Speaker 1: Now really.
Speaker 2: Really now really hello, and welcome to really know Really
Speaker 2: with Jason Alexander and Peter Tilden, who humbly suggests that
Speaker 2: not subscribing to our show is a terribly ignoble thing
Speaker 2: to do. And speaking of Ignobel, we've all heard of
Speaker 2: the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Literature, Science and
Speaker 2: Medicine Prize as well.
Speaker 3: This episode has absolutely nothing to do with any of that.
Speaker 2: But if you come up with an idea that is
Speaker 2: an unusual or trivial or bizarre achievement in scientific research,
Speaker 2: well then we have an award for you. It's called
Speaker 2: the ig Nobel Prize, and anyone can win it if
Speaker 2: their idea makes you laugh and then makes you think really,
Speaker 2: no really. The prize was created by today's guest Mark Abrahams,
Speaker 2: who has awarded it annually since nineteen ninety one, and
Speaker 2: the awards are handed out by genuine Nobel laureates as
Speaker 2: they honor and celebrate the unusual, the creative, and the imaginative.
Speaker 2: To be prepared to learn about woodpeckers and concussions, an
Speaker 2: unusual childbirth device, and the importance of fish farts.
Speaker 3: You heard me write, folks, fish farts. Here's Jason and Peter.
Speaker 3: So this was one. This was you brought this to
Speaker 3: my I did not know that this was the thing.
Speaker 3: I did not know it was the thing either.
Speaker 4: Now we all know that if you if you come
Speaker 4: up with something brilliant genius, especially in science, mathematic, literature,
Speaker 4: the art, there's a very prestigious award called.
Speaker 3: The Nobel Awards.
Speaker 4: I did not know that if you come up with
Speaker 4: something that is just upside down, inside out, backwards, nuts,
Speaker 4: out of its mind, strange, odd, seemingly funny, there's also
Speaker 4: a no war called the ig Nobel Awards.
Speaker 5: And that's our really, no, really, there's an award and
Speaker 5: the premise for the award is if it makes you laugh.
Speaker 3: First makes you laugh, and that makes you think it makes.
Speaker 5: You which is really and I want to ask our
Speaker 5: guest about that, as far as do most awards and
Speaker 5: do most scientific breakthroughs come where everybody goes, that's frigging genius,
Speaker 5: right right, jet Goo, like the guy's wife goes.
Speaker 3: You gotta tell everybody who did they go?
Speaker 5: You're out of your mind and it takes time. So
Speaker 5: our guest is Mark Abraham's who created this yearly award
Speaker 5: actually ten awards every year. He's also the editor and
Speaker 5: publisher and does everything for the Annals of Improbable Research,
Speaker 5: which comes out Is that bi monthly?
Speaker 3: Still more?
Speaker 1: You know, that's a confusing word. I've been doing this
Speaker 1: for a long time. I'm still not sure what buying means.
Speaker 1: It comes out every two months?
Speaker 3: Oh, every two months? Every two months? Is it scept annual?
Speaker 3: Is that what it is?
Speaker 1: And I got it six times a year?
Speaker 3: Yeah? First of all, Mark, how did you get let's say, hi?
Speaker 3: And how did you get involved in the six Welcome
Speaker 3: to You thought what you were doing it was ignoble. Hi, Hi,
Speaker 3: how are you there?
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen ninety I was doing very different stuff,
Speaker 1: and I, since I was a little kid, used to
Speaker 1: collect odd things and write about them and other stuff.
Speaker 1: I decided to see if I could get something published
Speaker 1: if I sent it into a magazine. So I sent
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff to a magazine and then a
Speaker 1: few weeks later we got a phone call from a
Speaker 1: man who said, Hi, I'm the publisher of the magazine.
Speaker 1: Got your articles? Would you be the editor of the magazine.
Speaker 1: But this is how I became the editor a science magazine.
Speaker 4: I'm laughing only because I'm going, what what when you're
Speaker 4: a letter? Article arrived, the guy was gone. Thank god,
Speaker 4: somebody finally contributed. We've had nothing. We got one guy
Speaker 4: immediately knock him up the food chain already.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was. It was a glorious thing all around.
Speaker 1: So I started doing that on top of what I
Speaker 1: was doing, and suddenly was meeting all kinds of scientists, inventors,
Speaker 1: all kinds of people who've done all kinds of unthinkable things.
