The Ig Nobel Prize

Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Leighann Lord dive into the strange world of the Ig® Nobel Prize for research that first makes you laugh, and then makes you think. Read more and listen to the full episode at http://www.startalkradio.net/show/the-ig-nobel-prize

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, right here in the Big Apple. What else would New York City be, Leanne?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  The medium-sized apple, depending on attrition of the population?

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got Leanne Lord across for me as my co-host. Thanks, Leanne, for coming in for this.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Thank you for the invitation.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. We don't get enough of you here.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  No, no, you don't, actually.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get some more. Now, you know who we invited into studio today? You see him, but I have to, you don't know who he is yet.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  No, I don't.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His name is Mark Abrams.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, the Mark Abrams?

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good. You're good, you're good.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I catch on.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're good at a cocktail party. Oh, you're the one, you're the one I always thought.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I am actually fabulous at cocktail parties. I really am. It's on my card.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, he's co-founder of the Science Humor Magazine. You ever thought you'd see those three words together in the same phrase?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Actually, after meeting you, yes.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you, thank you. It's a magazine I've known, like, my whole professional life, annals of improbable research. Annals of improbable research.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Which you have to pronounce very carefully.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. And he's founder of the Nobel Prize Ceremony. Well, no, we already have one of those.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He had to find a different name.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Slightly.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, okay. That's actually a word. I have to, like, look that one up again. If you're Ig Noble.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, you had to look something up?

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I did, just to make sure.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  I don't feel bad now.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I had an idea, but I had to look it up just to confirm.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're Ig Noble, it's like you ain't what anybody should be emulating.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Hmm, I have a lot of that in my life.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, he's got an Ig Noble Ceremony, like, in Cambridge every year. This guy's out of control. And it's, it's, what he does is he combs that all the research that's done. I think occasionally someone might contribute something directly to it. But beyond that, you look around and see what kind of science has been done. It's a little quirky, and you say, why did what? And then you find, hey, oh, ay, that's kind of interesting.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or weird, or they should be institutionalized. There's some reaction to the people who conduct the research.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  You mean those things that I see and I go, somebody got a grant for that?

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Like that kind of stuff?

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. This guy is like, knows where those are done and who's done it. And whether or not they should be granted an award. So, let me bring him into the conversation. Mark, Mark Abrams, welcome to StarTalk Radio.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Thank you, thank you. It's a great honor to be here.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, thank you.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Welcome.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  With both of you.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, you're based up in Boston?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  I am.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, cool.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Guilty. Guilty man of New York.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Cambridge even.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the, the, the, the other Cambridge, our Cambridge.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yes and, and no. Yeah, yeah, depending on who you choose to be today, yeah.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This America Jack.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. But you're everywhere, so.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  You're man of the people.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, tell me, can you just submit a paper directly to the annals of improbable research? Would you read, or is it entirely just, so what, what's the construct of this?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  All right, here's, here's what it's about. It's, and it took about seven years of, of trying to describe this to come up with a phrase that people seem to understand. It's all about things that make people laugh and then think.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not laugh and then cry.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  You can do that if you like it.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the best kind, actually.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  People cry when they laugh.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those are the two things for, for drama, you know, the smiling and crying face.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Often they go together in this case. It's things that, when you first hear about them, or you first see them, they're funny. But they're the kind of funny that a week later, the thing is still rattling around in your head. And you really want to go find your best friends and tell them about it and argue about it.

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you want to create, it so becomes almost a, a, not a meme, but a little brain virus that you can't get rid of.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  In a way, yeah. It's, it's things that make you wonder. And that phrase, of course, can mean many things.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  I like, it's like, it's sneaky science.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So give me, what's, what's the top, what's the best example you would give right after telling someone that that's the kind of research you look for?

• 4:27Speaker 02

  There's a paper that was published in a biology journal in Europe. It's a

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a legit journal?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a very small one. It's read by only a few scientists who are specialists in that field.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be true for any truly specialist journal.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  That's true for even the big ones, even nature and science, which are filled with reports that sometimes can make a person's career because they got a paper published in nature or in science. But the truth of the matter is that not very many people read those papers. Those papers are so very specialized, even the words in them, that not many

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A few dozen, maybe a hundred people in the world even know what that one is talking about.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  And those are in the, the absolute top journals. So when you get down to the really specialized ones, not many people see these. Anyway, somebody saw one article that was in this particular journal and they sent us a copy and that article

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so I, I feel better now, realizing that you are not the one

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  combing every single freaking journal in the world.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  I and, and my friends and colleagues are always looking at things, but every day we get a flood of things. Thank, the internet made life much better. The flood just is increasing all the time. So there's a flood of stuff coming in from people who notice things. This particular one that came to mind when you asked, it, this report is the first scientifically documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.

