Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and our yearly tradition returns. We always end up covering
Speaker 1: the ig Nobel Prizes, and that's what we're gonna do
Speaker 1: today in part one of our ig No Bells series.
Speaker 1: That's right. We we generally pick up with the ig
Speaker 1: Noo Bells after October is finished because the Ignoble Prizes,
Speaker 1: it tends to happen, uh right at the end of September.
Speaker 1: Terrible timing for us, like we're just getting going for
Speaker 1: Monster season and then they throw these in our past.
Speaker 1: But I think it works out too because then for us,
Speaker 1: because everybody can sort of read the initial press releases
Speaker 1: if you know, if you're if you're paying attention to them,
Speaker 1: to the science to science media, you'll probably pick up
Speaker 1: on on what one and then you can eventually check
Speaker 1: back in with us and hear us chat about it
Speaker 1: as well. Now, these spirit of the Ignoble Prizes, if
Speaker 1: you're not familiar is they would say they follow the
Speaker 1: ethos of Professor Frank Right, Professor Frank, Professor Frank. He'll
Speaker 1: make you laugh, He'll make you think, Yeah, yeah, the Simpsons, Yeah,
Speaker 1: very very much. So, Uh, I have to we have
Speaker 1: to point out, as I think we usually do ignobles.
Speaker 1: In some cases, they rub some people the wrong way.
Speaker 1: Some people don't see the humor in it. They maybe
Speaker 1: think that science should, uh should be a humorist affair
Speaker 1: and that we and or they think that that in
Speaker 1: some cases, uh, the honorees are being made fun of.
Speaker 1: But I think for the vast majority of individuals honored
Speaker 1: by the ignobles, uh, they get it, They get the joke,
Speaker 1: they see the value of it, and they realize that, yes,
Speaker 1: it's about having fun, but it's also about honoring legitimate
Speaker 1: research as well. Yeah. I mean, so these are real studies,
Speaker 1: and it tends to focus on studies that are funny
Speaker 1: when you first look at them, but they usually do
Speaker 1: reveal something at least pretty interesting. I mean not always.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I kindaman, well, that's just pretty silly, But most
Speaker 1: of the time there's at least some kind of really
Speaker 1: interesting tidbit in there. It either moves the field forward
Speaker 1: in some unexpected way, or it gives you something to
Speaker 1: think about. Uh, they do that, they Professor Frank. Professor Frank.
Speaker 1: So these have been awarded every year since by the
Speaker 1: Annals of Improbable Research, a humorous science publication that looks
Speaker 1: at various studies and whatnot. The purpose of this award,
Speaker 1: according to the editors of Improbable Research, is to quote
Speaker 1: honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make
Speaker 1: then make them think. Furthermore, they stressed that the ten
Speaker 1: prizes aren't necessarily meant to pass judgment on the winners. Instead,
Speaker 1: as they they tend to emphasize that the prizes quote
Speaker 1: celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people's interests
Speaker 1: in science, medicine, and technology. And by the way, the
Speaker 1: principal individual here is editor Mark Abram's, editor of the
Speaker 1: Animals of Improbable Research. Um, and I think that's important
Speaker 1: to the idea about spurring people's interests, because a lot
Speaker 1: of times do manage to highlight studies and papers and
Speaker 1: achievements in science then otherwise don't really rise, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: up in the headlines, or if they do, they only
Speaker 1: rise in the headlines because they're funny. And so one
Speaker 1: thing that we like to do when we look at
Speaker 1: the ignobles is find Okay, are are there some of
Speaker 1: these that are actually kind of interesting when you start
Speaker 1: thinking about them? Do they give you something to ponder? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And in always we ask the question why is it important?
Speaker 1: And why is it funny? The second question is generally
Speaker 1: just very obvious and the kid go except for the
Speaker 1: ones that aren't actually all that funny, which occasionally happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes, but generally you're like, oh, yeah, I see
Speaker 1: why they honored that one. And in some cases I
Speaker 1: think we've mentioned on the show, a new study will
Speaker 1: come along and we'll realize, oh, that one that's going
Speaker 1: to get an ignoble at some point. Yeah, any study
Speaker 1: about like butts or bending over or something that's just
Speaker 1: it's just a shoe, and then it just naturally Nobell bait. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: All right. So, now that we've established the ig Nobel
Speaker 1: Prizes and what they are for anyone it wasn't familiar,
Speaker 1: let's let's start jumping into some of the winners for
Speaker 1: two thousand and eighteen. Okay, Now, obviously we're not going
Speaker 1: to cover all of the winners in the same depth.
Speaker 1: Some we're going to engage with pretty deeply. Some we'll
Speaker 1: just sort of talk about pretty quickly. But I think
Speaker 1: the first thing we should look at is maybe medicine prize. Yes,
Speaker 1: so this one honors Mark Mitchell and David Wartener for
Speaker 1: for using roller coaster rides to try to hasten the
Speaker 1: passage of kidney stones. Does this have practical utility? Well yeah,
Speaker 1: just just you wait. This was an October publication and uh,
Speaker 1: Dave Wardinger was the individual who accepted the honors at
Speaker 1: the ceremony. So this one obviously links into an episode
Speaker 1: that you and I recorded years back, The Stone of Madness,
Speaker 1: which my name is Lubert nas because the episode dealt
Speaker 1: in part with the passing of kidney stones and bladder
Speaker 1: stones and what wait is it the Bosch painting? Is
Speaker 1: it Bosch? Yes, the removing of the Stone of Madness
Speaker 1: not from the bowels but from the cranium. Right, But
Speaker 1: the the idea is that there was like a removal
Speaker 1: of stone surgeries in the early modern period. Was was
Speaker 1: kind of dicey, right, literally, like people were diced and
Speaker 1: sliced and then died horrible deaths on the operating table.