Speaker 1: A lot of them were very very funny things, but
Speaker 1: also really obscure. And I kept thinking, most of these
Speaker 1: people are going to live their whole life something, They're
Speaker 1: going to die and nobody will ever know they did
Speaker 1: these things, and that's wrong. Somebody should do something. I realized, well,
Speaker 1: we can do something small. So we started this little
Speaker 1: thing nineteen ninety one. And it's a long story, which
Speaker 1: is not interesting. Why we called it the Ignobel Prizes.
Speaker 1: So we had a name picked, a bunch of winners.
Speaker 1: I had met a lot of scientists, so I invited
Speaker 1: a bunch of people who had Nobel Prizes to come
Speaker 1: to this ceremony we were having, and they all said yes.
Speaker 1: I had been introduced to somebody at MIT, Massachusetts Institute
Speaker 1: of Technology, who ran the museum there, who knew the
Speaker 1: history of my magazine a lot better than I did,
Speaker 1: and told him this idea of the ceremony. He said,
Speaker 1: you have a place to hold it, No, do you
Speaker 1: want to have it here? Sure? So we had a
Speaker 1: nice place to have it. The Internet was really small
Speaker 1: at that point, but we put out a notice on
Speaker 1: the Internet saying the first annual Ignobel Prize Ceremony will
Speaker 1: happen on whatever the date. It's free this year, but
Speaker 1: you've got to have a ticket in advance, and to
Speaker 1: get a ticket, go to MIT to some particular audience
Speaker 1: on Tuesday afternoon at noon. Tuesday afternoon at noon, there
Speaker 1: were more people than tickets, one hundreds of miles, so
Speaker 1: we had the place packed. I'd also in those first
Speaker 1: months met a lot of reporters from a lot of places.
Speaker 1: So that first night we had winners, We had Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize winners to hand out the prize. We had more
Speaker 1: people climbing the sides of the building than could fut inn.
Speaker 1: We had reporters coming from many countries, and we kept
Speaker 1: I think I can speak on behalf of everyone who
Speaker 1: was there that night. We all had the feeling that
Speaker 1: at any moment, some grown up person would walk into
Speaker 1: the room and tell us to stop this and go home.
Speaker 1: But nobody did. And the next day and after that,
Speaker 1: we started getting lots and lots of publicity around the world,
Speaker 1: huge amounts, and because it happened to work so well,
Speaker 1: you know, we got lucky that first year. The next
Speaker 1: year we could do it on a much bigger scale,
Speaker 1: and that just continued and continued, and the fifth year,
Speaker 1: I guess we moved it down the road two miles
Speaker 1: from MIT to Harvard.
Speaker 4: And I know you the actual physical award changes every year.
Speaker 4: Do you remember what the first one was?
Speaker 1: It was, Yeah, you might have this in your memory.
Speaker 1: You could go into the worst toy stores in existence
Speaker 1: and you could buy a little plastic mirror that had
Speaker 1: some electronics and a battery inside and if you press
Speaker 1: the button, it would scream at you. That was the prize.
Speaker 1: And we try to keep the same spirit every year
Speaker 1: and designing our own prizes that we build.
Speaker 3: My favorite is the ten trillion dollar bill.
Speaker 1: You know, there are a lot of prizes that give money,
Speaker 1: sometimes a lot of money to the winners, and we
Speaker 1: never had any money, so we never thought about it,
Speaker 1: and then one day we realize there's a way for
Speaker 1: us to give a lot of money to the winners.
Speaker 1: And now each winner or if it's a team, the
Speaker 1: winning team gets ten trillion dollars. They get a ten
Speaker 1: trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe, which is worth maybe four
Speaker 1: bucks if you buy it on any day which is long.
Speaker 1: And also the person responsible creed for printing those ten
Speaker 1: trillion dollar bills, doctor Gideon Gano, who's head of the
Speaker 1: national bank in the country Zimbabwe, won an Ignobel prize
Speaker 1: for doing that. In mathematics, all of these things, once
Speaker 1: you know a little bit of the lightest bit in
Speaker 1: any direction, you see really unexpected stories. He wrote a
Speaker 1: book to explain to his adoring public why he did this.
Speaker 1: And at the same time he was printing bills and
Speaker 1: actually the largest was a I think one hundred trillion
Speaker 1: dollars face value on a single bill. The same time
Speaker 1: he was having the government print up bills same size
Speaker 1: with a face value of one cent. And he explained
Speaker 1: there was a reason for doing this the large value
Speaker 1: and the tiny values, said that when you're spending a
Speaker 1: large amount of money, you still have to make change.