• 5:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  My blood just ran cold. Did anybody else? Cause somebody's watching this.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  I would be happy to give you more detail.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, how much more detail does one need than homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck? That title has all the detail you need.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Neil, it's seldom a question of need.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  It's a matter of desire.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Now it's a car accident. Now I gotta stop and watch.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very interesting analogy.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's rubber necking on what's going on on the side of the road.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  I am indulging in my natural human instincts. I'm not rising above them at this moment. I need to know about the duck.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So what motivated this research?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Well, first of all.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you get to know that even?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  First of all, I should not exactly correct, but channel what Leanne just said. You need to know about the duck, you said. There were two ducks involved in this.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Uh, yes.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the dead one and the live one, I would presume.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Yes. Would you like to hear the story?

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  I have to. I'm sorry, Neil, I have to.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  The paper was written by a man named Kees Mulikker. He's Dutch. He is the curator of a museum in the city of Rotterdam. It's the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, a very nice museum. A few years ago, they put up a new wing with all glass walls. And from the very beginning, birds every day slam into that thing. They don't see at certain times of day, depending on the light. And the people who work there got used to the... They pay very little attention. But one day, Kees Mulikker was sitting there.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So the sound of birds snapping their neck, flying into a window they don't see.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  They don't all snap their neck.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The natural din of sounds in their day.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  If this happens several hundred times a day where you work, you would get used to it very quickly.

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I would stop it from happening. I'm sorry.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  No, you would adjust. Human beings adjust to all sorts of things.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  You would see if you could find a way to stop it. But as it happens, this story has taken many twists and turns. And I've become very friendly with the scientist who wrote this. And as a result of that, one of the things I've learned is that there is something in the very rough neighborhood of about a billion birds that die every year in the US from colliding with buildings. It happens a lot.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A billion.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  That's about the usual estimate from the people who have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how often this happens. And that's just in this country.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  And yet another study.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  There are many of them. But back to the case.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  One day, he was sitting there, Kees Mulikker was, and he heard an especially loud... And he was curious, so he went and he looked out the window and he saw that there was a mallard duck on the ground that pretty clearly had just slammed into the building at very high speed, broken its neck and was dead. While he was watching, a second mallard duck flew in, landed next to the dead one, and began engaging in activity with the dead one. Now, Case-

• 9:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Freshly dead.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Yes, freshly dead if you want to think of it that way.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, Case studies birds and he realized quite quickly that he had never heard of anything quite like this happening. So he decided to, and he did, get his, uh, his notebook and his camera and he moved a little closer to that spot. He sat there taking notes while this was happening.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As any good scientist would do.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Yes, or at least many. And he continued taking notes as this unfolded over the next seventy-five minutes.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  So clearly, these, these weren't resuscitation efforts.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apparently not.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Mallard duck, mouth to mouth.

• 9:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or how do we know he's just not a, a, a, a bird pervert? I mean-

• 9:54Speaker 01

  A deviant bird?

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, the guy taking the notes. Like, the internet was down that, that afternoon.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  How do you-

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Okay, first of all, no, this was in Rotterdam. Their internet's never down.

• 10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right, because when the internet's not going, it's going on in real life in front of you.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Neil, I suspect there are people-

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I forgot, it's the Netherlands, I forgot.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  I suspect there are people who, hearing about an astronomer in New York City who, uh, has been very interested in a little planet, or non-planet, had a similar question about that astronomer they'd never met, but that's just a guess. Anyway-

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you know planets mounting other planets to make baby planets. I mean, this is the, that's the difference between-

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Not that we know of.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  And another theory is born.

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you make more planets?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  How do you make more planets? There's a mommy planet and a daddy planet.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Let's not abandon this. So, say you've got a big planet and a little planet that's much denser slams into it and it splits the big one into two.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That can happen.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Now, you've just made some baby planets.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  By this method you described.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one watching that would assert that the cosmic objects were making love, that's all.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  They might now, after hearing us talk about-

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Don't judge, Neil, don't judge.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I should not judge other people's, but-

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Yes, do not judge other people's love of astronomy.

• 11:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So seventy-five minutes of data and he wrote a paper on this.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it was only seventy-five minutes, by the way, because it was at the end of the workday and he was getting hungry, wanted to go home to dinner, so he went outside and he broke it up and he collected the dead specimen for the museum. He later did an autopsy, that's how he knows that the victim was male as well as the other bird. And he wrote this up and got published and we gave it an Ig Nobel Prize.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  You had to.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Which brought a tremendous amount of fame to him around the world and offers to write books and be on TV and radio and he's got a whole side career going because of this. But it also brought that study and this scientist to the attention of other people who study birds and who study animals. It's reached the point now, it was about ten years ago that we gave him that prize, it's reached the point now where, as Case likes to say, if there's an animal anywhere in the world misbehaving, Case will hear about it, maybe in a week or so.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again, that's value judging that having sex with a dead bird by another bird who's homosexual is misbehaving.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Right, we're putting human values on it.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just value judge that.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  That is making a judgment.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is just nature being nature.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  I have to ask, was his first book called Duck Love? I have to know.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  No, his first one was called The Duck Guy. His second book was about-

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did Duck Dynasty folks hear about this?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  This was pre-Duck Dynasty.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  And these have only been published in Dutch. His second book about a different topic, which he learned about because somebody brought it to his attention, knowing that this is the guy who collects unusual things. His second book has the title, The Butt Crack of the Tick.

