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Sword swallowing expert Dan Mayer

High jumping fleas, hot-potato mouth and necrophiliac ducks were but a few of the ridiculous topics of research presented at the London leg of the Ig Nobel Awards Roadshow in March. For those unfamiliar with the Ig Nobel Awards, they are held each year to celebrate improbable scientific research which ‘first makes you laugh, then think’ – a parody on the venerated Nobel Prizes. Past Ig- winners include, for Economics, research on how ovulating strippers earn more tips; and in 2008 the Ig Nobel Peace prize went to the people of Switzerland, for adopting the principle that plants have dignity.

Scientists have the opportunity to discreetly refuse the prize before the ceremony, as the work is generally not intended as a joke. Luckily most scientists are fair game for a laugh. The roadshow, hosted by Imperial College, saw previous winners taking to the stage, giving short presentations on the research which earned them the prestigious accolade.

The show was hosted by Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel prize, and editor of Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobel magazine. Mirroring the original ceremony held annually at Harvard University, Abrahams gave each speaker exactly 5 minutes to summarise their research. If they committed the crime of overrunning, ‘Miss Sweetiepoo’, an 8 year old girl in a party dress, commanded them to ‘please STOP! I’m BORED!!’ over and over until they were forced to exit the stage. This made for a highly enjoyable evening, far removed from typical long-winded science lectures.

Highlights included Dr Mahmood Bhutta’s presentation, ‘Hot Potato Voice in Peritonsilitis: A Misnomer’. Patients with advanced tonsillitis can experience pus around the tonsils, which apparently makes their voice sound like they have a hot potato in their mouth.

By listening to healthy subjects speak with and without a hot potato in their mouth, and patients with peritonsilitis, Dr Bhutta discovered ill patients did indeed form sounds differently from the healthy subjects, as muscles around the soft palette (the dangly bit at the back of your throat) were weakened. However, the differences did not match up with the ‘hot potato’ subjects’, proving ‘hot-potato mouth’ to be a misnomer.

Local hero Piers Barnes from Imperial College, won the Ig Nobel Maths prize in 2006. He was on hand to explain his prize winning research on how many photos should be taken of a group of people to (almost) ensure taking one where nobody blinks. Barnes and his crew did some complicated calculations to do with shutter time, blink duration and ‘window for blink spoiling photo’. They worked out for a group of less than 20, in bad light, divide the group number by 2, in good light, divide by 3, and this will give you the optimum number of times to click.

Barnes kept us amused by conducting an audience experiment which paralleled the methods used for his research. Asking everyone to switch on their mobile phones, he showed calculations on how long it would take before a phone rang, considering there were 700 people in the room and on average a phone receives 3 calls an hour. Sure enough, phones started to ring, but we weren’t entirely sure if he proved his point!

The roadshow included a taste of the macabre, in Kees Moeliker’s presentation on the first recorded instance of Homosexual Necrophilia in the male Mallard duck. ‘Working in a glass building has its benefits’, Moeliker explained, ‘as birds tend to fly into the windows and kill themselves’. One day, a mallard duck lay dead outside Moeliker’s office window, and was visited by a fellow male who succeeded in mating with him. Moeliker’s segment was quite disturbing, especially when he presented said duck (the dead one) from a plastic bag he had brought on stage, and offered it to Miss Sweetiepoo. Clearly this man has a dark sense of humour- every year he and colleagues celebrate ‘dead duck day’, giving a short service for the violated duck, and visiting the local Chinese restaurant for something crispy and aromatic.

New Scientist’s Feedback editor, John Hoyland, was on hand to distract us from unsettling mental images. Or so we thought! The dead bird theme continued, as Hoyland highlighted the ‘lack of sympathy for geese who brought a plane down in the Hudson river’ in January this year. After some digging around he found there have been 1266 reports of aeroplanes hitting Canada geese between 1990 and 2008. On top of this there are recorded fatalities of 145 bald eagles, and, oddly enough, 80 turtles! Hoyland incredulously went on to list fatalities of 14 armadillos, 13 alligators and 1 pig. He sensibly came to the conclusion that these animals may not have been killed in flight.

