technique to ABC News:
“The technique involves flying a remote-controlled helicopter above a whale as it surfaces and catching the whale blow in petri dishes attached to the underside of the helicopter,” they said in a statement.
Transportation: A team based in Japan and the UK used slime molds to optimize human-sized railroads. Team member Dan Bebber told the Boston Globe how he stumbled upon this:
“Just for fun, we wanted to see if a brainless organism will do as well as Japanese engineers,’’ Bebber said.
Public Health: A Fort Detrick study of bearded scientists working in microbial labs found that they carry along a hoard of microbes in their facial hair, and could literally be bringing their work home with them at the end of the day.
Medicine: A team based in the Netherlands has been experimenting with how roller coasters (and the emotions that come along with riding them) affect asthma sufferers. Team member Ilja van Beest explained to Fox News how difficult it is to study asthma:
“The lungs are difficult because you can’t just look down and see if your tubes are constricted,” van Beest said. “You have to rely on how you feel so a lot of our research has been looking at various ways people try to understand their symptoms.”
Peace: Researchers in the UK found that swearing really does reduce pain. Team leader Richard Stevens explained the finding to CBSNews.com:
“What we think is when you swear you produce an emotional reaction in yourself, you arouse your nervous system and you set off the fight or flight response,” Stephens said. “It gets the heart rate up, gets the adrenaline flowing.”
Chemistry: A team including BP were awarded an IgNobel for their studies over the summer of how oil, natural gas, and water interact. Yeah, that was a fun experiment.
Economics: The awards committee even congratulated the bigwigs of the financial industry for their efforts in creating and promoting new ways to invest money to “maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.” Oddly, no one from Goldman Sachs or the other investment banks named came to pick up the award.
Biology: Studies of fruit bats engaging in oral sex to prolong their sexual encounters won the biology award for a team out of the UK. We’re glad those researchers have been rewarded for the hours they spent dutifully watching bat porn.
Related content:
Discoblog: Crunchy Chips and Smart Slime Mold Win 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes
Discoblog: It’s a Bra! It’s a Dust Mask! It’s Both! And Now, It’s for Sale
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Why Santa Claus shouldn’t work in a lab
Discoblog: Can You Cuss Away Your Pain? Study Says Yes
Discoblog: Touching a Boo-Boo Really Does Make It Feel Better
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Brainless slime mould makes decisions like humans
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Holy fellatio, Batman! Fruit bats use oral sex to prolong actual sex
Image: Flickr/Aiden Jones
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