Speaker 1: But there's this painting by Herono Spash that makes fun
Speaker 1: of this guy who's going to try to get a
Speaker 1: stone and alleged stone cut out of his head, and
Speaker 1: he's like, please cut the stone. Master. My name is
Speaker 1: Lubert Doss, So I often think about that when I
Speaker 1: see somebody behaving foolishly in public. I'm just like, my
Speaker 1: name is Lupert Doss. All right, Well I've I I
Speaker 1: don't know about you, Joe, but I've been fortunate enough
Speaker 1: to avoid kidney stones thus far in my life. If
Speaker 1: you've ever had a kidney stone, now I have not. Okay, Well, basically,
Speaker 1: what we're we're talking about here are hard deposits made
Speaker 1: of minerals and salts. They form, They can form inside
Speaker 1: your kidneys, and they often form when the urine becomes concentrated,
Speaker 1: allowing the minerals to crystallized and stick together. Uh if
Speaker 1: they If they form, then your body tries to pass them,
Speaker 1: which can be painful. In some cases, doctors can simply
Speaker 1: give you a pain killer and instruct you to drink
Speaker 1: a lot of water to help pass it. But in
Speaker 1: other cases, especially if it becomes lodged in your urinary tract,
Speaker 1: surgery may be required to it. That's just I'm shivering
Speaker 1: over here. So there's no dud, you know, definite single
Speaker 1: cause for kidney stones, but dehydration can certainly lead to
Speaker 1: their formation. Again the concentration of urine. Remember now, as
Speaker 1: the authors of this paper point out, some three hundred
Speaker 1: thousand US patients seek emergency care for kidney stones each year.
Speaker 1: And in addition to hydration saying you know, drink a
Speaker 1: lot of water or the administration fluids to other things
Speaker 1: that are sometimes used are positional inversion and external application
Speaker 1: of force. WHOA, so what does that mean getting upside
Speaker 1: down or something getting upside down getting thrown around a
Speaker 1: little bit, And so I think everyone can can can
Speaker 1: realize here while why we're getting into the domain of
Speaker 1: roller coasters, uh, They point out that there have been
Speaker 1: reports of spontaneous kidney stone passage associated with both the
Speaker 1: roller coaster riding and bungee cord jumping. So somebody had
Speaker 1: kidney stones and then they're like time to go bungee jumping. Well,
Speaker 1: and that was a little unclear the weather. It was
Speaker 1: a situation where if the individual knew they had the stones,
Speaker 1: I assume they knew, um, given the discomfort that is
Speaker 1: generally reported, but attached the bungee cords. My name is
Speaker 1: Lubert Dass. The problem though, is, they said, these these
Speaker 1: accounts they tend to be reported in like non peer
Speaker 1: reviewed publications or it's just kind of like word of mouth.
Speaker 1: And uh. In particular, uh, they noted that they had
Speaker 1: heard numerous stories about people passing kidney stones after riding
Speaker 1: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, a roller coaster at Walt disney
Speaker 1: World's Magic Kingdom thing part in Orlando, Florida. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they they had turned apparently heard various accounts of folks
Speaker 1: spontaneously passing the stones after writing it, Have you ridden
Speaker 1: this roller coaster? Joe? No, I'm not really a roller
Speaker 1: coaster person, and I haven't wait. Which one is that
Speaker 1: Magic Kingdom? Oh? Yeah, I've been to that one, but
Speaker 1: not since I was a kid. I was probably too
Speaker 1: short to ride to it. Anyway, when I was there,
Speaker 1: it's like it has like a mining theme. I wrote
Speaker 1: it just like what last year the year before. I
Speaker 1: wrote it with my son and my niece, and it's
Speaker 1: a fun roller coaster. I'm not really a roller coaster
Speaker 1: person myself, but I enjoyed some of the roller coasters
Speaker 1: at Disney because they're just like really phenomenal productions, especially
Speaker 1: the one that has a YETI in it. Did you
Speaker 1: get the black lung? The black light? The black long
Speaker 1: was not a featured add on when I was at Disney.
Speaker 1: But but this, this is a roller coaster that does
Speaker 1: move you around. It's it's not like one of those
Speaker 1: just crazy, um you know, one of those just insane
Speaker 1: rides that does that some people go for. It doesn't
Speaker 1: look like it's a design and to get a confession
Speaker 1: out of you, but it's still it takes you for
Speaker 1: a ride. So they wanted to test it out. They said, well,
Speaker 1: let's go there and let's see what happens to some
Speaker 1: kidney stones. Brilliant, I'm in now. They didn't take individuals
Speaker 1: with kidney stones on board, so there were no human
Speaker 1: test subjects here. What they did is they took three
Speaker 1: kidney stones of different sizes, suspended them in urine, and
Speaker 1: then placed them in adult uteroscopy and reino scopy simulators,
Speaker 1: and then they took them for twenty rides, so sixty
Speaker 1: rides in total. Okay, so they what basically got them
Speaker 1: in some kind of fake kidney kind of contraption. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were some pictures of these in the paper and
Speaker 1: they one of them looks kind of like a prop
Speaker 1: from a David Cronenberg film, and the other looks like
Speaker 1: a it's like a crystal tree looking, you know device.
Speaker 1: It looks like it kind of looks like an award
Speaker 1: you might win for, you know, achievements in Kidney Stone,
Speaker 1: Remove Horse something. So do you know if they had
Speaker 1: to have any kind of arrangements to negotiate these organs
Speaker 1: onto the roller coaster, like are they arguing with the
Speaker 1: ticket guy or what? They pointed out specifically that that
Speaker 1: care was taken to preserve guests, employ entertainment, joinment. Um. So,
Speaker 1: so I believe they had them inside of something hidden
Speaker 1: out of the way because they also mentioned specifically, uh,
Speaker 1: and this is this is an exact quote. Uh. Bovine
Speaker 1: and poor sign renal models were deemed impractical as patients
Speaker 1: surrogates for study, owing to ambient temperature and the inappropriate
Speaker 1: display of such material in a family friendly amusement park. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you couldn't bring like pig kidneys onto the roller
Speaker 1: coaster because that might upset some people. Yeah, and Disney
Speaker 1: was apparently they were gracious hosts for this study, but
Speaker 1: they knew there were limits it's kind of a delicate
Speaker 1: situation when you're carrying out your kidney stone research on
Speaker 1: an active amusement park ride. But then again, you might
Speaker 1: have some science loving kids there. They get their you know,
Speaker 1: their picture hugging Mickey, and then they get their picture
Speaker 1: hugging some pig kidneyst opportunity. That's maybe, so maybe maybe
Speaker 1: for the next study. So what did they find out, Well,
Speaker 1: they found that it did seem to prove helpful, but
Speaker 1: mostly only if you're seated towards the back of the coaster.