Sword swallowing expert Dan Meyer provided the showstopping segment of the evening. He demonstrated his special talent after presenting his paper – ‘Metal to Medicine – Sword Swallowing and its Side Effects’, which picked up the 2007 Medicine Prize. Meyer has the world record for most swords swallowed at a time, and was not afraid to amaze and frighten us by allowing an audience member to pull a very sharp sword from his throat. Reminding us several times ‘this is very dangerous. I could severely harm myself’, Meyer then attached a sword to a whip, and a terrified and slightly confused looking volunteer waited for him to swallow the sword, bend over at the waist – ‘3 times more dangerous than normal sword swallowing’ – before whipping the sword out. I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t expecting success! But the consummate professional was, of course, uninjured.

Though I’m not sure if any of the research truly made me ‘think’ and wonder as to its implications, I was certainly reminded of how entertaining science can be, and what a bizarre and wonderful sense of humour certain scientists possess. Long may the Ig Nobel Awards show the world that scientists can poke fun at themselves.

It seems like an inevitable consequence of having things to do- we’re going to have to spend time pondering, avoiding, being distracted from the task in hand. But researchers studying procrastination think it can have serious health and financial consequences, and are looking for ways to conquer time wasting, potentially rendering facebook useless.

Around 90% of university students are time-wasters, according to University of Calgary economist Piers Steel, who describes procrastination as ‘voluntarily delaying a course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay’. It comes from a human urge to avoid the unpleasant. Students are a high risk category due to their often hectic academic schedules and social lives.

Studies have shown that chronic procrastinators have raised stress levels, and are prone to further risks to their health by putting off trips to the doctor and the dentist. They are much more likely to have accidents in the home as they will avoid ‘dull’ tasks like changing a lightbulb. Procrastination at work has financial consequences as time spent staring out of the window could be time spent productively badgering away.

Steel believes certain character traits bring out the inner procrastinator, leaving some more prone. Time wasters are low in the conscientious trait, they are less ‘dutiful, organised and industrious’. They are also likely to be impulsive- mixing up their intentions so being easily distracted. Anxiety can be implicit- a fear of failure can lead someone to put off starting a task.

If this sounds like you, or you’ve noticed a stressed out friend with bad teeth and anecdotes of falling over in darkened rooms, help is at hand. One strategy which has been shown to work is to set yourself attainable, specific goals, instead of a vague goal which allows a get-out clause. So replace ‘I will get fit’ with ‘I’m going to the gym tomorrow at 7.30am.’ Psychologist Tim Pychyl gives some nice parent-style advice- “just get started”, the anticipation will be much worse than the actual task. To prove his credentials, he carried out a survey on his students, querying their moods and how much they were putting off tasks with deadlines. He found ‘when students actually do the task they are avoiding, their perceptions of the task change significantly. Many times, they actually enjoyed it.’

So do your homework, you might like it….

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=procrastinating-again

Published in Felix, Imperial College’s student newspaper, December 2008

An architect's impression of a future Vertical Farm

The average European farm today does not really fit in our picture of a bright and green future. A modern farmer will have many items of machinery to work the land, consuming tonnes of fossil fuels and adding to the CO2 burden. In addition, the intensive farming practiced in the developed world depends on spreading the crops with pesticides and fertilisers. These take a great deal of energy to produce and are petroleum based. The run-off from these potions end up in our rivers, damaging fragile ecosystems. Much of our arable land has been laid to waste by irresponsible or over-intensive farming techniques. Food can travel thousands of miles to reach us, carrying with it a massive and messy carbon footprint.