Speaker 4: One of my one of my favorite physical prizes that
Speaker 4: I saw on the website was it's simple, but it's
Speaker 4: kind of brilliant. Is they beautifully framed sort of box,
Speaker 4: you know, glass covered box with a hammer inside and
Speaker 4: a Blacklis says, in case of something like in case
Speaker 4: of emergency, break the glass, put the hammers on the inside.
Speaker 3: It's just it's fantastic.
Speaker 5: Well, everything about this, you do ten of these and
Speaker 5: words every year. As a matter of fact, this this,
Speaker 5: well you're get They give ten at the one and
Speaker 5: this was the thirty fourth coming up the third congratulation
Speaker 5: to thirty fourth award show correct.
Speaker 1: Thirty fourth first annual.
Speaker 5: Yes, and you are the masters ceremony. So I guess
Speaker 5: you should just rump in out. Can I give you
Speaker 5: my favorite of all that I've read, and then you'll
Speaker 5: go through some in Jason's favorite too?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Sure, My favorite It still is that they were trying
Speaker 5: to figure out submarine noises.
Speaker 3: So yeah, can you talk to us a little bit
Speaker 3: about that?
Speaker 1: Sure? Be sure you want to hear it.
Speaker 3: I want to hear it.
Speaker 1: All right, we gave a prize this would have been
Speaker 1: about what two thousand and two or three or four
Speaker 1: somewhere around there. It was to two teams of scientists,
Speaker 1: one of them in Canada and Scotland and the other
Speaker 1: in Sweden. They'd both at the same time done the
Speaker 1: same thing, didn't know they were both doing it, and
Speaker 1: both of them had discovered that there were these odd
Speaker 1: little metallic clicking sounds like click click click click click
Speaker 1: click click clicklick really fast, and that that was coming
Speaker 1: from Herring, and that it was Herring's farting. And so
Speaker 1: they speculate that this might be a way that Herring's
Speaker 1: communicate with each other. That's why we gave them the prize,
Speaker 1: and they met each other, these two teams for the
Speaker 1: first time after Superman.
Speaker 3: Your mother's name is, My mother's name is.
Speaker 1: But the best part of the story we didn't learn
Speaker 1: until about fifteen or so years later. One of the
Speaker 1: Swedish scientists who had done this told me the other
Speaker 1: side of the story. He said, this was top secret,
Speaker 1: so nobody. We could not talk about this until recently.
Speaker 1: But it's been enough time that we can talk about it.
Speaker 1: But the public doesn't know the other team. They were
Speaker 1: researching Herring. That's why they heard this. We weren't trying
Speaker 1: to do any research on herring. We didn't do that.
Speaker 1: We did it because the Swedish government, the Prime Minister,
Speaker 1: asked us to do some research. Because this was about
Speaker 1: thirty or so years ago. The Prime minster of Sweden
Speaker 1: was very angry because the Soviet Union at that time
Speaker 1: had sent a submarine that got washed up on the
Speaker 1: rocks and got stranded, and he was convinced that they
Speaker 1: kept sending submarines to spy on them. And he kept
Speaker 1: getting up in public and announcing that there are more
Speaker 1: submarines and we've got further evidence, and they're hidden underwater,
Speaker 1: but the evidence always dissolved, and he was getting really
Speaker 1: embarrassed and frustrated. So he directed the Swedish Navy to
Speaker 1: get a bunch of the best scientists in Sweden to
Speaker 1: under top secrecy do research on all aspects of this.
Speaker 1: They put microphones underwater in Stockholm Harbor. Stockholm's the capital
Speaker 1: of the country, and they heard these clicking sounds, these
Speaker 1: metallic clicking sounds, which the Navy decided obviously submarines. We
Speaker 1: got the proof, they told the Prime Minister, who said,
Speaker 1: I'm going to get up and announce it, and he
Speaker 1: double checked with all the scientists who said yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: except for these fish biologists who listened to it for
Speaker 1: about a minute and said, that's not a submarine.
Speaker 3: That's fish.
Speaker 1: And you give us, give us a couple of days,
Speaker 1: tell you exactly what kind of fish. And they pretty
Speaker 1: quickly discovered it's herrings. They could do it, they could
Speaker 1: take you know, even a dead herring, put it underwater
Speaker 1: in a fish tank, squeeze it. And the Prime Minister
Speaker 1: did not want to hear that. He said, no, it's submarines.
Speaker 1: I am going to announce this. So the best part
Speaker 1: of the story to me is what happened next these
Speaker 1: two science these two biologists, these two scientists. Sweden said
Speaker 1: go ahead if you want, but if you do that,
Speaker 1: we're going to get up and tell the public that no,
Speaker 1: we've got the evidence that it's herring's parting. And the
Speaker 1: Prime Minister back down and never made an announcement.
