Homing pigeon missiles, dead trout swimming, butt breathing honored with Ig Nobel Prize With less than a month to go before the Nobel Prizes are handed out for the most worthy scientific discoveries of the preceding year, it would be remiss of The Register not to observe the honors conferred by the gong's bratty little brother, the Ig Nobel Prize. The satirical ceremony has been run annually since 1991 by the …
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If I recall correctly, they weren't homing pigeons. Instead they were trained to peck seed on the outline of a ship, and the idea was that - given an appropriate window on the missile - they would peck on the window, and that could be used for steering. A little like the one about training dogs to run under tanks, and then send them out with bobns strapped to their backs. And about as successful.
like the one about training dogs to run under tanks, [...] And about as successful.
The pigeon experiments were successful. It's just that advances in electronics made electronics more useful.
The dog experiments were not successful. They trained explosive dogs to return to friendly vehicles.
Not really chicken powered, just chicken heated. (See Blue Peacock nuclear landmine)
imanidiot,
No. Chicken powered. It was a poultronium fusion device. Poultronium was discovered a couple of years ago, when a chicken tried to cross the Large Hadron Collider. It was vapourised in a matter of peckoseconds - and all that remained was a heavy metal which turned out to be both fissile and weapons grade. Rather than working by implosion, this device is spun in a strong magnetic field in order to create the chain reaction. Research has been ongoing since - to create the rotisserie bomb. The most devastating weapon yet devised by mankind.
"The dog experiments were not successful. They trained explosive dogs to return to friendly vehicles."
Wasn't the problem that they trained then on the smell of the fuel and used petrol like their own vehicles while the enemy used Diesel, or vice versa? Or was that a different experiment?
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It sure beats having tobacco smoke blown up one's rectum, which was something doctors in the 1700s actually used to do to resuscitate the presumed dead – hence the phrase.
Thankfully, we've moved onto defibrillators.
I can imagine an anally inserted (and fired) defibrillator would wake the dead.
The Darwin awards. From what I understand were put out to pasture (so to speak)
The latest and I must say rather talented laureates I could find were from 2022 https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2022.html.
While there is a massive pool of also rans there are still a smallish number of truly creative individuals unintentionally achieving self destruction who deserve their well earned recognition of a Darwin Award.* Would be a great shame if they were denied postumous immortality. ;)
* I suspect Erasmus Darwin might have appreciated these awards more than Charles. He preferred the Lunar Society to the loony society of becoming the physician to George III.
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And the 9th award winner for 2024, in the Demography category (between 8-Chemistry and 10-Biology, hopped-scotch-whiskeyed over slightly in Richard's Saturday night's alright cool list ...) is: "Supercentenarians and the Oldest-Old Are Concentrated into Regions with No Birth Certificates and Short Lifespans" ... oddly enough ... ! (for an even ten)
Sounds a bit like "pining for the fjords" but actually an interesting if odd study.
The dead trout were towed rather than "swimming" behind the vortex shedding cylinder in order to determine the contribution of purely passive motion to the living fish's Kármán* gait.
I didn't know that fish naturally position themselve in vortices rather in undisturbed water. Must discover why - better oxygenation?
* presumably named afer von Kármán
Agreed! This use of Karman Vortex Streets to swim upstream, even when "dead" (but still flexible), is quite hip. Some folks did interesting simulations of that in 2016 (MATLAB and OpenFoam). Their Fig. 14 (pdf p.13) shows an articulated "Trout robot inside the simulated Karman Vortex Street" for example.
Ultrafast Miniature Robotic Swimmers (that "noninvasively access the enclosed space in the human body") might also benefit from those vortex streets, or at least from "vortices generated by [their] tailbeats" (Fig. 2) (like flying robot insects also).
"This use of Karman Vortex Streets to swim upstream, even when "dead" (but still flexible), is quite hip. "
This might explain something that I have occasionally wondered about - some years ago when visiting Lake Como I was surprised to see a used condom on the surface determinedly swimming towards shore against the wind. We live and learn.
The coins one has taken a while for someone to look into. I noticed a strong same-side bias in myself while at school and concluded similarly that the best guarantee of a fair flip was not to observe the coin when placed:
> "Furthermore, the data revealed considerable between-people variation in the degree of this same-side bias. Our data also confirmed the generic prediction that when people flip an ordinary coin -- with the initial side-up randomly determined -- it is equally likely to land heads or tails: Pr(heads)=0.500"
Having wondered whether technique influenced my personal bias, I found that careful rotation of the hand between flipping and capture led to fairly predictable results - keeping the hand steady and rotating it "upward" (about the index finger) prior to capture retained the same-side bias I originally noticed, whereas "downward" (about the little finger instead) led to the opposite expectation.
I also suspected others' mileage may vary in typical circumstances, which seems borne out by their summary.
As I child I noticed the opposite - my flips would most often land the opposite side up. I fairly quickly assessed that it was down to consistency of technique - if I launch and catch it the same every time, the outcome should be the same (barring external forces)
I accept that the margins are quite tight, but I could predict the outcome and be correct in about 75% of attempts.
(icon for when the launch went wrong)
"The coins one has taken a while for someone to look into. I noticed a strong same-side bias in myself while at school and concluded similarly that the best guarantee of a fair flip was not to observe the coin when placed:"
And, when you noticed this at school, did you go out of your way not to look when tossing a coin with friends to make a decision, or did you look very carefully to gain an advantage? :-)
The medical one seems old hat. It has been known for ages that the placebo effect is real and increases if the patient thinks they have taken the actual drug, so for an effective trial the placebo should have all the same side effects as the real stuff. This raises ethical issues if these side effects are unpleasant or harmful.
I don't think that's quite right, because the patient won't necessarily know what side effects the real stuff has (and anyway, side effects vary from person to person). But I am reminded of something I read decades ago about making placebos taste really unpleasant because the patient will think that something that nasty must be effective.
One interesting, but unfortunate, side effect of modern drug trials is that placebos become more effective.
If you have people come into a lab with lots of flashing machines that go ping, lots of people in white coats and have them sign lots of impressive forms about risk of death - they believe the stuff must be powerful and get better. Irrespective of if it's real. Making the placebos have side effects will make this worse
It means a lot of safe effective drugs have failed trials simply because they aren't statistically better than the placebo.
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I'm sure I once watched a TV programme about using pigeons in maritime search and rescue aircraft (rotary or fixed wing).
They had been trained to peck in the direction of any "objects" in the water.
They were mounted in a frame with a sensor array in front of them. and pecked "in the general direction" of the target.
The demo of locating a target seemed a bit...vague, like there over there...ish!
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