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. This sounds like sexually frustrated science.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Radio listeners cannot see the look on Leanne's face.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  No, they can't, they can't. Yeah, I'm stunned, the butt crack of the tick.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ticks do have big butts, though, when you look at them. They're all butt. Think about it. They got the little front part where they have the legs.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Why do you know this?

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I've seen tick butts. I just don't remember seeing a butt crack.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Tell us more, Neil.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you are really digging your grave here, sir.

• 13:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I could get a research paper out of this if you keep...

• 13:17Speaker 01

  And perhaps an Ig Nobel Prize. Oh, my goodness.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep doing that. So...

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Probably are things that live in there, bacteria and...

• 13:26Speaker 01

  I can't.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, don't even go there. Right, right.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. I want to spend more time in a second segment on previous winners of your Ig Nobel Prize, but I want to first understand the Journal of Improbable Research. What kind of things land there?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Oh, birds and all sorts of things. Yeah, the annals, please, of improbable research. The heart of the magazine, magazine comes out six times a year, and the heart of it is little pieces, little quotations from scientific studies that are published. And there are lots of studies published. The last time anybody did a count just of journals, this is science journals being published, and this was about 15 years ago, there were about 25,000 scientific journals being published. And that's, that's if you ignore the little tiny ones that are just within somebody's department somewhere. So there's so much stuff that nobody ever sees all this. So the heart of the magazine is little citations, little, little quotes from some of these things

• 14:22Speaker 02

  that all, if we've done a good job, have that quality, that they're funny, and you also want to go and tell somebody about them.

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they were not intended to be funny?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're funny sort of out of context, in a sense.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Some of them are funny in context. There are some things that just are funny.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a good example?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Uh, well, we'll get back to the duck again, you know.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but that duck got the Ig Nobel Prize, right? Okay, but I just want to, just something that's just random that you would choose to land to...

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Okay, here's one. Here's one. This, this one also got a prize, but the people who did it did not think there was anything funny about it when they did. It was done by seven Australian scientists, published in a journal of ergonomics, which is studying how you build and make things that are comfortable to use versus uncomfortable to use, or dangerous versus undangerous to use.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard that that only arose as a thing when baby boomers started getting arthritis and turned old. And they said, we got to invent things that serve our hand and.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  They did not want to go quietly into that good night, did they?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  I would love to know if that's true.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, it correlates. Whether or not it's a cause and effect is another thing.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's when OXO came out, you know, it's what just when I needed OXO, it's there with all of the kitchen implements.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Thank you, baby boomers.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So go on, but I I interrupted.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  This study that these Australian scientists published was called an analysis of the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are these, I mean, but sheep have legs.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Sheep do have legs, which is sometimes part of the problem. We gave these guys an Ig Nobel Prize, and it was only on the phone call when I was offering them the prize that the guy on the other end realized that what they'd done is funny.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  The reason they did it, they live in a part of Australia where sheep are a major industry. And people in that industry had a problem. They called some scientists and asking them, can you please make things better?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Can you talk to our sheep?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, the problem is that there's a there's there's a large building and thousands of sheep are brought in at the same time to be sheared, to have their wool cut off. To be and and the the cutting is done with big electric clippers, which are very dangerous. There are a lot of injuries every year to the sheep and to the people using it. And things go much smoother if the sheep will move where you want them to move when you want them to. But sheep don't always do what you want them to do.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Like people.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Yep. So the scientists were asked, can you, is there anything we can do? Make the building a different shape or anything to make this stuff go quicker and less dangerously? That's what the the report is about. One of their conclusions, one of the things that these scientists decided after working on this for a year or so was very simple, and it boils down to, it's easier to drag a sheep downhill.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than in any other direction?

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Yes. In some of these buildings, they were trying to drag sheep uphill, and the sheep were not.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They could have asked an astronomer, you know, we we know all about gravity.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yay, science.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  I look forward to your next ergonomics paper about sheep, dear astronomer.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. When StarTalk comes back, we have Mark Abrams as our special guest.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Are there any constellations that involve sheep?

• 17:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, no. What was the ram? There's Aries the ram. I guess that's sheep, isn't it? A boy ram, a boy sheep. Is there a boy sheep? Yeah, it's U's and rams. So we got it. We have sheep in the sky. We got it. So when we come back, more with Mark Abrams and the Ig Nobel Prize.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, Leanne Lord. My co-host, we've got as a guest, Mark Abrams down from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he runs the Journal of Improbable Research and annually awards the Ig Nobel Prize for science research that, that...

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Makes you laugh.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  And then?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  And then think.

• 18:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then think, but I, it makes me laugh.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  See, I was listening.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then cry. But, but, Leanne, you had a question left over from segment one. What was it?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  I, I did. You guys used a term. You bandied back and forth, and I feel I generationally missed it. What's OXO?