Speaker 1: So for front coaster passage, right, we're talking four of
Speaker 1: twenty four. Rear coaster passage rate twenty three or thirty six. Hey,
Speaker 1: that's not bad. Yeah, I mean it's like, like everybody knows,
Speaker 1: you said at the back of the coaster, you're gonna
Speaker 1: get a bump, your more hillacious ride, and if you
Speaker 1: have a lacious kidney stone, well it's going this is
Speaker 1: going to help knock it out of you just a
Speaker 1: little bit easier. So the author is actually like suggesting
Speaker 1: people do this somehow, I would suspect not. No, no,
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody is saying go to to Disney
Speaker 1: World instead of a doctor kidney stone. Like, for one thing,
Speaker 1: the lines for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad are pretty long,
Speaker 1: and I cannot imagine standing in them with any kind
Speaker 1: of like an abdominal discomfort going on, or you know,
Speaker 1: and enhanced necessity to urinate or anything. But how long
Speaker 1: they had the stand in lines total in order to
Speaker 1: run the ride the thirty six times or whatever that
Speaker 1: they were trying to pass the stone? Maybe there's some
Speaker 1: sort of a research based fast pass you can get.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I don't know that they mentioned that
Speaker 1: specifically in the study. And then they also point out
Speaker 1: that their other you know, their limitations on the study.
Speaker 1: Obviously they didn't get to use human patients. They use
Speaker 1: these models, But the study is important because kidney stones
Speaker 1: are a legitimate health concern, and I don't think, Yeah,
Speaker 1: even though we're not talking about installing roller coasters in hospitals,
Speaker 1: it does make one think what kind of what kind
Speaker 1: of an apparatus might be appropriate, right, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you could probably just figure out what part of the
Speaker 1: roller coaster rides specifically is the most useful, like what
Speaker 1: you know, kinds of g forces on the body and
Speaker 1: how that's applied, and maybe just like make a chair
Speaker 1: that does it to you or something. Yeah, that's I
Speaker 1: think that's the most logical application that I can imagine,
Speaker 1: short of just actually having a roller coaster at the hospital.
Speaker 1: That's also sounds kind of fun um. But anyway, that's
Speaker 1: why it's important, why it's funny. Obviously, it's science plus
Speaker 1: roller coasters. Anytime that combo was coming at you, it's
Speaker 1: going to elect a few giggles. I think that's a
Speaker 1: pretty good one. Okay, well let's take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we will have more ignobles.
Speaker 1: Thank thank Alright, we're back now. The next one I
Speaker 1: think we should go to is Nutrition Prize. And I
Speaker 1: know what you have all been thinking lately. You've been wondering,
Speaker 1: can I lose weight by converting to a diet consisting
Speaker 1: only of human flesh? The Hannibal diets, the new fad.
Speaker 1: Oh no, Hannibal eats all kinds of other stuff. He
Speaker 1: would have to go like super paleo Hannibal. Well, he
Speaker 1: supplements his diet with human flesh. That's how he stays
Speaker 1: so trim putting like a blueberry reduction balsamic glaze on
Speaker 1: this humane You know how unhealthy all that would be
Speaker 1: if he wasn't throwing in some some lean human flesh
Speaker 1: to just really balance everything out, all right. So this
Speaker 1: prize went to a researcher named James Cole for a
Speaker 1: paper published in Scientific Reports in called Assessing the Caloric
Speaker 1: Significance of Episodes of Human Cannibalism in the Paleolithic. Who
Speaker 1: attended the ceremony is James Cole, the author of this paper.
Speaker 1: So let's say you come across some evidence of humans
Speaker 1: eating other humans, it's reasonable to ask why are they
Speaker 1: doing this? Right? In fact, this is often a question
Speaker 1: we have to ask about the remains of Stone Age
Speaker 1: humans because they're Paleolithic sites, Stone Age sites that show
Speaker 1: clear evidence of human cannibalism at least as far back
Speaker 1: as our hominin relatives in the early place to see
Speaker 1: in roughly two point five million years ago. So I
Speaker 1: guess before we get to the y. Actually, a totally
Speaker 1: reasonable question you might have is, if we're talking about
Speaker 1: hominin remains that are thousands or even millions of years old,
Speaker 1: how can we tell cannibalism took place. It's just bones, right, Like,
Speaker 1: what would the evidence be? Well, there are a couple
Speaker 1: of lines of evidence for cannibalism in the Pleistocene. One
Speaker 1: is anthropogenic modification of human remains. That's the like polite
Speaker 1: sciencey way to talk about signs of butchering on human bones.
Speaker 1: So clear human made changes to the bones of other humans,
Speaker 1: and these would be the same kinds of physical marks
Speaker 1: that we would find left on the bones of what
Speaker 1: are considered prey animals. Signs of butchering, cooking, and eating.