Speaker 4: One of mine that I was particularly dre onto. I
Speaker 4: guess because I want to know. I just I want
Speaker 4: to know the inception transmission of gonea rhea through an
Speaker 4: inflatable doll.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have questions about that.
Speaker 4: What was was it? I can imagine a number of scenarios.
Speaker 4: One could be somebody said, hey, there's a proliferation of
Speaker 4: these sex toys and sex dolls, and I wonder if
Speaker 4: it is safe and healthy to use them without protection
Speaker 4: that we would use with a real person. Or if somebody,
Speaker 4: you know, suddenly acquired a case of gonorrhea, as I
Speaker 4: swear I haven't been with anything other than this sex doll,
Speaker 4: and had.
Speaker 3: To then verify what was the impetus to do the study.
Speaker 1: Here's the story of it. This was a doctor in Norway.
Speaker 3: So it's always the Netherlands.
Speaker 1: The story is that there was the captain of a
Speaker 1: ship who came in. He was the patient. He had
Speaker 1: a case of gonorrhea. This was the ship had stopped
Speaker 1: in Greenland. That's where the doctor and the nurse were
Speaker 1: working at the time. So it's a you know, sort
Speaker 1: of isolated place. Sure, and I believe that there are
Speaker 1: laws on the books that said any medical people who
Speaker 1: treat certain sexual diseases have to try to track down
Speaker 1: where did this come from, so that they can try
Speaker 1: to keep it from spreading. The patient did not want
Speaker 1: to talk about it, but they really pressured him and
Speaker 1: he told the story. The story was that he had
Speaker 1: gone and knocked on the door of one of his
Speaker 1: crewmen who wasn't in, so he opened the door and
Speaker 1: he saw this inflated sex doll and it made use
Speaker 1: of it, and a few days later they landed somewhere
Speaker 1: and he discovered he now had a disease and he
Speaker 1: went to see the doctor.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: And the doctors treated it as they could treat it
Speaker 1: with drugs pretty easily. They were kind of amused, and
Speaker 1: they also did some research to see it's possible. Yeah, see,
Speaker 1: you know, is there a history to this? Are there recommendations?
Speaker 1: And discovered that this is probably the very first time
Speaker 1: that this had ever happened, transmission of gone rhea through
Speaker 1: an inflatable doll. This is a good reminder that when
Speaker 1: you sleep with an inflatable doll, you're sleeping with everyone
Speaker 1: who ever slept with that inflatable doll.
Speaker 5: Colonoscopies. The guy who did the research who try and
Speaker 5: prevent people from exploding during a kolonosky? Is that true?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, tell us about this. It's all fascinating.
Speaker 1: We've given two prizes about colonoscopies. That was the first.
Speaker 1: They're very different from each other. Okay, there is a
Speaker 1: history of this in the probably the nineteen fifties, but
Speaker 1: I'm a little vague on exactly when. There was a
Speaker 1: point when colonoscopies started to become almost routine. But before
Speaker 1: that it was rare that they would be done. And
Speaker 1: part of the reason it took a while was that
Speaker 1: it took doctors a while to figure out how to
Speaker 1: do this safely. Think about what has to happen there.
Speaker 1: They want to look inside you, deep inside idea, So
Speaker 1: they have to get something inside, and they're going to
Speaker 1: do it from one end rather than the other. It's
Speaker 1: a lot easier the journey from there. It's dark in there,
Speaker 1: so they need a light that they stick in there,
Speaker 1: and it's also cramped, so they need to expand the
Speaker 1: thing so they can see. So what they do to
Speaker 1: expand it is they would put gas inside you, and
Speaker 1: they use oxygen at the beginning, and then they would
Speaker 1: put a light inside there. And in the fifties, every
Speaker 1: light they used generated heat, so they're putting oxygen inside
Speaker 1: you and then heating it. Patients, they were having patients
Speaker 1: who explode it there happened fatally exploded some of them.
Speaker 5: Yes, how do you come out and tell me wife.
Speaker 5: We got good news, no problems.
Speaker 3: But it's.
Speaker 1: One of the things that the medical profession learned fairly
Speaker 1: early in this was that you do not use pure oxygen.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that was the first Nobel prize related to colonoscopy.
Speaker 1: The second prize was more recent, maybe about ten years ago,
Speaker 1: to a doctor in Japan who wrote about why he
Speaker 1: did the first self colonoscopy.