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OXO. Am I pronouncing it right? I think it's an entire brand of kitchen implements where when you touch your hand to the handles, it's like, hey, I like this in my hand. I don't even want to let go of it.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  I'll see you cooking with fancy stuff.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it's on any wall. No. It costs a couple of dollars more, but that's it.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, see, yeah, yeah, yeah. The couple of dollars more and the, the upping of the, of the tone of your voice tells me everything I need to know.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, analyzing the tone of my voice.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  You went up an octave. So, yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  And if I can add some fuel to this fire, that company is British. So these are British expensive.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  British implements.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So next time, look at the wall of kitchen implements and there's a whole section of OXO.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  I don't think they have that at Walmart.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just hold them in your hand. Hold them in your hand and you'll see they feel more comfortable.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  So I'll buy better kitchen implements and no food.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  People have to make choices.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  I'm haggling for a raise here on StarTalk. That's what I'm doing.

• 20:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So your Nobel Prizes, I'm told you give ten a year, is that right?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  We give ten, yeah, every year since 1991.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And each is in a category?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I was reading over some of the categories, they're hilarious. So, what was it, in 2010, when did the Public Health Prize for, well, I gotta read this, because you won't believe it, you'd think I'd, "Scientists from the Czech Republic, Japan, India, and the United States investigated whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat." That got an Ig Nobel Award.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, that was this year, 2014.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  2014.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  And that prize was split between two different teams, one of them based in Europe, one of them based here and India. The Europe team is really headed by a colorful guy, you should look this guy up on the internet, he's the most interesting-looking person you have ever seen. His name is Jaroslav Flegor, F-L-E-G-R, he's from Czechoslovakia.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A name like that, you gotta be interesting-looking, right?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  And he, for 20 or 30 years, has been looking at a particular parasite called Toxoplasma that pretty commonly lives in cats.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a natural parasite to the cat?

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yep. And it's easily transmitted from cats to people who hang around the cats. And what...

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, if a cat has this parasite, the cat is not sick.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just normal for a healthy cat.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha, go on.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Well, in some cases, and nobody understands why, sometimes it goes one way, sometimes the other, that sometimes the cat seems to behave just like a normal cat, but sometimes, because it has this parasite, the cat will start behaving in ways that are very destructive to itself.

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That are toxoplasmic to itself, okay?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yes, toxoplasmosis is the disease. And sometimes, apparently, that happens to humans. And these people are now wondering, well, have been for a while, and other people that, you've heard the phrase "cat lady",

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  of somebody who owns hundreds of cats and behaves in a very, very eccentric way, that maybe a lot of those people are infected with this parasite.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does part of the manifestation of that infection make you want to acquire more cats? Because the old cat lady never has just one cat.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  That's, well, that's the thinking that this probably happens, yeah.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is a way for the parasite to reproduce itself?

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By getting you to want more cats that contain the parasite.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  I'll go with it.

• 22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a brilliant parasite.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I, I, all this time I thought it was the cats. That were in charge.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all about the parasite.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  And there are other parasites that behave in similar ways in other animals.

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what are some of the disorders, I mean, when I think of a cat lady, they're a little odd, but a lot of odd older people. So I, I never uniquely implicated the fact that it's a cat lady. So.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  It's not always a cat lady, it's not always a lady.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  But they're.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're crazy cat dudes.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  There, there are a whole range and they're, yeah.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, pause. How many crazy cat dudes do you know?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  I'm dating, there are lots of crazy cat dudes.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Okay, and, and, and you find yourself especially attracted to?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thank you, yes, I was, I was gonna ask that.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  What happens is they hide the cat and then I find out there's a cat.

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  You know, because you don't necessarily, the first date isn't necessarily at their apartment.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  How does one hide a cat?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Well, it doesn't, it's not, it's, you don't lead with the cat.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She doesn't go home with the first date.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every night.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  And it, and it may not, it's not something they might, they might not lead with, like, hi, my name is so and so, I have a cat. You know, that would be a little off putting.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  If you've had so many bad experiences, I would expect that by now you lead with the question, hi.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Hi, Kay, do you have a cat?

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Hi, I find you very attractive, do you have a cat?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Not even, do you have a job, is your mom crazy, do you have a cat?

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm looking at these symptoms, you've got obsessive compulsive disorders, schizophrenia, and that leads me to wonder whether these legends of cat people, these are people with multiple personality disorders, Catwoman. You, what's, and the Natasha Kinsky film Cat People. Well, I, I think there are more than one version of that film, her, the one she's in is the one I remember. These are people.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  I wonder why.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are people who, who the cat manifestation interferes with their psychological state.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  I heard.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you think this might go way back?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  I heard you laugh when you first brought up this topic and now I hear you asking very good questions thinking about it.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm not crying yet.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  That's why we gave a prize.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll be crying soon when it's, when we're done.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  We, we gave the other, we shared, or we, we gave this prize to two groups. The other group recently looked at a lot of medical records, I mean, a lot, many, many thousands. And they looked at the records of people who had been treated for having, because they were bitten by a cat. And they found that some large fraction of those people who had been treated medically for having been bitten by a cat also had been treated at some point for depression. No, this is, as Neil, as you were saying, this is, this is a correlation. It's not necessarily the case that one of these causes the other, but it's mighty interesting that these things do seem to go hand in hand sometimes.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Worth further study.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so just, I'm trying to understand what it is that's correlating with what? Is it that owning a cat could lead to depression? And, or is it...