So, what is the answer? One possibility being seriously considered is vertical farming. Still on paper rather than a reality, the indoor, multi storey, garden is intended for inner city food production. The food would be grown on your doorstep, largely eliminating emissions from transportation. As an intensive indoor growing space, traditional machinery would be obsolete, and the crops would require no chemical protection from the weather or disease. Vertical farming is the brainchild of Dr Dickson Despommier of Columbia University, who believes, along with a growing fan club, that vertical farms are an appealing alternative to traditional farming.

The farms could recycle waste water from cities; currently massive amounts of this are mixed with chlorine and dumped into our waterways. Instead it can be reprocessed and used to irrigate the crops. The farm could even produce drinking water. Electricity would come from the building’s integrated solar panels and wind turbines on the roof, making for a sustainable and eco-friendly farm.

Indoor farming is already a growing and successful business, with greenhouses constantly evolving their technology. Plants can be grown hydroponically in water, or in engineered soils. A method called aeroponics has been developed, where the plant grows dangling in a mist of water and nutrients.

Sceptics have noted that greenhouses often use a lot of electricity to create artificial light when the sun is not strong. They think that plants on lower levels of the vertical farm will require artificial lighting. However, with improving technology in solar panels, and solar tunnels which can channel light from the roof down, this problem may be surmountable.

Genetically modified plants would not be necessary; instead the indoor environment can be tailored to exactly produce the perfect growing environment for each crop.

The farms would help address another potential crisis. The global population is expected to boom by around 3 billion in the next 40 years. Using current farming practises, this would require a piece of land the size of Brazil devoted to more arable land. This much spare land simply does not exist.

According to research into humans living in extraterrestrial space, an estimated 300 sq feet of intensively farmed land will produce enough food to support one person. The vertical farmers have worked out that one of their projects, the size of a New York city block, at 30 stories high, would have enough space to produce food to support 10,000 people. Moving agriculture to these intensive sites would reduce the pressure on land being used for agriculture. This will allow for regeneration of land destroyed by farming, and provide breathing space for the development of sustainable practises to go along with the vertical farms. This might even go some way towards re-growth of the world’s rainforests.

The farms could be set up in countries already suffering from food shortages. Communities would not have to be at the mercy of the weather causing a bad harvest, and would be able to produce crops all year round. The plants would be at less risk of infectious disease as they would have little contact with life outside the farm. Supporters of the idea have even suggested setting up these farms in refugee camps, where food usually has to come from international aid, whose supplies may not be constant.

Clearly there are great reasons to go vertical when it comes to farming, but with any project there are obstacles along the way, and there are a few problems which might stop these farms from getting off the ground.

The development and building of the project is bound to be expensive, and the farms would have to be highly efficient to be an economically viable rival to conventional farming.

The buildings will be very complex affairs, housing irrigation systems for the plants, controlled indoor flow of air and nutrients, incinerators to contribute to energy supply, and water treatment apparatus. Taking the farm inside creates a host of complications. Maintenance would add to the expense, and the structure would be at risk from water damage, with the humid atmosphere and irrigation networks.

In promoting the idea, vertical farming supporters have suggested meat can be produced in these intensive environments; poultry and pigs could take up some of the levels of the building. More and more people are taking an ethical stance against intensive meat farming, so this could provoke some backlash.

Critics have suggested land in highly populated areas would be too expensive and hard to come by. Thankfully, Despommier has thought of a way around this obstacle. He remarks, ‘You can do this on the rooftops of hospitals and schools’, which would make use of the produce themselves, and he also suggests using outer suburbs of cities where land is cheaper.

The attractive features of vertical farming mean it has caught the interest of large developers, including multi-national firm Arup, who are looking to take the idea to the next level. City governments have contacted Despommier and his team, and there are talks to implement the farms into plans for entire eco-cities.

So maybe in the foreseeable future you will be buying superfresh produce from your local multi-storey farm.

Published in I, Science, Imperial College London’s student science journal, Autumn 2008