Speaker 3: Because it was Saturday and there was not much going on.
Speaker 3: What do you mean why my sister was ill? Wow?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he came from Japan over to Massachusetts, came to
Speaker 1: the ceremony and we gave him the prize. Nobel Laureate
Speaker 1: handed him the prize, shook his hands, and he gave
Speaker 1: a speech, and then he did a little demonstration on stage.
Speaker 4: No, no, yes, yes, Well is this like a lapeta
Speaker 4: main kind of thing or was there entertainment and what
Speaker 4: do you know?
Speaker 1: Stuff coming out? This is stuff going in?
Speaker 3: Oh my wow? Or do it?
Speaker 1: You know what it looks like? And and if you
Speaker 1: look at his paper in the Medical Journal, he drew
Speaker 1: a little cartoon of himself so you can see what
Speaker 1: it looked like.
Speaker 3: He did this on the stage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, not the entire procedure. We didn't have time.
Speaker 3: How much of the procedure did he do on stage?
Speaker 1: Just just the start, just enough so people could get
Speaker 1: clear on what was going on.
Speaker 3: Mark, you're.
Speaker 1: You want to know why he did it?
Speaker 3: Go ahead? Oh wow, I'm on the edge of my z.
Speaker 3: How could I not all right?
Speaker 1: All right? No, you want to know why he did it?
Speaker 3: Oh wow, I'm on the edge of my z? How
Speaker 3: could I not all right?
Speaker 1: All right? They do klonoscopies mainly because there are diseases,
Speaker 1: cancers or the biggest one that they might be able
Speaker 1: to catch early enough to do something about it. And
Speaker 1: most of what used to be called advanced countries around
Speaker 1: the world do that to a lot of the population now,
Speaker 1: but not in Japan. In Japan, this is as this
Speaker 1: doctor explained it in the paper and to us that
Speaker 1: in Japan the population in general is frightened of colonoscopies,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't happen much there, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: figure out why are people so scared? So he's trying
Speaker 1: all sorts of stuff, including trying it on himself so
Speaker 1: he could first and see what was going and then
Speaker 1: from the publicity from this he was hoping maybe this
Speaker 1: will get people laughing and curious and they'll start relaxing
Speaker 1: and start having And he said, the cancer rates for
Speaker 1: those kinds of cancer are much much higher in Japan
Speaker 1: than in most other countries. So it's kind of a
Speaker 1: serious thing.
Speaker 5: So he did it to an example, So he's the
Speaker 5: Katie couric basically.
Speaker 3: On a serious note.
Speaker 4: Though, you know, when I have a call and Oscar
Speaker 4: me I'm I'm out, they put me out. I I
Speaker 4: can't imagine if he's doing this, if he really did
Speaker 4: the full procedure to himself, remaining concia.
Speaker 3: I mean, it must be.
Speaker 1: If you want, if you ask them, they won't put
Speaker 1: you out.
Speaker 3: It's there's not asking.
Speaker 1: There's discomfort, but not a lot of pain. And it
Speaker 1: can be interesting.
Speaker 3: The folks that receive it.
Speaker 4: Other than it's it is acknowledgment, and it is kind
Speaker 4: of fun and and and perhaps in its own way
Speaker 4: has become prestigious.
Speaker 3: Is there anything in it for them other than that?
Speaker 3: Does it? For instance?
Speaker 4: Has has something that's won the Ignobel ever gone on
Speaker 4: in some other form to become uh, I don't want
Speaker 4: to use the word more serious science, but has it
Speaker 4: become more practical?
Speaker 3: Has it actually turned out to be.
Speaker 1: One thing to think about is all the stuff that
Speaker 1: we get taught in schools about science, all these great
Speaker 1: discoveries and inventions and stuff. The picture I always had
Speaker 1: from the way I learned stuff was, you know, so
Speaker 1: and so came up with this idea, made this discovery,
Speaker 1: and everybody realized how great it was. That almost never happens.
Speaker 1: You know, you know, from your own life, from your
Speaker 1: own experience. Every time even a tiny thing, even in
Speaker 1: your household, that you figured out that made life better.
Speaker 1: You tell whoever you're living with, how do they react.
Speaker 1: First of all, they don't want to hear it. Quite
Speaker 1: often they'll say, oh, that's stupid or that doesn't work.
Speaker 1: And this is what happens to scientists. This is what
Speaker 1: their job is. You know, Nine out of ten or
Speaker 1: more of the things they come up with, that's the
Speaker 1: reaction they get. But the rare ones that do go
Speaker 1: on to get used, especially if they turn into a
Speaker 1: lot of money around the world, then the story changes.
