Improbable Research

The opera “Dream, Little Cockroach” premiered as part of the 30th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, on September 17, 2020. Here’s video of the opera, by itself.

Plot summary: A man dreams that, although he was always a cockroach, he has been transformed into a human being. His family, and scientists, and the whole population, argue about how to respond. They decide to make him their leader.

Here’s the cast and crew of this premiere performance:

Musical Director: Maria Ferrante
Video director and editor: Bruce Petschek
Additional videography and audio editing: Alexey Eliseev

NARRATORS: Karen Hopkin and Christopher Hopkin

INSTRUMENTALISTS
Piano: Yulia Yun
Accordion: Dr. Thomas Michel
Cello: Dr. Julie Reimann
Bass: Dr. Bruce Koplan

SINGERS
Maria Ferrante
Dr. Fred Tsai
Bobbie Hill
Jan Hadland
Ted Sharpe
Lizhou Sha

NON-SINGING ACTOR
The man who might be a cockroach: Alexey Eliseev

SINGING SCIENTISTS AT END OF ACT 3
Rich Roberts, Frances Arnold, Marty Chalfie, Eric Maskin, Andre Geim, Jerome Friedman, Alessandro Pluchino & spouse, Andrea Rapisarda, Michael Smith & spouse, May Berenbaum, Sabine Begall, Richard Vetter, Kiyoshi Furusawa, Melissa Franklin, Jean Berko Gleason.

Portaborse: Michele Liguori

Surveilance Reports About Self-Touching

“Most Self-Touches Are with the Nondominant Hand,” Nan Zhang, Wei Jia, Peihua Wang, Marco-Felipe King, Pak-To Chan, and Yuguo Li, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-13. (Thanks to Adrian Smith for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at The University of Hong Kong and The University of Leeds, report:

“Self-touch may promote the transfer of microorganisms between body parts or surfaces to mucosa. In overt videography of a post-graduate ofce, students spent 9% of their time touching their own hair, face, neck, and shoulders (HFNS). These data were collected from 274,000 s of surveillance video in a Chinese graduate student office. The non-dominant hand contributed to 66.1% of HFNStouches. Most importantly, mucous membranes were touched, on average, 34.3 times per hour, which the non-dominant hand contributed to 240% more than the dominant hand. Gender had no signifcant efect on touch frequency, but a signifcant efect on duration per touch.”

When it comes to biometric authorization systems, there are many to choose from – candidates include face recognition, fingerprint recognition, ear recognition, voice recognition, tongue recognition and body odour recognition etc etc. But none is 100% perfect, so there’s always a demand for improvement and innovation.

In 2016, a team from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Ocean University of China, and the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia proposed (and tested) a new one : finger-snapping recognition :

“The security of smart devices has been a major concern for people nowadays. For example, a range of methods have been applied for user authentication on smartphones and smart watches, such as password, PIN and fingerprint. They can be either easily stolen by attackers or need extra sensors for input. In this paper, a new biometric trait, finger snapping, is applied for person authentication. The sound of finger snapping is easy to capture with the microphone embedded in the smart devices. Besides, it is easy to perform and do not require explicit remembrance for the reason that finger snapping only depends on muscle memory.”

“Finger snapping is an act of making an impulsive sound with one’s fingers and palm. It is often done by connecting the thumb with another (middle, index or ring) finger, and then moving the other finger immediately downward to hit the palm. Such act of finger snapping involves physiological characteristics which refer to inherited traits that are related to human body, as the sound of finger snapping is differentiated by the size of palm and skin texture. In addition, it also involves behavioral characteristics which refer to learned pattern of a person, as it is the movement of the finger creates the sound.”

“A survey is carried out on 74 people about whether they can snap their fingers and accept the finger snapping authentication. Results show that 86.5 % of the respondents can snap fingers, of which 89.2 % would like to authenticate themselves using a simple finger snap. Besides, through our finger snapping collecting phase, we come to find out that people who could not snap their fingers can learn to do it after understanding the method of finger snapping.”

See: Yang Y., Hong F., Zhang Y., Guo Z. (2016) Person Authentication Using Finger Snapping — A New Biometric Trait. In: You Z. et al. (eds) Biometric Recognition. CCBR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9967. Springer, Cham. (a full copy may be found here)

BONUS Assignment [optional] : Can you snap your fingers? If so, can you do it (exactly) the same twice?
_{Research research by Martin Gardiner}

The number of published research studies about the effects of cashew gum and nanoparticles on cooled stallion semen has increased by one, with the arrival of this new study:

“Effects of Cashew Gum and Nanoparticles on Cooled Stallion Semen,” Kahynna Cavalcante Loureiro, Isabel Bezerra Lima-Verde, Anders Johannisson, Theodoros Ntallaris, Alessandro Jager, Petr Štěpánek, Marcelo da Costa Mendonça, Patrícia Severino & Jane M. Morrell, Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica, vol. 62, no. 31, 2020.

The authors are at the Institute of Technology and Research (ITP), Brazil, Tiradentes University (UNIT), Brazil, the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, Czech Republic, and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

(Thanks to Silvan Urfer for bringing this to our attention.)

Add another study to the collection that focuses on a question of consumer acceptance of pork pâté enriched with cricket powder. This one is:

“Nutritional Analysis and Evaluation of the Consumer Acceptance of Pork Pâté Enriched with Cricket Powder – Preliminary Study,” Krzysztof Smarzyński, Paulina Sarbak, Szymon Musiał, Paweł Jeżowski, Michał Piątek, and Przemysław, and Łukasz Kowalczewski, Open Agriculture, vol. 4, no. 1, 2019.

The authors, at the Nature University of Poznań, Poland, conclude:

It was shown that the cricket powder additive significantly increases the content of protein, fat and minerals. It also changes the color of the product, which is darker, and the color balance is shifted towards the blue. Consumer assessment showed that the 2% cricket powder additive allows to obtain a product of high attractiveness for consumers.

This photo shows two of the authors presenting the poster version of the research:

(Thanks to Corky White for bringing this to our attention.)