Laughing and thinking

Party hats were donned, plastic beakers full of wine were quaffed and hearty cheers were bellowed. It was most definitely party time here on the Science Lite desk a few weeks back – for it was the most important time of our year – the Ig Nobels!

It is our Christmas, birthday and Eurovision all rolled into one. So much more than a mere sardonic finger wag at the apparently ridiculous, the Igs celebrate scientific originality and curiosity in their most spectacular forms.

First make them laugh, then make them think – so goes the mantra of the Ig Nobels – and as the detritus of our celebration begins to clear, it is time to take you through some of this year’s victors and allow you to do just that.

First up – the Medicine Prize. The spoils went to a Japanese team for finding that exposure to opera music can help mice recover successfully after a heart transplant. Interactions between sensory input and immune responses have been noted before, but this research went further to probe specifics…and oh what specifics they were. Amazingly they found opera could affect generation of regulatory CD4⁺CD25⁺ cells and up-regulation of anti-inflammatory cytokines. All this meant that transplanted tissue was more likely to survive.

From high-brow murine musical tastes to the astronomical abilities of dung beetles. The joint Prize in Biology and Astronomy went to a team who made the staggering discovery that when dung beetles get lost, they navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way. It turns out those plucky little poo rollers can keep their hard earned swag going in a straight line using celestial cues, and indeed lose this ability when the night sky is overcast. Not only does this fabulous study represent the first convincing demonstration for the use of the starry sky for orientation in insects, it also provides the first documented use of the Milky Way for orientation in the animal kingdom.

It can sometimes be hard to spot where the ‘make them think’ component comes in on, for example, this year’s Probability Prize winning research. It went to a group based in Edinburgh for making two related discoveries – first, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.

Peculiar, yes. Chuckle worthy, definitely – but insightful? Surely not? Well, yes actually. Information on standing and lying behaviour of cows can be used for oestrus detection, early diagnosis of disorders and to evaluate welfare consequences of changes in housing and management.

The same is true of the Archaeology Prize. Prima facie utterly preposterous – Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl of the State University of New York were awarded this year’s prize for parboiling a dead shrew, then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then manually examining everything excreted during subsequent days. Utter madness surely?

If nothing else they should have been rewarded for their willingness to get their hands dirty – both metaphorically and literally. Yet it was all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not. This will in turn allow archaeologists and biologists to better judge the digested remains of vertebrates – and who knows what this may lead to? A new species discovery? An insight into a complex ecosystem? As always with science – the causal relationship between discoveries can be delightfully unpredictable.

Proving that science is so rarely – if ever – futile, this year’s Igs have truly made us laugh and made us think. And to all the winners, we offer our heartiest handshakes…except those shrew bothering fellows from State University of New York, to them we’ll just doff our party hats.