Speaker 1: And examples would include cuts and chop marks in the
Speaker 1: bone from the butchering process, like they might have been
Speaker 1: made with sharp stone tools, breaks in the long bones,
Speaker 1: which would be presumably to access the marrow, because that's
Speaker 1: the good part. Evidence of cooking, such as burned ends
Speaker 1: of a bone, human tooth marks on a bone, quote,
Speaker 1: lack of a cranial base to get at the brain
Speaker 1: on otherwise complete or near complete skeleton. Well you gotta
Speaker 1: suck the head. I mean, anybody who's like crayfish or
Speaker 1: swamp bugs if you want to call them. So, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I said crayfish crawdads is the correct terms that I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go with. Crawdads. I have to admit I'm a
Speaker 1: little hazy. I do like swamp bugs as a as
Speaker 1: a kind of Cajun description though right, well, they're they
Speaker 1: are quite bug like, but they have delicious heads, and
Speaker 1: so a lot of people just eat the tails, but
Speaker 1: people who know what's up also take the what would
Speaker 1: you call it this guess this is the thoracic cavity
Speaker 1: with the head there, and they just suck all the
Speaker 1: fat and juices and guts out of it, get those
Speaker 1: good tasty brains and uh so, yeah, there apparently there's
Speaker 1: some nutritional value in the brains that some people might
Speaker 1: want to get. But there's also the idea and that
Speaker 1: sometimes modification of the skull is done for some kind
Speaker 1: of other purpose, not just purely accessing nutrition, but like
Speaker 1: the creation of skull cups, making skulls into like eating
Speaker 1: or drinking vessels. Yeah. I mean, we've we've seen more
Speaker 1: recent examples of this in Tibetan customs, for instance. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh So, another thing that Cole mentions is like a
Speaker 1: physical sign of cannibalism in ancient human rains or ancient
Speaker 1: hominin remains, not necessarily just holmo sapiens uh is quote,
Speaker 1: the virtual absence of vertebrae due to crushing or boiling
Speaker 1: to get it bone marrow and grease, so like maybe
Speaker 1: you want to get that good spinal cord, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have the vertebrae kind of coming apart. It's like eating
Speaker 1: crab legs. Yeah, and then tool scrapes on the bones,
Speaker 1: which there could be scrapes on the bones related to
Speaker 1: butchering and accessing of meat, but there could also be
Speaker 1: scrapes on the bones for ritualistic or symbolic purposes. On
Speaker 1: top of that, there's some interesting genetic evidence of cannibalism
Speaker 1: in the in the world. In the prehistoric world, for example,
Speaker 1: there are diseases known as transmissible sponge iform and cephalopath
Speaker 1: ease or t s S, and examples of this would
Speaker 1: include CURU or kreuz feld Yakob disease. And these are
Speaker 1: prion diseases or pre on diseases that cause degeneration of
Speaker 1: brain tissue and can be acquired often through cannibalism. When
Speaker 1: you might have heard of is kuru. The members of
Speaker 1: the for A linguistic group in Papua New Guinea have
Speaker 1: often been exposed to the t SC known as kuru
Speaker 1: because of their practice of ritual Indo cannibalism. For religious
Speaker 1: and cultural reasons. Yeah, and a lot of these ideas, um,
Speaker 1: you know, they have to do with the passing on
Speaker 1: of a departed individual, parted family member, like and you
Speaker 1: consume some of their flesh and it's like their spirit
Speaker 1: lives on through you, that sort of thing, exactly. H
Speaker 1: And So an interesting thing is that there are worldwide
Speaker 1: patterns of genes we find that seem to indicate our
Speaker 1: species genetic history sometimes favored in the past adaptation for
Speaker 1: resistance to T S S, for example meat at all.
Speaker 1: In a two thousand three paper, and Science wrote, quote
Speaker 1: heterozygosity for common polymorphism in the human pre on protein
Speaker 1: gene p r n P confers relative resistance to prion diseases,
Speaker 1: and then later they're write worldwide p r np haplotype
Speaker 1: diversity encoding alleal frequencies suggest the strong balancing selection at
Speaker 1: this locust occurred during the evolution of modern humans. So
Speaker 1: the authors argued that the patterns of genetic resistance to
Speaker 1: T S c S that we see in human populations
Speaker 1: indicate that something in our evolutionary history favored people who
Speaker 1: could cannibalize, who could eat human flesh without contracting fatal
Speaker 1: encephalopath ez, this is a fun paper thus far. This
Speaker 1: really it's kind of a nice follow up to our
Speaker 1: ghoul episode, the delta impart with you know, with the
Speaker 1: question you know what about the consumption of human corpses
Speaker 1: in in in our in our past, and in our biology.
Speaker 1: It is an interesting subject. In fact, I'm not even
Speaker 1: really getting deep into the paper yet. I'm just I'm
Speaker 1: just setting it up, so it's going to really get
Speaker 1: going in a second, okay. Like, first of all, their
Speaker 1: disputes about whether individual sites actually do show evidence of
Speaker 1: cannibalism rather than some other form of manipulation of the dead,
Speaker 1: like you could have had maybe ritualistic de fleshing of
Speaker 1: the dead without eating. Maybe for some reason they wanted
Speaker 1: to get the meat off the bones of a dead person,
Speaker 1: but not not eat it. Well, like one example that
Speaker 1: comes to mind, to come back to Tibet, the practice
Speaker 1: of sky burial, the breaking down of a corpse so
Speaker 1: that they flesh may be consumed by sacred animals. Uh Like,
Speaker 1: if you were just looking at the forensic evidence of that,
Speaker 1: you might say, oh, well, clearly this person was butchered
Speaker 1: and eating, because essentially it is butchery, but it is
Speaker 1: not for cannibalism, but whether or not it happened in
Speaker 1: individual cases, it at least does appear to be something
Speaker 1: that happened enough for us to have records of it.
Speaker 1: Sometimes prehistoric humans and other related hominins were eating each
Speaker 1: other at least often enough for us to have some
Speaker 1: archaeological record of it. So back to the original question,
Speaker 1: the question of why why were these ancient humans and
Speaker 1: other hominin relatives eating each other? Coal notes that there
Speaker 1: are multiple document and motivations for human cannibalism. So several
Speaker 1: of these would be like survival cannibalism. That's when you're
Speaker 1: not normally a cannibal, but you're about to starve to death,
Speaker 1: so you eat somebody. Right. This is essentially with the
Speaker 1: touch of the wind to go in in the folklore
Speaker 1: of native people's in the America's gets that the idea
Speaker 1: that is forced to uh, you may have to enact
Speaker 1: cannibal cannibalism, right. And then there is of course psychotic
Speaker 1: or criminal cannibalism, and aggressive cannibalism. These would be various
Speaker 1: types of cannibalism that is some sort of like aggressive symbology,
Speaker 1: like warfare cannibalism. You you know, not only defeat your enemies,
Speaker 1: but you defeat them so totally that you feel you
Speaker 1: should eat them. There is, of course, as we've pointed out,
Speaker 1: spiritual a ritual cannibalism, and then there is gastronomic or
Speaker 1: dietary cannibalism, nutritional cannibalism. Basically like this is part of
Speaker 1: your diet and you're eating it because it's meat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like that list the old school cannibalism.
Speaker 1: This is more in line with the biological cannibalism that
Speaker 1: we've discussed in the show before, right, of other organisms.
Speaker 1: Uh uh, yeah, there's that. And then also he points
Speaker 1: out a good a good category that often gets left
Speaker 1: out medicinal cannibalism. Right, sometimes you might want to eat
Speaker 1: another human because you think it does something kind of
Speaker 1: a vampiric cannibalism. Could the flesh of the young and
Speaker 1: you shall feel better wise one, Yeah, something like that.