• 25:27Speaker 01

  But then he's saying it's coming off...

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That people who are depressed are more likely to own cats?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  But it's coming off the cat bite. Those are the people that were studied that had that hyperfracture, that hypnosis.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, the cat bite was just an excuse to get, to now do the test because they're in the hospital. I mean, that's, that got them to the hospital. Plenty of people are bitten who don't go to the hospital.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's, there are all kinds of questions that come from this, but the, so the, the simple fact that they found was that in the hospital records, people who have been bitten by a cat, you know, and enough that it shows up on a hospital medical record somewhere, many of those people also have on their same record that they have been treated for depression.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what are we trying to correlate here? That depressed people buy cats? That owning a cat makes you depressed? That depressed people are more likely to be bitten by a cat? What are we, what are we looking for here?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  The answer to your question...

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all of the above, that's gonna be the answer.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Yes, is, yes, these are good questions. And that's as far as it goes right now.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  And this makes you very interesting at a cocktail party.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I like, I like...

• 26:26Speaker 01

  I'm doing this at a cocktail party. I'm bringing this up at my next party.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Answers and insight here. Leave me with 20 questions dangling in front of my face.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  You're a scientist. You're supposed to have questions dangling in front of your face.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, excuse me, if I have the question.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  See how impatient he gets when he has a good question, he doesn't have the answer? This is what drives him forward.

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  This is science in action, ladies and gentlemen.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Allow, allow me to clarify.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Oh, dear.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love me an unanswered question.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  That's a t-shirt.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But not after you've already, not after you've already done the freaking research, okay? Don't do research and say, here are four questions, we don't have the answer. Go back and do the damn experiment.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  And I'll be applying for my grant to do just that.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Next question.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question. So, well, how about the schizophrenia and compulsive disorder related to cat ownership? Is that?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  How about it?

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you think it's, is it that parasite or is it something else about the cats?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know. We just give these prizes. You know, we don't.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just hand them out?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  We stir up trouble. That's what we do, sir.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, others. Uh, my favorite category you have is safety engineering. That's just the idea that that would be a category.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  I, I, I think I know which, which particular achievement you're gonna mention.

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go for it. Which one, which one?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Uh, Troy Herdabees, is that the name?

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, which, what's, which is the prize? Yes.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Yes. We, that, in all 24 years we've been doing this, there is one that still stands out in my mind as having been the most difficult one to figure out a category that describes it. It's, it's that one. We finally came up with, we invented the category of safety engineering. The prize went to a man named Troy Herdabees, who lives in Canada, in the city of North Bay, Canada, which I think is about a six or seven hour drive north of Toronto. Um, Troy won an Ig Nobel Prize because he had spent seven years trying to develop and personally test a suit of armor that he hoped would protect him against grizzly

• 28:21Speaker 02

  bears. There are films of his tests. You can see Troy in his suit, which is made from scrounged materials. He had no money, so he'd get stuff from the dump.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is an early Iron Man.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Effort here.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  So, it's safe to assume that Troy doesn't have Netflix? Is that what I'm hearing?

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Well, he may not. Part of the inspiration for this, he said two things drove him to start doing this. One was he had some kind of encounter with a grizzly bear out in the woods, in the Rockies in Canada. And the other was around that same time, he had watched the movie Robocop.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Oh, mercy.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  He blend, yes, that's a good summary. He blended these two. He went, he got some old hockey equipment and some other stuff from the dump. And, and duct tape, and he began building suits and then testing them by having first people do things like throw rocks at him.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can tell you that if his duct tape is, if his suit is held together with duct tape, it will not stop a grizzly bear.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My wife was from Alaska, and before I visited Alaska, I said, I'm gonna bring my Swiss Army knife, so I can defend against the, she said, no.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got the whole, you know, you know what works against a grizzly bear? A shotgun, that's what works against a grizzly bear. You know, thirty ought six.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  You know what works better? A jeep heading in the other direction.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but Troy, there are films of this, you can, you can go online, uh, there was a documentary called Project Grizzly. You can see Troy in these suits, which got very elaborate, the later ones had sheets of titanium and all sorts of things inside them. You can see him being pushed off the side of a cliff, you can, there, there's one piece of film where you see-

• 29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To test the, to test how, how much it protects them.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  That the suit would work, yeah, because he wasn't gonna start by testing with a grizzly bear, you start with small things and work up, you know, bigger and bigger forces. You can see him standing there in his suit, which is so bulky, he can just barely move, if he tries to take a step, he falls over and he can't get up. You see him standing there.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like the old armor, I think the old armor of knights.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's-

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was not, you were not tiptoeing through the tulips.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  They must have gone through the same process, more or less, without grizzly bears, because they were too far south. You see him standing in the suit in the middle of an empty field, and then you see a jeep coming in from the side of the, the film frame at, I think it was twenty, no, forty, forty kilometers an hour, and slam into him. And in this documentary, you hear a radio interview with, with Troy saying, "Yeah, we did that seventeen times."

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Wow, national health insurance is awesome, isn't it? I can't even imagine doing that here, what is the copayment on that?

