Happy Thought for 20 September 2024

Have a Happy Thought:

It’s that time of year again! Where we get to celebrate science that seems… ridiculous. But then it makes you go “hmm” : The Ig Nobel awards!!

Let’s start with interior design. Those of you who actually have green fingers might always be able to tell the difference, but I often struggle to figure out whether a plant is real or fake. Turns out, it’s not just me - some plants are starting to mimic non-plant shapes around them!

The leaf on the left is the ‘natural’ shape for this plant. The leaf on the right was grown by an actual living plant when it was grown near to an artificial plant with a simple oval shape to its leaves.

Image: White & Yamashita, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530 

Let’s stick with things inside our houses for now… we all know that the direction our toilets flush isn’t impacted by whether we’re north or south of the Equator, right? Well, the persistence of that myth got some researchers to wondering what other circular/helical phenomena might be impacted (or not) by coriolis forces. So… how about the direction of whorls and swirls… on our heads?

Yeah, fairly predictably, whether your cowlick goes clockwise or anti-clockwise is not related to where you live on this planet of ours.

One last myth to bust, though. We’ve all heard about these super-long-lived people and wondered what their secret is. Often, if you ask them, their secret to long life seems to be drinking hard alcohol. According to this year’s winner of the demography prize, though, the real secret to a long life is… welfare fraud. Or, at least lying about your age. Turns out that “many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.”

You will definitely want to visit the Ig Nobel prize site to read through all of the winners from this year - believe it or not, I have left out some of the better ones! (Ever want to know how to tell a drunk worm from a sober worm? Or what happens when you explode “a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow”? Wonder no longer!)