Speaker 1: Then it's this great glorious discovery everyone recognized, and the
Speaker 1: real version that gets forgotten ye lost and one of them.
Speaker 1: And one other thing to think about, too, is what
Speaker 1: really makes these things. Funny is that everything we pick
Speaker 1: for a prize is way outside almost anybody's normal experience.
Speaker 4: Well that's where that's where I am with the it's
Speaker 4: a typical force delivery to.
Speaker 1: The Blonsky device. Yeah, a lot of people listening may
Speaker 1: have this picture deep deep in their memory. It's a drawing.
Speaker 1: It's a technical drawing from an old patent patent who's
Speaker 1: given in nineteen sixty five to a couple, a married couple,
Speaker 1: George and Charlotte Blonsky, and it's for what they describe
Speaker 1: as a device to assist a woman in giving birth
Speaker 1: by using centrifugal force. So this device, it's it's a
Speaker 1: large round table with a bunch of machinery underneath. When
Speaker 1: the woman is ready to deliver her child, she lies
Speaker 1: on the table on her back. They strap her down
Speaker 1: to the table, and then the table's rotated at high
Speaker 1: speed and the child comes flying out this patent. It's
Speaker 1: a truly beautiful pattern. The drawings are highly detailed, they're
Speaker 1: beautiful drawings, they're very memorable, and the writing, if anything,
Speaker 1: is even better. The writing is the closest I can
Speaker 1: think of to describe it is. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: Edgar Allan Poe. It's beautiful writing, and it goes on
Speaker 1: for pages, and most of the detail, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of detail, is about the little and the big
Speaker 1: things they built into this machine to try to ensure
Speaker 1: the safety of the mother and the child. For example,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff in there to put in
Speaker 1: what they call a speed governor something to make sure
Speaker 1: it doesn't spin too fast. Right, And so they sat
Speaker 1: as a maximum. I think they they say, if you
Speaker 1: build this properly, the mother and the child will not ever, ever,
Speaker 1: ever encounter more than about eight g's eight times the
Speaker 1: force of gravity. Fighter pilots sometimes pass out less than that.
Speaker 3: Right, top gun. It's top gun delivering a baby. Oh
Speaker 3: my god. And do they have the diagrams?
Speaker 5: Do they have people stationed at different places in case
Speaker 5: the release happens at twelve o'clock or twelve fifteen or
Speaker 5: one thirty.
Speaker 1: There's there is, there is, there's a lot of provision
Speaker 1: in there to do this. I became really fascinated by this.
Speaker 1: We tracked them down. They were no longer alive by
Speaker 1: the time we found them, and we gave the prize posthumously.
Speaker 5: It's brilliant and By the way, one of the studies
Speaker 5: it's interesting that we talked about before you came on
Speaker 5: was the woodpeckers get headaches, which you go, haha, except
Speaker 5: the NFL adopted that one as far as some of
Speaker 5: the research right.
Speaker 1: That was why they did this. This was a couple
Speaker 1: of doctors when British when American many years ago, and
Speaker 1: they were they're ophthalmologists, that eye doctors, and they were
Speaker 1: getting really concerned about exactly the issue you bring up,
Speaker 1: people getting whacked in the head sports or anything else
Speaker 1: and then getting brain damage. And they started wondering, why
Speaker 1: doesn't at least far as anybody can tell, this doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to happen to woodpeckers. What's different? They started looking
Speaker 1: at how the woodpecker's head is built, and they discovered
Speaker 1: it's built in a very very different way. It's sort
Speaker 1: of they describe it as like a very well packaged
Speaker 1: FedEx package where the brain is protected if the if
Speaker 1: the blow is coming from that direction. And that was
Speaker 1: their whole purpose to try to persuade not as sir
Speaker 1: of the NFL, but you know, anybody to start protecting
Speaker 1: your head.
Speaker 4: Well, I have to both thank and blame mark for
Speaker 4: two things, because one of their discoveries verify something I've
Speaker 4: always believed, and one of them is going to still
Speaker 4: give me trouble with my wife. The one, oddly enough,
Speaker 4: that will not give me trouble with my wife is
Speaker 4: that there is no direct correlation between foot size and
Speaker 4: genital size and a man.
Speaker 3: That one I was very happy to see was proven.
Speaker 4: Thank you for that, and thank you for the wonderful
Speaker 4: scientists they grow it us that.
