Ah it's that time of year again...

[gnommi]

...yep, the IgNobel Prize Giving Ceremony

My favorites:

ECONOMICS

G Miller, J Tybur and B Jordan (University of New Mexico), for discovering that a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.
"Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?" Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan, Evolution and Human Behavior (2007) 28: 375-81.

CHEMISTRY
SA Umpierre (University of Puerto Rico), JA Hill (Fertility Centers of New England), DJ Anderson (Boston University School of Medicine), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide:
...and to CY Hong (Taipei Medical University), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.

"Effect of 'Coke' on Sperm Motility," SA Umpierre, JA Hill, and DJ Anderson, New England Journal of Medicine (1985) 313: 1351.
"The Spermicidal Potency of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola," C.Y. Hong, C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang, Human Toxicology (1987) 6: 395-6.

Comments

...can a professor get a table dance?

[(Anonymous)]

That's some good quality research right there. You may also be interested in "Freakonomics" which has some shaky data occasionally but some interesting parallels between drug dealing gangs and a certain well known hamburger franchise. You can see a talk about it on TEDtalks on teh nets.

L.

Oh, check out the remastered "Chaos All Stars" on heavy7productions.com

Worth downloading, it's better than the CD by miles. There is also a JustNIN Timberlake remix and some Elephant man goodness.

Re: ...can a professor get a table dance?

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

I read Freakonomics a couple of years back when Dave bought a copy to take on holiday and raved about it. I really enjoyed it, which is more than I can say for Simon Conway Morris' (bizarrely skewed by personal issues but probably accurate) rebuttal of Steven Jay Gould's (probably flawed) Wonderful Life that I tried to read this holidays. One hates it when one's heroes turn out to be human, what?

Will go see the new CAS, highly enjoyed the last one. Did you look at the Venetian Snares track? Fun.

How the hell are you anyway? Coming over for Xmas?
N

Re: ...can a professor get a table dance?

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

hahah and Discopathology just cued up on Last.FM.... serendipitous timing!

[glummdead.livejournal.com]

does coke affect sperm motility when you drink it, or do you have to splash it on?

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

I read through the papers (how sad is that?) and it seems to have been thought that local application (cough) post coitus was a useful contraceptive measure. These two papers seem to be addressing this belief.

I have NO idea how anyone might come to that conclusion in every day life, mind you.

The mind, she boggle.

[glummdead.livejournal.com]

Now, I'm not a scientist.... but I'd imagine that flavoured syrup wasn't the best medium for ensuring proper sperm transmission

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

but the little wigglers still show at least 70% of their original motility when swimming in Coke!

impressive, huh?

[glummdead.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember sperms contain a small amount of glucose which they use to power their wiggling, I bet the buggers go fricking mental in coke. Like a junkie dipped in a giant heroin broth.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

that might explain why they slowed down a bit in Diet Coke then?

[tlrmx.org (from livejournal.com)]

Ah, you had a sheltered childhood, but this time in a good way.

You know how kids always have ridiculous ideas about sex? A whole bunch of the bad ideas that spread, particularly among girls, are about pregnancy. Stuff like you can get pregnant if you kiss a boy on the mouth, or you can't get pregnant if the guy pulls out early, or you can't get pregnant if it's your "first time" or if you've never had your period. This (along with avoiding Carrie style incidents) is why educators tend to be in favour of covering this material early, before any of their pupils act on the playground rumours.

One of the most popular (perhaps more so in the US than here) idiotic rumours is that you can apply various household items to sort of "wash out" or kill the sperm after sex. I can hear the biologist in you laughing now. Coke is often cited, because, well, it's fizzy and you've done the class where they show you that it is acidic... and of course if you're a 14 year old girl and you've just had unsafe sex, you probably don't want to tell your parents, let alone a complete stranger in a pharmacy or counselling service, thus the "obvious" solution of obtaining the morning after pill doesn't even come into the equation. So, a can of Coke it is.

It's not clear exactly how dangerous this is in practice, because obviously we're not going to authorise it as a human experiment and front line medical services that report on incidences of infection or other problems are only going to see girls who had problems, it could be that ten or a hundred times as many try this and (although it doesn't actually work) they have no ill effects and don't tell anyone.