Speaker 1: So a couple of other relevant categories. Just to mention
Speaker 1: is that there's the idea of exo cannibalism versus indo cannibalism.
Speaker 1: Exo cannibalism would be humans eating humans who were not
Speaker 1: part of the in group, for example, eating rivals killed
Speaker 1: in war. And then there's indo cannibalism, which is eating
Speaker 1: humans who were part of your in group, for example,
Speaker 1: ritualistically eating one's own family members for religious reasons. Right,
Speaker 1: and you can sort of divide these up two has
Speaker 1: been into categories of nice cannibalism and mean cannibalism. Right, So,
Speaker 1: the majorities of studies of paleolithic cannibal sites have tended
Speaker 1: to deposit, Cole says, a nutritional motivation for the cannibalism,
Speaker 1: while a smaller number have positive religious rich rules or
Speaker 1: aggressive cannibalism associated with warfare. And Cole points out that
Speaker 1: there's some confusing things about the ways these motivational labels
Speaker 1: are applied to instances of cannibalism from prehistoric times. And
Speaker 1: so to help refine the discussion about the types of
Speaker 1: cannibalism and the role of raw nutrition in motivating prehistoric
Speaker 1: cannibalistic episodes, Cole said, basically, hey, wouldn't it help to
Speaker 1: know exactly how nutritious a paleolithic human was? That could
Speaker 1: sort of help us better understand whether these are purely
Speaker 1: nutrition seeking events or whether there's some other kind of
Speaker 1: significance to them. Right. So, ultimately the goal of this
Speaker 1: paper was to construct an informed estimate on the nutritional
Speaker 1: value of a human. First question, has anybody ever done
Speaker 1: that before? Cole says, yes, it has been done that
Speaker 1: it was just sort of in a short letter to
Speaker 1: American Anthropologist in the year nineteen seventy, and their methodology
Speaker 1: for how they came up with their number was not clear,
Speaker 1: But in nineteen seventy Stanley M. Garn and Walter D.
Speaker 1: Block wrote quote the limited nutritional Value of Cannibalism. In
Speaker 1: this short letter to American Anthropologist, garn and Block claimed
Speaker 1: that an adult male weighing fifty kilograms or about a
Speaker 1: hundred and ten pounds, which is a reasonable estimate of
Speaker 1: the body mass of a stone age human, would yield
Speaker 1: about thirty kilograms or sixty six pounds of edible skeletal
Speaker 1: muscle mass, and nutritionally, that breaks dound about four point
Speaker 1: five kilograms of protein and about eighteen thousand calories. So
Speaker 1: based on this, garn and Block said that if human
Speaker 1: is your only source of protein, that's the only meat
Speaker 1: you're eating and the only real protein you're getting. A
Speaker 1: group of sixty people would need to eat a person
Speaker 1: every day in order to get enough protein to have
Speaker 1: a healthy diet. Uh. And if it were rationed out,
Speaker 1: so you've got less out to a diet of like
Speaker 1: one human per week shared between sixty people, the group
Speaker 1: would not be getting nearly enough protein. So, based on
Speaker 1: this garn and Block conclude quote, the nutritional value of
Speaker 1: cannibalism may therefore be viewed as questionable unless a group
Speaker 1: is in a position consume its own number in a year.
Speaker 1: So basically you'd have to be eating a lot of humans.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, you know, I really want to see
Speaker 1: these numbers broken down and compared to the Chainsaw family
Speaker 1: and the Texas Chainsaw massacre, Right, is that nutritional cannibalism? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't. I feel like it's a mix of nutritional
Speaker 1: and commercial because there are four individuals in the family
Speaker 1: and obviously they need the protein. Uh, it's commercial. This
Speaker 1: is not taken into account at all. I know, because
Speaker 1: they're running the barbecue restaurant on the side, and as
Speaker 1: we find out in Texas Chainsaw Masacre to they're they're
Speaker 1: winning awards at regional barbecue competitions. This is prestige cannibalism. Yes.
Speaker 1: Uh So to follow up on Garden Block coal asks, Okay,
Speaker 1: is their estimate correct. They don't say how they got
Speaker 1: to these numbers. And to figure that out, Coal did
Speaker 1: a review of the existing literature on the chemical composition
Speaker 1: of the human body, relying on three studies from the
Speaker 1: Journal of Biological Chemistry in the middle of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: which were drawn from analysis of four alt human males.
Speaker 1: So how much nutrition is there per kilogram of muscle
Speaker 1: mass on a human? Well, this data yielded an average
Speaker 1: of nineteen thousand, nine hundred and fifty one calory calories
Speaker 1: per twenty four point nine kilograms of muscle mass. So
Speaker 1: garden Block weren't all that far off by estimating eighteen
Speaker 1: thousand calories in thirty ms of muscle. And so there's
Speaker 1: and then Coal comes up with some estimates of the
Speaker 1: nutritional value of the protein and fat on a human.
Speaker 1: I think this is supposed to be for a roughly
Speaker 1: a hundred and forty five pound human male, So total
Speaker 1: body there would be about a hundred and forty three thousand,
Speaker 1: seven hundred and seventy one calories. And it's got a
Speaker 1: breakdown by body parts, right, so like the body parts
Speaker 1: reasonably expected to be consumed based on ethnographic studies of cannibalism,
Speaker 1: so not eating stuff like teeth and nerve tissue. That
Speaker 1: would leave you with about a hundred and twenty five thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred and twenty two calories. And there is this
Speaker 1: wonder full table in the paper where the body is
Speaker 1: broken down into parts based on their nutritional value. So
Speaker 1: the heart it's about six hundred and fifty calories, the brain,
Speaker 1: spinal cord, and nerve trunks about undred calories, the four
Speaker 1: arms one thousand, six hundred and sixty four calories. I'm
Speaker 1: assuming this is not for a popeye, but just like
Speaker 1: regular forearms. Now that hard, that's that's some that's some
Speaker 1: good calories there. But that's some tough eating. That's some
Speaker 1: tough tissue. Oh yeah, I think you've got to You've
Speaker 1: gotta make a stew with that. Well. Yeah, So part
Speaker 1: of the one of the caveats, and I'll get into
Speaker 1: the caveats in a minute here, but one of the
Speaker 1: caveats is that this is just for raw meat. It
Speaker 1: it can't take into account how the nutritional value of
Speaker 1: these things change when cooked. But we have discussed before
Speaker 1: how cooking is thought to significantly increase the caloric value
Speaker 1: or nutritional value of a lot of foods. Things that
Speaker 1: cannot otherwise be digested can be digested after being cooked exactly.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to come up with some comparisons, not
Speaker 1: analyzing protein ratios or anything, but just purely in terms
Speaker 1: of raw calories. I worked out that on this number
Speaker 1: with the with the edible part being about a hundred
Speaker 1: eight hundred and twenty two calories, human body is worth
Speaker 1: about a hundred and thirty two Windy's bacon eaders. Now,
Speaker 1: what's a bacon eater. A bacon eader is a Windy
Speaker 1: sandwich that has a bunch of bacon and cheese on it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it's like a bacon cheese barker. Yes, basically, it's
Speaker 1: like that there. I think they make a big deal
Speaker 1: about how like we don't put any lettuce on this.
