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By Leonie Schittenhelm

Hello and welcome back to another instalment of ‘Wacky scientific papers with Leonie’! With the winners of the Ig Nobel Prize for Improbable Research 2017 announced just over two weeks ago, it is not surprising that the internet is abuzz with the surprising, mind-blowing and just plain old weird contestants honoured this year. Each year these prestigious prizes are given to research that – in their own words – first makes people laugh and then makes them think. Here we collect some of this year’s winners and mix in some old favourites for good measure. Let us know your favourite funny paper in the comments!

1. ‘On the rheology of cats’ or can a cat be both a solid and a liquid?

 Rheology is a field that is primarily concerned with the flow of matter, both in liquid and solid state. The author of this paper, M.A. Fardin, charmingly argues that cats can behave in different ways depending on the surface they are lying on and the space they are trying to manoeuvre themselves into. His methodology? ‘1. Bring an empty box. 2. Wait.’

2. ‘Equations of the End: Teaching Mathematical Modeling Using the Zombie Apocalypse’

Modelling how quickly and widely infectious diseases can be transmitted is a complex mathematical undertaking but immensely valuable for disease management. But how can you teach these complex mathematical skills to students without scaring them off? Simple answer: Zombies!

3. ‘Pigeons can discriminate “good” and “bad” paintings by children’

A classic in the world of scientific questions no one has even thought of asking before. This study first asked adults to label children’s paintings as either ‘bad/ugly’ or ‘good/beautiful’ and then tried to teach the distinction to pigeons – with surprising successes! Pigeons can apparently learn what is considered beautiful to human eyes and use both colour and pattern of the paintings to come to their assessment.

4. ‘Shit happens (to be useful)! Use of Elephant Dung as Habitat by Amphibians’

While clearly important research, the title of this paper is more than cheeky! Even more admirable however is the type of experiments undertaken to yield this data: Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz examined no less than 290 (!) elephant dung piles to see if any amphibians had made their home in them. That’s research dedication right there.

5. ‘What happens if we don’t defend academic freedom’

More serious in tone, this paper was published to protest the increased legal pressures on international universities in general, and the Central European University in particular, that are pushed by an increasingly volatile Hungarian government. The paper itself is short, because what happens if we don’t defend academic freedom? ‘No abstract 1. No introduction 2. No argument and contribution 3. No analysis 4. No conclusion and avenues for future research 5. No more questions asked’.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

The amount of common diseases we have yet to cure can seem overwhelming sometimes: no week without a looming ‘Alzheimer’s epidemic’ headline or an advert on the bus warning about the 1 in 3 chances of having a stroke. Surely all energy and research funds should be channeled into treating and healing these wide-spread diseases? Yes and no. While learning more about these diseases is incredibly important to help the people affected by them, researching less common diseases should not be forgotten.

A disease is considered rare if less than 5 people in 10,000 are affected by it. While relatively few other people will share the same disease, the amount of rare diseases ranges between 6,000 and 8,000. This means that over 30 million people in the European Union alone are estimated to suffer from these rare conditions, often without relevant therapeutic options and frequently misdiagnosed for years. To make matters worse, significant research results are difficult to obtain due to inherently small sample sizes and experts in a specific rare disease being equally scarce.

However, with the advances of genetic diagnostics, diagnosing rare diseases correctly and research to find better treatments is finally in reach. And while the problem of small local sample sizes persists, the European Union has pledged to fund collaborative projects tackling this problem as part of the Horizon 2020 programme. One such example is the RD-Connect network that is being built by Professor Hanns Lochmüller and his team at Newcastle University. The online platform collects a range of clinical and genomic data on rare diseases, while encouraging the researchers to use their resources to upload their own, building a huge database on rare diseases.