Speaker 3: But the the five second rule, the dropping just f
Speaker 3: to answer.
Speaker 4: Now I know they got the answer, and the answer
Speaker 4: would have a say and I'm capsulizing, but it dropped.
Speaker 3: No, if it may contact, it's a problem.
Speaker 4: But I will d like sometimes I'll take my I
Speaker 4: have like one medication and a bunch of vitamins and
Speaker 4: supplements that I take in the morning, and sometimes a
Speaker 4: pill will drop on my kitchen floor. My wife goes
Speaker 4: throw it away. I go, are you out of your mind?
Speaker 4: It's a dry pill on a dry floor that is
Speaker 4: regularly cleaned. People walk there and I go, come on,
Speaker 4: come on. So I know it was proven. When they
Speaker 4: dropped something that had some viscosity to it onto onto
Speaker 4: a floor, it immediately picks up.
Speaker 3: Germs or bacteria or whatever.
Speaker 4: Have they ever run it with like you know, a
Speaker 4: dry bill on a dry floor.
Speaker 3: I should go this.
Speaker 1: This was a high school girl who did these tests
Speaker 1: working in a college lab over the summer. I think
Speaker 1: many scientists since then, professional scientists who have done the
Speaker 1: same thing, and what they found was just what you
Speaker 1: described that if everything's dry and clean, probably no problem.
Speaker 1: If everything is wet and sticky, well, profly don't want.
Speaker 3: It's brilliant. You're brilliant.
Speaker 5: You're brilliant, and you you bring joy to science and
Speaker 5: tech and medicine, and we will we will, we will
Speaker 5: remind people that they can watch on nineteen plans.
Speaker 1: It's not just science techondmagine. We give a literature prize,
Speaker 1: office and art prizes when you prizes and anything as
Speaker 1: long as it's something that will make any anywhere laugh
Speaker 1: and then.
Speaker 5: Think Mark, thank you very much, Okay, thank you Boom.
Speaker 5: There are a couple that we didn't get to by
Speaker 5: the way that I just want to and then we'll
Speaker 5: do our goga teim. That's that's just unbelievable. Let me
Speaker 5: start looking at the blond skis with the table just yeah,
Speaker 5: it still gets me let me sing here, let me see,
Speaker 5: let me see here.
Speaker 4: Well, there was one that I love that thematically has
Speaker 4: been a part of our show forever. Go ahead, the
Speaker 4: chemist who extracted vanilla from cowpoop. We keep finding vanilla
Speaker 4: in the strangest places.
Speaker 3: Are we running out of vanilla? I know we're running
Speaker 3: out of other stuff? Why are we going to gopher anals?
Speaker 3: The Starbucks?
Speaker 5: Starbucks says, I'm sorry, right, vanilla, but we're squeezing stuff
Speaker 5: right now to try and find some more. What else
Speaker 5: do we have? Are there equal number of hairs and
Speaker 5: human nostrils? Somebody was doing that experiment mine cadavers. Let's
Speaker 5: see what else here?
Speaker 4: I know that there was a survey, a preliminary survey
Speaker 4: of rhino to lexiomania in adolescent samples, meaning the preponderance
Speaker 4: of teenagers to pick their nose.
Speaker 3: Oh, that was a big And they also had a sound.
Speaker 5: Somebody was studying a sound that would annoy just teenagers
Speaker 5: and no one else could hear.
Speaker 3: Here, I'm watching the Awards show this year.
Speaker 5: We have to maybe on every year. It may be
Speaker 5: an annual for us. So, Gougenheim, what do you got,
Speaker 5: David Google?
Speaker 3: Oh? Wow? Yeah.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 3: Wow. There's a lot of a lot of science, a
Speaker 3: lot of science, a.
Speaker 6: Lot of science.
Speaker 3: And you know me, I love science.
Speaker 1: So I went up correction, I started reaching.
Speaker 6: Because it's like, it's the Nobel Prize, right, but a
Speaker 6: lot of people think it's the.
Speaker 3: Noble correct, like nobility, right?
Speaker 6: Yes, So of course, how many Nobel Prize winners are
Speaker 6: no nobility?
Speaker 3: Nobility? Okay? Interesting, you went down a weird rabbit too, too. Okay,
Speaker 3: we'll play some of.
Speaker 6: The John Williams Strutt, the third Baron of Brawley, won
Speaker 6: the Nobel Prize Physics in nineteen oh four. And then
Speaker 6: there was this guy, Max von Lowie, a German gentleman,
Speaker 6: who again in nineteen thirteen won the Physics Nobel Prize
Speaker 6: for his diffraction of X rays on crystals.