• 30:52Speaker 02

  The impressive thing about Troy, though, you, you might look on somebody who would choose to do this as being-

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crazy.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Single?

• 30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, single, crazy.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  As being singularly crazy. You might look on, on that person as being that way, but at the same time, it's pretty impressive that he's done all these things and a lot more, and he's still alive, he's very careful.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But has he considered that if you're in the woods where you might be attacked by the grizzly bear, you're in the woods to enjoy the woods? Not to stand there so that you're not eaten by a grizzly bear?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  You're speaking for yourself, you're not speaking for Troy. Troy, after his one encounter with a grizzly bear, decided it was important for him to go back and spend time with a grizzly bear, preferably that one, but another would do.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  You know, I, part of me wants to know the bear's point of view, like, is the bear just sitting there going, "Dude, Troy, can't we just get along?" This is unnecessary, man. It's a misunderstanding.

• 31:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard Franklin Ajay joke about grizzly bears and he said, "I wonder if grizzly bears, before they eat you, I wonder if they're concerned if you were free range."

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there was a guy-

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Free range humans before you get mauled.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  There was another guy who went out and wanted to spend time with grizzly bears and was insisting that he should not have any protection because he and the grizzly bear would commune.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Oh, Lord.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  There was a documentary made about him. It's called Grizzly Man. And it's very, very stirring to watch those two documentaries together.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I bet. I do admire, though-

• 32:31Speaker 02

  He was eaten, by the way, and so was his girlfriend.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  And it was really horrible.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  I bet. I was just gonna say, I do admire what he said, that the sticktuitiveness, to put it very simplistically, of what Troy has methodically done. I mean, that patience, that dedication.

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sticktuitiveness.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay, you're a word lady.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  You don't see that in a lot of people.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some are bag ladies, you're a word lady.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I am a word lady.

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some are cat ladies, you're a word lady.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  I'm a word lady. I accumulate words.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, people who have won these prizes are extraordinary people.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Very dedicated.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you had another safety engineering prize I was reading about where how to capture a terrorist? What's that? We got a minute left. Give me that one in the minute of this segment.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  It's a man who lived in New York City and in the early 1970s, he got a patent for an improved method for capturing airplane hijackers. This method-

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because back in the, that's before hijackers would crash the plane.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They really just wanted to land it somewhere else. I'm old enough to remember that.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Usually Havana, Cuba at that point.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because we had no plane service to Cuba.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if we had a plane service to Cuba, they probably would not have been hijacking. They would have just bought a ticket.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But since we had no access to Cuba from the United States, planes from here to Cuba were hijacked. Okay, go on.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. This method would be to install trap doors in the plane, right outside the cabin, so that the captain could press a button which would open the trap doors, the hijacker would fall into the trap doors, there was some machinery which would automatically package the hijacker up, at which point the bomb bay doors, which were installed in the bottom of the airplane, would open up and the encapsulated hijacker would fall through there, a parachute would open, and police, who had been notified by radio, would be waiting on the ground to capture the-

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Parachuting encapsulated hijacker when he reached the ground.

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's something out of James Bond.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Very.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, StarTalk Radio continues with Mark Abrams.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio, we're back. Yeah.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  I know, I was thinking that. That's like the star sexy StarTalk after dark voice. What is that?

• 34:56Speaker 02

  When you were a little boy, did you practice that?

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  In kindergarten.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk after hours.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a different addition.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  It is, it is.

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We haven't perfected that one yet.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  I can imagine traffic stopping on the street as.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why the fan base is so high.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I don't know. So, Mark, you award the Ig Nobel Prize and a big ceremony in Cambridge each year.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people, and you get like Nobel Prize winners to award it.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've done this from the beginning. We always have a bunch of Nobel Prize winners up.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in Cambridge, you're never that far away from some Nobel Prizes with Harvard and MIT.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  That's right. You go into the men's room and you're standing next to, you don't know who.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  If you go into the men's room, if you go in the women's room, you're still standing next to them. You don't know who, but it's a different setting.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that would be the, okay.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know what would, why the bathroom would need to be specified for when you're standing next to someone who could be important. Does that mean important people are the only ones who pee?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  No, I think it's just saying you could find important people anywhere, even the least likely of places.

• 35:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even in the bathroom, even though we all go to the bathroom. Yes, okay.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  But not necessarily with your CV on your arm.

• 36:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, correct. So, I love these categories. A safety engineering, a peace prize, chemistry prize, physics prize. And one of these, what was the category? I read something about somebody testing the effect of Coca-Cola as a spermicide?

• 36:19Speaker 02

  It may have been a chemistry prize. Yeah, they're. They tested whether Coca-Cola kills sperm.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How did, why, why come up with that?

• 36:30Speaker 02

  These are some doctor.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I like, I like ideas no one has thought of before. But this is you're sitting there, you know, at the soda fountain, there's a Coke. I mean, who's, what state of mind and circumstance leads to this thought? That's really what I want.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Here's the story on this one. Oh, I knew there's a story. Here too. This happened in a lab at Harvard Medical School. Deborah Anderson is the scientist.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like stories of being in there. This happened at a lab.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  They were doing research on, trying to come up with new methods of contraception.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I interrupted you, was a graduate student?