Speaker 1: You know, this is just bacon and cheese. It's one
Speaker 1: of those sandwiches that uses kind of crass masculinity marketing.
Speaker 1: It's kind of sandwich for men, like the double down
Speaker 1: sort of that kind of thing. Yeah, so it's like
Speaker 1: that human body is worth about a hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: two Windy's bacon eaters. Or I've got another one here
Speaker 1: about two hundred and ninety three slices of pizza Hut
Speaker 1: Meat Lover's large original stuffed crust pizza. All right, well,
Speaker 1: that's that's quite a lot of pizza. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: a human body is somewhat nutritious, though I did I
Speaker 1: want to say I arrived at those numbers using those
Speaker 1: restaurants online nutrition calculators. Those numbers could be they could
Speaker 1: be massively under shooting the glories in an average baconator. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously there are gonna be some caveats in this type
Speaker 1: of because this is just coming up with some very
Speaker 1: broad est so some major caveats coal mentions. He says
Speaker 1: the data he used to arrive at his estimates were
Speaker 1: only based on adult males in the twentieth century, and
Speaker 1: he's got a great sense of humor when he writes this,
Speaker 1: so quote. Ideally, nutritional templates for females and a range
Speaker 1: of ages would be constructed to represent the full nutritional
Speaker 1: potential of hominin social groups. However, data for females and
Speaker 1: subadults are not available within the published literature, and the
Speaker 1: collection of primary data of this nature was outside the
Speaker 1: ethical and legal scope of this study. Uh. He also
Speaker 1: says that the data only pertains to basically anatomically modern humans.
Speaker 1: It's not known how different the nutritional value of other
Speaker 1: species like Neanderthals or Homo erectus might be. Also, the
Speaker 1: average values here are drawn from a small sample size.
Speaker 1: Better estimates could be drawn if you had more humans
Speaker 1: to measure the neutra rational value of Also, these values
Speaker 1: are of the nutritional value of raw me. Like we said,
Speaker 1: cooking might change things. So after that coal also does
Speaker 1: some estimates of the nutritional yield for body mass at
Speaker 1: different Paleolithic cannibalism sites found by archaeologists. So you've got
Speaker 1: a Stone Age cannibalism site and you look at okay,
Speaker 1: what were the different people here that apparently got eaten?
Speaker 1: And so he like tries to add up how much
Speaker 1: body mass calorie value was was being served at this site. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so how so the question he asks is how
Speaker 1: do you humans stack up against other meat sources of
Speaker 1: the Paleolithic quote when compared to most other fauna, human
Speaker 1: skeletal muscle has a nutritional value broadly in line with
Speaker 1: those that match our size and weight, but produced significantly
Speaker 1: fewer calories than most of the larger fauna such as mammoth,
Speaker 1: wooly rhino, or deer species known to have been regularly
Speaker 1: consumed by past hominins, So they're better meals around. Yeah, exactly. So,
Speaker 1: while you could get decent nutrition from a human body,
Speaker 1: Cole argues that it would be much more worthwhile to
Speaker 1: simply hunt the same large fauna of the time that
Speaker 1: you would normally be hunting mammoth, Rhinoceros RX, bison, cow, bear, horse,
Speaker 1: giant deer, all this stuff. So hunting and killing a
Speaker 1: human for meat has a kind of wonky risk to
Speaker 1: reward ratio because, you know, he points out that humans
Speaker 1: are crafty and sometimes they can fight back in clever
Speaker 1: and dangerous ways. Is it really worth hunting humans provided
Speaker 1: that they're going to give you relatively low amounts of
Speaker 1: nutrition compared to these big, fat, bulky animals that are
Speaker 1: also probably easier to hunt. So Cole asks were hominins
Speaker 1: actively hunted by members of their own species in prehistoric times? Uh?
Speaker 1: He says quote active hunting raises the interesting question of
Speaker 1: whether the relatively low calorific return for hominins would justify
Speaker 1: the energy expenditure in hunting an individual or group. If
Speaker 1: the motivation was driven was driven purely by balancing energy quotions.
Speaker 1: It is suggested here that this would not be the
Speaker 1: case when a single large fauna individual returns many more
Speaker 1: calories without the difficulties of hunting groups of hominins that
Speaker 1: were as intelligent and resourceful as the hunters in their
Speaker 1: ability to fight back and evade pursuit. So now he said,
Speaker 1: you know, we have these instances of what looks like
Speaker 1: prehistoric cannibalism among hominins, but it just doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: that is a very smart strategy for getting meat generally.
Speaker 1: So what what's going on here? Why do we see
Speaker 1: this cannibalism? And he hypothesizes, well, maybe there are cases
Speaker 1: of occasional opportunistic nutritional cannibalism. For example, we're pretty hungry
Speaker 1: and a member of our group just died of natural causes,
Speaker 1: right or or certainly to go back to the warfare,
Speaker 1: and now ities like you get into some sort of
Speaker 1: uh an altercation with a rival group, perhaps over access
Speaker 1: to fauna to fauna, and then well, I need meat.