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing that I learned about him is.
Speaker 6: He was born Max Lowie, but when his father became a.
Speaker 3: Noble, they put the Vaughn in. That's how the Germans
Speaker 3: indicate no building. I not everybody that has won his noble,
Speaker 3: but that's where it began.
Speaker 4: I'm like, oh, he also, in making that change, won
Speaker 4: the Jerry Lewis I love that name.
Speaker 5: Of Mac lowy and that's why people don't know.
Speaker 3: They say it is Jason Alexander, your real name.
Speaker 5: His real name is Jason alex Vaughan Alexander. My you
Speaker 5: know my son did My son wandered in while I
Speaker 5: was doing research for this thing, and he said, you know,
Speaker 5: I've heard of the ig Nobel Awards. He said, I
Speaker 5: watched the documentary on people who were killed by their
Speaker 5: own invention.
Speaker 3: Oh, this is the Darwin.
Speaker 5: It's the great it's the greatest. I forgot the Sedgway
Speaker 5: or such Sedgway. Guy that a ride who wrote the
Speaker 5: Sedgway created it died on my favorite.
Speaker 3: No, he he bought the company and and died on it.
Speaker 4: Favor Darwin Award was the guy who was in a
Speaker 4: log cabin in the dead of winter and he was
Speaker 4: drinking and drinking, and he ran out of things to drink.
Speaker 4: So he's sitting in front of an open fire and
Speaker 4: he drinks the kerosene out of his kerosene lamp and
Speaker 4: throws up into the fireplace and the kerosene ignited on
Speaker 4: the vomit flow and he blew.
Speaker 3: Out his lungs and goodbye.
Speaker 5: Wow, And you're right about the Sedgeway by the way,
Speaker 5: and William Brody, I love this one. Deacon Brody of
Speaker 5: the eighteenth century Edinburgh is Sumputer, who had been the
Speaker 5: first victim of a new type of gallows, of which
Speaker 5: he was also the designer.
Speaker 3: So that's it's reported. David.
Speaker 5: Thank you, everybody listening, Thank you, and most importantly thank
Speaker 5: you Mark Abrahams.
Speaker 4: Wow, because this show will make you laugh and make
Speaker 4: you think and then make you cry. And then wouldn't
Speaker 4: it be great if we want to make no better?
Speaker 4: Give you more farts than than than a head Ham School.
Speaker 2: Of As another episode of Really No Really comes to
Speaker 2: a close. I know you're wondering why was the real
Speaker 2: Nobel Prize created?
Speaker 3: Well, I'll award.
Speaker 2: You with that information in a second, but first let's
Speaker 2: thank our guest, Mark Abrahams. You can follow market his
Speaker 2: website improbable dot com, on masted on, he is at
Speaker 2: Mark Abraham's on Facebook he is just Mark Abrahams and
Speaker 2: his podcast is Improbable Research.
Speaker 3: Find all pertinent links in our show notes.
Speaker 2: Our little show hangs out on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and
Speaker 2: threads at Really No Really Podcast, And of course you
Speaker 2: can share your thoughts and feedback us online.
Speaker 3: At reallynoreli dot com.
Speaker 2: If you have a really some amazing factor story that
Speaker 2: boggles your mind, share it with us and if we
Speaker 2: use it, we will send you a little gift. Nothing
Speaker 2: life changing, obviously, but it's the thought that counts. Check
Speaker 2: out our full episodes on YouTube, hit that subscribe button
Speaker 2: and take that bell so you're updated when we release
Speaker 2: new videos and episodes, which we do each Tuesday. So
Speaker 2: listen and follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts
Speaker 2: or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: And now the.
Speaker 2: Answer to the question why was the real Nobel Prize creed? Well,
Speaker 2: According to many sources, the prizes founder, Alfred Nobel, the
Speaker 2: Swedish inventor of dynamites and other explosives, didn't have a
Speaker 2: wonderful public image. It's been said that when his brother died,
Speaker 2: a newspaper erroneously thought it was Albert who died and
Speaker 2: published the headline the Merchant of Death is dead. The
Speaker 2: obituary also noted that Nobel had become very rich by
Speaker 2: finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.
Speaker 3: This may have motivated did.
Speaker 2: Nobel to create the Nobel Prize to let's say, enhance
Speaker 2: his legacy really.
Speaker 1: No, really, really no.
Speaker 2: Really is the production of iHeartRadio and Blase Entertainment.