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Deborah Anderson ran the lab.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ran the lab.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  And she had a young, very young doctor, a woman who had grown up in Puerto Rico, who was working in, in the lab. And the young woman told her that in, in the high school that this young woman had gone to in Puerto Rico, she said, all the girls there use Coca-Cola as a contraceptive. And Deborah Anderson laughed and thought this was, this was a bizarre joke. And the young woman explained, I'm not joking. This, this was true. Deborah Anderson checked into it and discovered that around the world, a lot of people then and now use Coca-Cola because they believe it's an effective contraceptive. They use it as a douche.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  That's what led Deborah Anderson to decide, well, let's test whether this stuff does have any effect in killing sperm or not. So they got some sperm and they got four different kinds of Coca-Cola. At that point it was classic Coke, new Coke, diet Coke, and I forget what the other one was. Cherry Coke. It may have been cherry or it may have been some other. I just realized what I said.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, that was, that was, that was, uh huh. They used that the first time, right?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  If you like, I'll introduce you to Deborah Anderson. She'll, she'll appreciate that.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  She came back to the Ig Nobel ceremony, took a bow this year, by the way, she's very good about that. So anyway, they tested it.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, in the movie, in the song Lola.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  L O L A, Lola.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Oh, different Lola, sorry.

• 38:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, C O L A, Cola. Okay, so in the written version of the song, it mentions Cherry Cola.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in the, in the song version, it's Coca-Cola. But the, the published version it says Cherry Cola. So it's, that it goes back.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  There are depths.

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And Lola was, I guess, a transvestite in that.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  And not just a showgirl.

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I don't think so.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Different song.

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, Lola, that's Lola was hang, just hanging out at the bar, yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  So, okay, so.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Everything is related.

• 39:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Walks like a woman and talks like a man.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Not in a sensible way, but everything is related.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  I need to, I need to find out.

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm sorry, sorry.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  I, I need Coca-Cola.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  You need what?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  To hear the rest of the story.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's, okay.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Thank goodness.

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they tested it and they discovered that in a test tube, it can kill sperm. But in, in nature, it's not an effective way of preventing contraception.

• 39:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the difference between a test tube and a vaginal wall? That's what you're telling me here.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  And, and all these surroundings, yeah.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did the surroundings neutralize the coke so that it then was no longer?

• 39:46Speaker 02

  And lots of things can go wrong and they're, yeah. They published something in a medical journal and some.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Saying it did not work.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Saying that, yes, it does kill sperm, but not in, in the way that you would want to trust it to be at all effective as a contraceptive. Some doctors in Taiwan read this report in a medical journal, and they decided to run their own test. They tested the same question using Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  I was wondering when that was gonna happen.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When was Pepsi gonna enter the equation?

• 40:24Speaker 02

  You can, so you can go if you want to and easily find their report and you can see the relative effectiveness of Coke and Pepsi.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Both groups, though, are pretty strident in saying that if you want to prevent a child from being conceived, you really should not depend on either Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and what is the cost of a can of?

• 40:48Speaker 02

  I'm saying nothing against the Coca-Cola company or the Pepsi company.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Oh, nothing, no, no, no. Cause it's usually a rum and Coke that might lead to the shenanigans in the first place.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you got there. So, in the end, isn't it what's cheaper, a can of Coke or, or a condom? I mean, maybe that's what it came down to. Coke was cheaper than condom.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  For some people, apparently that is exactly what it came down to.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  You would do better with a full can of Coke and clocking that brother in the head.

• 41:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's, that's what I'm saying. Thousand and one uses for a can of Coke.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Well, that was one thousand and two.

• 41:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's this one about black holes? That's, that's why, that's why, you know.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've given awards, but tell me about that one.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Nick Noble Award, what, for physics, I guess, is that right?

• 41:30Speaker 02

  And you may know a fellow named Walter Lewin.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Walter Lewin came and accepted the prize on behalf of the winners because the winners were indecisive about whether to show up at the ceremony. The winners were Dr. Jack Van Impe and his wife, Rexella Van Impe. They have a television program you may have seen called, uh, Jack Van Impe Presents. They are televangelists. The program is in the form of a news report with all the trappings of a news report. They are fascinated by science, although not in the way most people are fascinated by science. They pluck little pieces of science, um, reports out of the news. And they'll start talking about them, but you know that

• 42:18Speaker 02

  If you just let them talk long enough, they will eventually relate that piece of science to something in the Bible.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Cite it as evidence.

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So cherry picking science. I wonder.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Cherries, yes, yes.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  That's so rare.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, I don't know. This is the first time I've heard of that.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, please, go on.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  And they one night announced, and they gave some detail, that they had discovered that black holes fulfill all of the technical requirements to be the location of hell.

