Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
FEEDBACK鈥橲 favourite awards, , were handed out on 18 September at Harvard University by , editor of the Annals of Improbable Research. The prizes honour research that makes you laugh, then think: this year, largely about sanity.
Banana-skin science
PRATFALLS are a timeless laugh-inducer. Kiyoshi Mabuchi and his colleagues at Kitasato University in Tokyo noted, however, that the simple question of the frictional coefficient of banana skin has not been answered to date (). So they gathered bananas, leather-soled shoes, samples of linoleum and wood flooring and a set of transducers to measure slippage at normal walking pace.
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Pressing a shoe down on the peel squeezes water from the inside layer, forming a gel with such low friction that your foot slips at any angle greater than 3.8 degrees from the vertical. For this they earned the Ig Nobel prize in physics. Further experiments found friction was about 60 per cent higher on an apple peel.
Feedback has already provoked cruel laughter by pre-confirming the researchers鈥� finding that shoes have essentially no friction on slanted ice.
Edward Vine鈥檚 household has acquired a 鈥淗anging Moth Proofer鈥�. He 鈥渉as to say鈥� that hanging is 鈥渘ot a method of reducing the moth population that had occurred to me鈥�
Jesus on toast
WHAT makes people see faces in random patterns? It鈥檚 not crazy 鈥� it has a scientific name. Face pareidolia creates the man on the moon, the face on Mars and Elvis in a slice of tomato. But its origin was unknown.
Kang Lee at the University of Toronto and his China-based colleagues won the neuroscience prize for their solution. They showed volunteers a series of purely random patterns, but told them that half contained faces. The volunteers duly said they saw faces in 37 per cent of the patterns. Brain scans revealed activity in the fusiform face area, responsible for recognising real faces, they report in 鈥淪eeing Jesus in Toast: Neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia鈥� (). Spookily, when the team combined those random patterns that seemed to be faces, the resultant image had two shadowy eyes and a nose.
鈥淚t鈥檚 not maladaptive,鈥� says Lee. 鈥淲hen you鈥檙e looking eagerly to see something it can speed up your processing.鈥� Thus your hundreds-times-great grandparents were those who could discern fastest who or what was coming over the hill.
Cats and depression
DOG fans will, we fear, be quoting the research that won the mental health prize. David Hanauer at the University of Michigan Medical School went data-mining in electronic records, for possible links between medical conditions.
The 鈥渃ompletely unexpected鈥� result was that 41 per cent of the 750 patients with cat bites 鈥� many of whom, by hypothesis, will have cats 鈥� were depressed. 鈥淲e were looking for anything interesting, and this one really jumped out as a strange and bizarre correlation.鈥�
Depression affected only 9 per cent of the total pool of 1.3 million patients, and 29 per cent of dog-bite patients (). Do depressed people seek out cats, or do cats depress their owners? Hanauer sighs: 鈥淥ur paper raises more questions than it answers.鈥�
Meanwhile Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and his colleagues found that intelligence and novelty-seeking scores in men conscripted to the Czech army were both lower if they were infected by the cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii. They also suggest the parasite might be linked to schizophrenia (see and New 杏吧原创, 17 October 2009, p 48).
Dog alignment
PEOPLE on the other side of the cat-dog divide may puzzle over the finding that earned Vlastimil Hart of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague and colleagues the biology prize. They wanted to know if dogs align their bodies with magnetic field lines, as cattle, deer and red foxes do. Observing the alignment of dogs as they relieved themselves was a route 鈥渢o obtaining large sets of data independent of time and space鈥�, they explain (). Two years of observing 70 dogs of 37 breeds showed that the animals do indeed prefer to align their bodies north-south along magnetic field lines.
Feedback notes that one male Borzoi accounted for 2478 of the 5582 urinations seen during the experiment. We wonder what that says about the mental health of the dog or of its data-gathering walker.
More to come
NEXT week, we shall explore the reasons for biologists dressing up to try to convince reindeer they are polar bears, the icky secrets of innovative sausages and the amazing curative powers of salt pork (under medical supervision).
Missing units
FINALLY, seeking a metaphorical comparison to aid readers in comprehending the number of unusual units that have been deployed to aid readers, for example by comparing masses to blue whales, we lit on the idea that this would be a 鈥渕etametaphor鈥� (13 September). A production error left us announcing: 鈥淲e therefore estimate that one unusual unit is鈥�.
Of course, there exists at least one unusual unit. The words that had disappeared off the page were 鈥渞epresented by 2 microBritannica鈥�. We related the quantity of unusual units to the canonical encyclopedia, but ended up with a bit of a wikiMess.