Understanding these diseases better does not only help the people affected by them, it can also increase our understanding of biochemical pathways in the general population. Because the majority of rare diseases are caused by a single gene mutation, symptoms can be usually traced back to the malfunction of a specific gene. This means that elucidating why a set of symptoms occurs can not only provide therapeutic options for patients, but also reveal the function of a specific gene in the healthy population.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Sweaty hands. Knees buckling. An acute desire to run to the toilet, lock myself in a stall and not come out for the rest of the night. And those weren’t even all the signs of acute nervousness I felt minutes before going onto the stage to perform my first Bright Club set. Let’s pretend you are me, roughly a year ago, which is incidentally the amount of time it took me to take up all my courage and convince myself to actually do this. You might ask yourself questions such as: ‘What is a Bright Club?’ and ‘Why does it freak this poor person out so much?’. Easy enough to answer: Bright Club, often also dubbed the ‘thinking person’s variety night’, is a comedy night about science and everything academia. The clue is in the name, and that’s where my nervousness comes back in: the people on the stage, telling the jokes? That’s academics, who for one night only exchange their pipette for a microphone or their lecture theatre for a comedy club to tell some jokes about their work. And that night, it was my turn.

Let’s rewind a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good laugh just as much as the next person. But to actually get up on a stage and talk about things you thought were funny when you wrote them up at home? That seemed just completely inconceivable to me. I mean, how do you even find things that are funny about your work? Being a PhD student in my first year, the only way I could keep my impostor syndrome in check was by appearing as serious about my area of interest as possible. To make matters worse, in the weeks preceding Bright Club, my science just flat-out refused to work, full-stop. Suffice to say, I was not in a very good place to see the humour in my daily work. So when Elin Roberts and Marilena Pace at the Centre for Life sent us home to ‘just write down some ideas for your set’, I was stumped. Where should I even begin to look? But as I got on with experiments and meetings, my work started to transform in front of my eyes. Surely not everyone has conversations about blood in the lunch room? And am I the only one that kind of treats their cell cultures like pets to be nurtured and loved?

I think there are a lot of good reasons to do Bright Club. The relief you feel when the audience laughs at your first joke. The growing exhilaration after the second laugh, and every laugh thereafter. The boost in confidence after doing something that you never thought yourself capable of. The amazing support from the Centre for Life, which will take you by the hand to write your first comedy set and practice it with you until you are ready to shine. But for me personally, the ability to see the humour in my work has been the best and most long-lasting effect of doing Bright Club. Everyone knows PhDs are hard, but everything gets that much easier if you can have a good laugh about it.

Interested in taking part in the next Bright Club event on the 3rd of October at the Stand Comedy Club in Newcastle? Contact marilena.pace@life.org.uk fore more information and all the important dates for your diary.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Everyone’s had those good intentions – that fitness app just after new years, this meditation app that the colleague that always seems like she has it all together recommended. The first few days go well, but then – well, let’s say the reminders keep popping up, without causing much more action than the thumb swipe that dismisses them. So how could text message-based intervention help people who have problems with binge-drinking? That is just what a collaborative study between Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle wants to find out.

Over 12 weeks they sent over 100 text messages to each study participant – the clue: instead of merely reminding them to drink less, they were designed to foster interaction and response. Questions such as ‘Can you think of any reasons why it might be a good idea to cut down a bit on your drinking?’ were interspersed with real quotes from pilot study participants (Mark from Edinburgh says: “Sometimes I’ve not had enough money to pay the bills.”) and challenges to identify achievable goals to reduce alcohol intake, if even just a little bit.

Responses ranged from humourous (On the question who would be pleased to see them drink less: “My wife, she’d get more money for shoes!!”) over heart-breaking (on the question, if they or their friends had experienced problems due to drinking: “I’ve had a friend that’s died because of drink. Fell off a balcony in a block of flats.”) to aspirational (“Stop earlier in the evening or at the very least slow down compared to others.”). While the researchers including Dr. Falko F. Sniehotta from Newcastle University, still note some caveats of the study, the success of actively engaging individuals in a text-based intervention programme instead of passively informing them speaks for itself. Answering one of the last messages one participant writes: “Had my ups and downs but I’m getting there now. Enjoyed the experience, thank you.”

If you want to have a look at the study yourself: Irvine, Linda, et al. (2017) “Real time monitoring of engagement with a text message intervention to reduce binge drinking among men living in socially disadvantaged areas of Scotland.”