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  And so, we gave them the Ig Nobel Prize, and we called them up, as we do in almost all cases, and quietly offered it to them, gave them the chance to decline. They did not decline, but they wavered about whether they were going to come to the ceremony. And finally, not too long before the ceremony, Dr. Jack Van MP's secretary called up and said, "Oh, sorry, Dr. Van MP cannot come because he has a previously scheduled fundraiser." So, we called Walter Lewin, who is an astrophysicist at MIT, which is right down the street. He very kindly came and accepted custody of the prize, and he talked about how grateful

• 43:31Speaker 02

  the astrophysics community is for this knowledge that no one had suspected until this work was done, that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements.

• 43:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, on the flip side of that, I remember an Ig Nobel paper from decades ago, that where there was a calculation demonstrating that heaven was hotter than hell.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, we didn't give a prize to that, but.

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It appeared in the journal.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, that was where, if you can measure the entropy generated by souls who were well behaved and who believe in a heaven, because we don't believe in heaven, you're not going to heaven, right? So, it's not everybody, it's just those who believe. And then, so their souls go to heaven, and it brings a certain level of sort of entropy, and so then you can add all of that up. And when you add all of that up, each soul contributes a certain sort of fractional bit of energy to the heaven, and then there it is, hotter than hell.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  And after that article came out, there were almost an endless series of letters from other scientists. Picking at little bits of the equation.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Saying you made an error and it really should be.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  My only question.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your super dynamic approximations were invalid, right?

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Wouldn't heaven be air conditioned? I mean, seriously, guys?

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Here's, here's another one.

• 44:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  See?

• 44:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  There's always one more scientist waiting to wade into this battle.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Did he just call me a scientist?

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how about the, listen, with, I used to walk dogs. That's how I bought my first telescope. I walked, I, I was in the glory days of dog walking before you had to clean up after them. So I could walk four dogs, they'd poop everywhere, and we'd just keep walking.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  And you wanted a telescope to examine that?

• 45:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  The inner world of poop.

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But my first telescope, I was in middle school. Back then we called it junior high school. So what did you find out about dogs? Pooping and peeing? I read the.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that, that prize this year, there have been several prizes over the years related to dogs. The prize this year went to a team from Czechoslovakia and Germany. They gathered data over a long period of time and they say that their data shows that dogs tend to align their bodies. That's the, the line of head to, to tail. They tend to align that with the geomagnetic lines of force around the earth.

• 45:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When they poop or pee?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  When they poop or pee. And they say the data shows that that alignment happened only on the days when the magnetic field was relatively strong, on days when there were things interfering and, and the field lines were not so strong.

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not because most city grids are aligned somehow north-south, and if you're walking a dog.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  I think these were all done out in fields, or most of them were. And there are lots of questions that it raises, that, many of which I'm sure you've.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so, forget the, forget the GPS. You want it to north-south, just make your dog poop.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Listen, I, I always believed my dog was a genius.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  They have an app, too, that anybody can download for free. They're hoping that lots more people will gather data on their dogs and send it in through this app.

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or strap something to the do- poop app?

• 46:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A poop app. One more here before we two, I want to get to that in the seconds we have remaining. What's this with the five second rule? Somebody researched that? The five second rule? That's sacred. What do you, you can't touch that.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  It was a high school student, a girl in Chicago who did that one summer. She had a job in a laboratory. And she tested the five second rule. The five second rule being the idea that if you drop food on the floor, if you pick it up within five seconds, it's safe to eat.

• 46:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  What she discovered.

• 47:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody knows that.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  What she discovered was the answer is, well, sort of. If the food is not sticky and the floor is clean, it's probably fine. Otherwise, it's probably not.

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Makes sense. Yeah, but, yeah. Or. I don't think anyone who has sticky food that lands down on a dirty floor would be invoking the five second. I also think it depends how hungry you are.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That too?

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they measured bacteria, she measured bacteria before and after how many got onto the food from the floor.

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not if you kissed it and held it up to God or anything like that.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  That would be a separate investigation.

• 47:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a separate experiment. Yeah. So you have a book out. What's the name of your, you've got several, the Ig Nobel Cookbook?

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm looking at it right now. That's just out.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  We asked a bunch of Ig Nobel Prize winners to send us recipes to cook things related to what they've done. The scientist who discovered homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck. He sent us, he sent us his favorite recipe for preparing duck.

• 47:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Awesome. What, is it homosexual ducks or just? Does that change the flavor? Yeah, does that change the flavor?

• 47:58Speaker 02

  It's, uh, only in a metaphorical sense. And, uh, so that's, that's one book. But the other is called This Is Improbable 2, which is a, uh, it stems from a collection of my newspaper columns in The Guardian in London.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you write for the Brits?

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I've been writing column there for about 10 years.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They hardly ever take writers from America because we're just not.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  I was thrown out of America. I mean, people there were.

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're not as literate as the folks over there. So congratulations.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Well, thank you.

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got you there. So it's a collection of those, of those articles?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  It's a collection of all sorts of things, uh, from science studies that most people have never run across that make people laugh and then think.

• 48:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're just, you're, you're at it even more as you do that?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for being a guest on StarTalk Radio. Thank you. Mark. This was great. Leanne, as always. Thank you. My most charming co-host. Aww. Ever. Thank you. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. StarTalk Radio is sponsored in part by Grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.