(Image: Paul McDevitt)
Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
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A tail as old as time
THE Ig Nobel Prizes have for 25 years honoured achievements that make you laugh, then think; and this year鈥檚 batch was no exception.
Bruno Grossi and four colleagues earned a feather in their cap by tails onto the backsides of chickens. They won the Ig Nobel in biology for addressing a timeless palaeontological problem: how did two-legged predatory dinosaurs walk about the Cretaceous world?
Birds are their closest living relatives, but they balance by crouching, and walk by moving their knees and lower legs with their thighs horizontal. The strut of a crow or rooster can鈥檛 match that of a dinosaur because the birds are missing something vital 鈥� the fleshy mass of tail that served as a counterweight to the dinosaur鈥檚 head and neck.
To see how chickens would walk with heavy tails, Grossi glued fake tails onto the rear ends of 2-day-old chicks, replacing them with larger tails until the birds were 12 weeks old. And hey presto, chicks with the heavy tails started walking with their legs more upright and more motion in their hips.
Climate change could submerge its launchpads, NASA has warned. Patrick Fenlon wonders why they don鈥檛 contact the US navy, who 鈥渉ave lots of experience in launching rockets from underwater鈥�
Paternity test
A PAPER on the limits of paternity bore fruit for Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer of the University of Vienna, Austria, who took the prize in mathematics.
They considered Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif, a Moroccan emperor who ruled from 1672 to 1727 and holds the official Guinness World Record for fecundity, with 888 children.
Earlier studies had suggested his record was exaggerated, so Oberzaucher and Grammer to test how many copulations per day were necessary to reach that staggering output.
The answer was a modest once or twice a day, depending on how fertile the women were, making the emperor鈥檚 record plausible. Moulay Ismail had 500 concubines as well as four wives to help him deliver his record, but Oberzaucher and Grammer say a smaller harem would have sufficed: they calculate peak paternity would require a harem of only 65 to 100 women.
Say again?
MARK DINGEMANSE, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen shared the literature prize for around the world say 鈥淗uh?鈥� when they don鈥檛 understand what they hear.
The sound and meaning of 鈥渉uh鈥� in languages around the world varies much less than expected 鈥� only about as much as 鈥渄og鈥� varies among different dialects of English. Yet it鈥檚 not an instinctive sound like a grunt; people must learn it, like other words. So why do all 鈥渉uhs鈥� sound alike?
They suggest that the sound is very effective at informing other people that you can鈥檛 understand them. Or, as the three wrote, 鈥渋t is the result of convergent cultural evolution: a monosyllable with questioning prosody and all articulators in a near-neutral position.鈥� To which Feedback says, 鈥淗uh?鈥�
A potty idea
DAVID HU and his colleagues are flushed with success after collecting the physics prize for their study into urination.
Their winning study was precipitated when Hu was potty-training his son, and noticed the little boy took as long to pee as he did. Further research led Hu and his colleagues to discover empty their bladders in roughly 21 seconds, even though their bladder capacities range from 5 millilitres in a cat to 18 litres in an elephant.
The bigger the bladder, they found, the more hydrostatic pressure there is pushing urine flow through the urethra, and thus the faster the flow. So it all averages out, even for humans. The lack of difference among animals may mean it鈥檚 not very important for survival, the authors suggest.
Crowning achievement
ON THE subject of politicised scientific names (12 September), Guy Cox reports that the giant redwood was originally christened Wellingtonia gigantea by a patriotic John Lindley.
However, Wellington鈥檚 towering victory was short-lived: Lindley failed to realise that the war hero鈥檚 name had already been taken by a group of shrubs in the Sabiaceae family.
鈥淐utting a very long botanical story short,鈥� Guy explains 鈥渆ventually the giant redwood was put into a related genus Sequoaidendron, named in honour of the Cherokee man who developed a written language for his tribe 鈥� and in my opinion he absolutely deserves it.鈥�
Log graphs
PAPER titles that possess brevity and wit gain more citations (12 September). John Woodgate reports a Bell System Technical Journal paper titled 鈥淭he square root of a tree鈥�. This is not exactly humorous, John admits, 鈥渂ut very intriguing, unless you are the sort of mathematician to grasp the meaning at once.鈥�
Another earworm
MEANWHILE, those who remember Lonnie Donegan鈥檚 earworm will be pleased to know that a friend of Chris Evans co-authored a paper on risks of transferring infections through ear inspections, the title of which was 鈥淒oes your earwax lose its pathogens on your otoscope overnight?鈥