Speaker 1: I was hunting this thing, but I just bashed the
Speaker 1: skull in of this guy, who, granted looks a lot
Speaker 1: like me. But is made of meat, right, So yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be sort of occasional opportunistic cannibalism. But then
Speaker 1: Cole also says that quote the motivations for cannibalistic episodes
Speaker 1: lay within complex cultural systems involving both intra and intergroup
Speaker 1: dynamics and competition. Essentially, he's saying he thinks a very
Speaker 1: likely explanation for a lot of these cannibalistic episodes has
Speaker 1: something to do with prehistoric culture, which we don't know
Speaker 1: a lot about. But it could involve uh, religious uses,
Speaker 1: ritual uses, medicinal uses, things people believed there to be
Speaker 1: reasons to eat other humans that went beyond just the
Speaker 1: nutritional value. I mean, it is very difficult to put
Speaker 1: ourselves to attempt to put ourselves in the mindset of
Speaker 1: of such cultures. Yeah, and we don't know what they were.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's one of the fascinating things. They're interesting
Speaker 1: little tidbits, but they didn't leave written records, so we
Speaker 1: don't really have descriptions of what they believed and what
Speaker 1: their relationships were like, and you know, just all the
Speaker 1: things that the kind of everyday texture of society that
Speaker 1: we know so well in our own world. It's it's
Speaker 1: mostly opaque to us what it was like this far
Speaker 1: back in the past. Well, you know, even the Chainsaw
Speaker 1: family from Texas, Chainsaw Masker, they they have their own
Speaker 1: sort of culture and system of beliefs that seems to
Speaker 1: have risen up out of this, uh, this Texan um
Speaker 1: avatoir culture and their family history with the business there.
Speaker 1: You know, there's some intentionally or or perhaps accidentally uh,
Speaker 1: kind of ingenious ideas about like the spiritual nature of cannibalism,
Speaker 1: kind of indebted in that original motion picture. Yeah, do
Speaker 1: you have an example, Well, there's a sense of there's
Speaker 1: a sense of ritual to the cannibalism it's going on
Speaker 1: at least within the own their within the family, and
Speaker 1: maybe you could apply that to the barbecue restaurant as well.
Speaker 1: But like there's that whole scene with the uh, you know,
Speaker 1: seated at the table and granted, you know they're they're
Speaker 1: proba really drawing a little bit from Judeo Christian traditions there,
Speaker 1: but you know, there's there's some something sacred going on
Speaker 1: with the family dinner and allowing Grandpa, the greatest killer
Speaker 1: that had ever ever lived, to attempt to to kill
Speaker 1: the victim. So that he can, uh, you know, drink
Speaker 1: of her blood, eat of her flesh, and grow stronger. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then all these other sort of elements of like that,
Speaker 1: the little bone wind chimes and constructions that have been created.
Speaker 1: It seemed it's almost like there are people that are
Speaker 1: so cut off from the rest of of a modern
Speaker 1: society that they're kind of reinventing primordial religious concepts. That
Speaker 1: is fascinating. I had never thought of it that way,
Speaker 1: Like all they do, like if if if everything that
Speaker 1: they do is concerned with meat and the importance of
Speaker 1: meat and the preparation of meat, um, and then what
Speaker 1: kind of ideas come out of that? It's it's it's
Speaker 1: not unlike what we might try and imagine for prehistoric people.
Speaker 1: So you know, if your whole life is, of course
Speaker 1: about the hunt, then various ideas spring out of that.
Speaker 1: If your whole life is about about the importance of
Speaker 1: meat and blood, Uh, then you know it, who knows
Speaker 1: exactly how they view the importance of our own flesh
Speaker 1: and what kind of powers or or or or I mean,
Speaker 1: we tend to put a horror show interpretation on it.
Speaker 1: And obviously I'm drawing in Texas chainsaw maskt right. But
Speaker 1: I mean perhaps in a way it's beautiful. Perhaps it
Speaker 1: was like I have killed this individual in battle, and
Speaker 1: I must eat them like that is the the only
Speaker 1: like that is how you show respect for a worthy adversary.
Speaker 1: I mean we're tempted to want to construct some sort
Speaker 1: of brutal like I have killed my enemy and now
Speaker 1: I must feast on their brains kind of thing. But
Speaker 1: it maybe in its own way it was sacred. Well.
Speaker 1: I think it's also possible that we frequently underestimate the
Speaker 1: degree to which a lot of the strange features of
Speaker 1: our culture that don't seem strange to us, because there
Speaker 1: are culture um are just are in traceable ways downstream
Speaker 1: of economics which are ultimately reducible to chemical energy economics,
Speaker 1: you know, acquiring food to eat. Uh, you can trace
Speaker 1: a lot of culture back to getting food and surviving. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: So to bring it back to the study, another thing
Speaker 1: you can imagine is how perhaps certain practices that were
Speaker 1: originally just opportunistic nutritional practices, maybe opportunistic cannibalism, when someone
Speaker 1: died and you didn't want to waste the meat, so
Speaker 1: you ate them. Uh, It's possible that could have turned
Speaker 1: into religious beliefs and rituals exactly. And that's not even
Speaker 1: taking into effect like any you know, sort of abnormal
Speaker 1: psychological effects that might have taken place and in certain
Speaker 1: individuals and therefore influenced the overall shape of the culture.
Speaker 1: You know, like if one individual claimed and or even
Speaker 1: believed that, say they consume the flesh of their departed
Speaker 1: father and then heard their father's voice, then that could
Speaker 1: have enormous effects, you know. I mean, we're talking about
Speaker 1: the spread of religion. Yeah, this is always interesting territory.
Speaker 1: Uh so, yeah, well, not the last time we will
Speaker 1: visit the potential religious beliefs and rituals of prehistoric common ends.
Speaker 1: But we're gonna go and take a break now. We're
Speaker 1: gonna leave cannibalism for now. But when we come back,
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at just a couple of more Ignoble
Speaker 1: Prize winners briefly before closing out part one of our
Speaker 1: Ignoble Prize series for this year. All right, thank thank
Speaker 1: and we're back. Robert. Do you have a shorter look
Speaker 1: you wanted to take it something? Oh? Sure, why don't
Speaker 1: we talk about the Chemistry prize? Okay, let's do some chemistry.
Speaker 1: This is from Romeo at all and they were honored
Speaker 1: for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a
Speaker 1: good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces. The paper was a
Speaker 1: titled human Saliva as a Cleaning Agent for Dirty Surfaces
Speaker 1: and it was published in Studies in Conservation back in
Speaker 1: nine and and the winners delivered their acceptance speech via
Speaker 1: recorded video. So with the original title should I spit
Speaker 1: on it? And that got rejected that it may can't
Speaker 1: sound a little bit a little basically yeah, but we
Speaker 1: can all relate to this, right, I mean, have you
Speaker 1: ever used your own saliva to clean off, say a
Speaker 1: smart smartphone screen or I know, in my case, I've
Speaker 1: used it on a kid's face. Plenty of times. I
Speaker 1: used my saliva as dishwashing detergent. So I don't know
Speaker 1: why people buy those pods. You just spit in the
Speaker 1: dishwasher a lot and then get it going. It does
Speaker 1: a great job. Well I I nobody's pushing it that
Speaker 1: that far. But there does seem to be something to
Speaker 1: the cleansing power of spit, at least to you know,
Speaker 1: a limited degree. And this is exactly what the paper
Speaker 1: and question looked into. They used quantitative test and chromatographic
Speaker 1: techniques to isolate alpha Emily's as the key cleaning property
Speaker 1: in human saliva. Now you're probably wondering, well, what is
Speaker 1: an Emily's Is it some sort of microbe? What is it? Well,
Speaker 1: an Emilyes is a member of a class of enzymes
Speaker 1: that splits a starch compound via the addition of water molecule.
Speaker 1: Now we we divide them into alpha's and betas because
Speaker 1: they differ in the exact way that they attack the
Speaker 1: bonds of a starch molecule. But Alpha Emilyes is found
Speaker 1: throughout the biological world, specifically in the digestive systems of
Speaker 1: humans and other animals. The one in the salivary glands
Speaker 1: is called Thailand that begins with the P P T
Speaker 1: y A l I in. So why is it important, Well,
Speaker 1: it concerns human biology. Obviously we're humans. We're always interested
Speaker 1: in that. It also concerns hygiene. And it's funny because
Speaker 1: it involves spit, and it involves the idea of cleaning
Speaker 1: something with spit, something that on on a basic level,
Speaker 1: I feel like we all do this. We all have
Speaker 1: probably had a situation where we use spit to quote
Speaker 1: unquote clean something, and yet at the same time spit
Speaker 1: is considered dirty. Uh, Like someone spitting at you is gross,
Speaker 1: seeing someone spit in the street is disgusting. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you can see some of the things, Like,
Speaker 1: I can see why this would be because the role
Speaker 1: of saliva in the mouth is somewhat the same as
Speaker 1: the role of average cleaning liquids or detergents. Right, So
Speaker 1: it is a detergent mean that it's like a wedding
Speaker 1: and lubrication agent that helps things move around and wash off.
Speaker 1: And then it's also a somewhat a digesting agent, like
Speaker 1: it breaks some things down and tenderizes some things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is that. Our mouth, we have to remember, is
Speaker 1: the first stage of the digestion. You know. We masticate
Speaker 1: the food, we get it all cut up, we get
Speaker 1: it nice and wet and soaked, and then our tongue
Speaker 1: helps to form it at the back of our throat
Speaker 1: into a bolus that is going to pass down our throats,
Speaker 1: preparing a package for shipment to the rest of the
Speaker 1: digestive system. There's nothing more appetizing than thinking about the
Speaker 1: lubrication of a bolus going down your throat, right, And
Speaker 1: then you know, ultimately that's what a French kisses. A
Speaker 1: french kiss are two individuals deciding to link uh the
Speaker 1: initial stages of their digestive system and to manipulate each
Speaker 1: other's um uh, you know, a oral manipulation. Limb. It's
Speaker 1: a beautiful moment. I just got a brilliant idea for
Speaker 1: an episode in the future. It should just be called
Speaker 1: Robert and Joe ruined Kissing, and we just like we
Speaker 1: just destroyed. We just take it to the point where
Speaker 1: nobody who listens will ever do it again. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: coming this Valentine's Day to a stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: mind episode near you? Well, I have another one here.
Speaker 1: This is another short one and we're not going to
Speaker 1: spend much time on to kind of close out the episode.
Speaker 1: But their medical education prize uh, this one went to A.
Speaker 1: Kira hora Uchi for the medical report colin Oscopy in
Speaker 1: the sitting position Lessons learned from self colinoscopy self colonoscopy. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna read the abstract on this one. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: just read it. Colin Oscopy is typically done in the
Speaker 1: supine position, with the patient's position varied as needed to
Speaker 1: assist instrument insertion. We found that a newly developed small
Speaker 1: caliber variable stiffness colonoscope design for colonoscopy and pediatric patients
Speaker 1: was especially useful in patients with difficult colonoscopy. The outside
Speaker 1: diameter is ten point three millimeters, and the working length,
Speaker 1: the field of view, and the range of the tip
Speaker 1: flection are similar to those of standard uh kolonoscopes. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't have much to say about this one.
Speaker 1: It kind of calls back to our and we did
Speaker 1: an entire episode on on the evolution of the anus,
Speaker 1: so it's not like we're shy about discussing this part
Speaker 1: of the human anatomy. But I think this is one
Speaker 1: of those studies that basically they honored it because of
Speaker 1: the whole uh self colonoscopy aspect of the title. I
Speaker 1: suspect that is what set them off. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: the self colonoscopy. Though at the same time it's important
Speaker 1: because this is an invalid and important diagnostic method for
Speaker 1: for for human health. Oh yeah, colonoscopies are important. All right. Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna go ahead and pinch off
Speaker 1: this particular episode of to to Blow Your Mind, but
Speaker 1: we're coming back in uh in the next episode, and
Speaker 1: we're going to discuss the remaining Ignobel Prize winners, UH,
Speaker 1: some of them in more detail, certainly than we than
Speaker 1: we spent with the colonoscopy study. There's some really good
Speaker 1: ones in the next episode, indeed, acording more, including morning Wood.
Speaker 1: So come back for that. Uh. In the meantime, if
Speaker 1: you want to check out more episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where
Speaker 1: we'll find all the episodes of the podcast. You'll find
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