Sex can relieve nasal congestion, and other work honored by 2021 Ig Nobels

Economics Prize

Citation: Pavlo Blavatskyy, "for discovering that the obesity of a country's politicians may be a good indicator of that country's corruption."

In the popular imagination, corruption and politics often go together like chocolate and peanut butter, only with far less desirable outcomes. According to Blavatskyy, a researcher with the Montpellier Business School in France, prior studies have shown that political corruption (like bribery and extortion) can lower a country's economic growth, increase costs for road construction, deter foreign investment, and increase public debt, among other adverse effects. But measures used to determine how corrupt a given country's political leaders might be tend to be highly subjective. In this paper, Blavatskyy proposes an alternative, more quantifiable methodology for assessing corruption: the body mass index (BMI) of political leaders.

Since medical records are generally not obtainable (if they are kept at all) for political leaders, Blavatskyy decided to test whether computer vision/machine learning could determine a person's BMI using facial recognition. He selected 299 sample images of the faces of political leaders from 15 post-Soviet states, "because corruption is perceived to be a significant problem in the region." Those samples were then subjected to a computer vision algorithm to obtain estimations of BMI for each politician. (Let's leave aside for the moment that BMI is a highly imperfect means of determining a person's body composition, despite its prevalence in the medical profession.)

He found that most of the politicians in the data set had quite high BMIs: 96 were obese (BMI between 35 and 40), while 13 were severely obese (BMI greater than 40). Only 10 boasted a BMI within the normal range, and none was underweight. Furthermore, when Blavatskyy compared his data with measures of corruption in those 15 states, he found a high correlation between the two. For instance, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia) and Georgia are deemed least corrupt, and their political leaders have the lowest median BMI. The correlation wasn't perfect, but Blavatskyy still concluded that this could be a viable method for assessing political corruption. However, he was careful to note that these results "do not necessarily imply that individual obese politicians are more corrupt than non-obese politicians."

Medicine Prize

Citation: Olcay Cem Bulut, Dare Oladokun, Burkard Lippert, and Ralph Hohenberger, "for demonstrating that sexual orgasms can be as effective as decongestant medicines at improving nasal breathing."

Rare is the scientific paper that opens with an anecdote about the time Sigmund Freud let a pal perform experimental nasal surgery on him, but this is that paper. Chances are that you, like me, were unaware that, back in 1897, a German otolaryngologist named Wilhelm Fliess—a close friend and confidant of Freud—came up with a theory of "reflex nasal neurosis," positing that there was a physiological connection between the nose and the genitalia in humans, in the form of "genital spots located on the nasal turbinate." There was never any scientific validity to Fliess' theory, but that didn't stop Freud from referring a patient, whom he had diagnosed with the condition, for surgery. Yes, it ended badly, with "recurrent nasal bleeding and a disfigured nose," per the authors.

Nonetheless, the authors of the recent study wondered if perhaps there might be something to Fliess' theory over a century later. Certainly not genital spots in the nose—that's long been debunked—but perhaps sex could help unclog a stuffed nose. After all, studies have shown that physical exercise and hormonal changes can open up nasal airways. Why not sex? It's a kind of physical exercise.

Eighteen heterosexual couples (all health care workers or partners of health care workers) participated in this study, with measurements of nasal resistance and flow taken before sex to establish a baseline, right after climaxing, 30 minutes after orgasm, an hour after orgasm, and three hours after climaxing. The experiment was repeated the next day, with participants administering a nasal decongestion spray before having sex. (In a nod to gender equity, "the data were only obtained if both individuals [in a couple] experienced sexual orgasm.")

Bulut et al. found that sex could indeed improve nasal congestion as effectively as nasal decongestant for up to 60 minutes, returning to baseline levels within three hours. Granted, a good 12-hour nasal spray would last much longer, but it's less fun. And some people might experience adverse effects from nasal spray, so having a natural substitution method for congestion would be helpful. The authors hope that there will be further studies to investigate whether masturbation has a similar effect for singletons.

Peace Prize

Citation: Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway, and David Carrier, "for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face."

Having a thick, full beard has been perceived as highly masculine in many cultures throughout the ages. But Beseris et al. thought there might be more to it than cultural preferences. Perhaps, they reasoned, human beards can provide protection in a fight. After all, the mandible (typically covered by a beard) is the most commonly fractured bone during a fight, and this may have been a serious injury in eras lacking modern surgical treatments. The researchers decided to test the hypothesis that thick facial hair protects the face from blunt trauma resulting from strikes during a fight.

Since it wasn't practical to take fully bearded skin samples from human cadavers, the team used skin samples from domestic sheep. Sheep fleece isn't a perfect match for human hair, but it's reasonably close. The samples were placed over a bone analog made of a fiber epoxy composite. One-third of the samples were furred, one-third were sheared, and one-third were plucked, and all were subjected to blunt force via an anvil dropped from a specified height.

The researchers found that the furred samples absorbed almost 30 percent more energy than the sheared and plucked samples, indicating "that hair is indeed capable of significantly reducing the force of impact from a blunt strike and absorbing energy, thereby reducing the incidence of failure," the authors wrote in their paper. Assuming the same is true of human facial hair, "this may explain why facial hair is associated with high masculinity, social dominance, and behavioral aggressiveness, as it may function as a true indicator of invulnerability to facial injury."

Physics Prize

Citation: Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians."

Pedestrian traffic is a fascinating case study in dynamic collective behavior, and hence it holds much interest for physicists. This paper explores how human walkers continuously adjust the path of their trajectory as they encounter oncoming pedestrian traffic in order to avoid collisions and maintain a comfortable personal space. "Not only is this scientific topic fascinating because of its connections with the physics of emerging complexity, pattern formation, and active matter, but it is also extremely relevant for its applications for the design, safety, and performance of civil facilities," the authors wrote.

Physicists typically model such systems as interacting matter particles, with social forces acting on people in similar ways to physical forces. But modeling such a complex system is difficult, in part because of a dearth of high-quality experimental data. So Corbetta et al. set up a six-month pedestrian-tracking experiment at three train stations in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and collected data from October 2014 to March 2015 with the help of four overhead Microsoft Kinect sensors. They collected over 100,000 pedestrian trajectories each day, amounting to about 5 million total, and used that data to build a better model for pedestrian interactions best described as "binary collision avoidance" (two people trying not to bump into each other). The authors believe their approach can be extended to more complex and denser crowd interactions.

Kinetics Prize

Citation: Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama, and Katsuhiro Nishinari, "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians."

Murakami et al. decided to conduct an experiment to study the self-organized patterns that emerge in human crowds, like spontaneous lane formation, which provide a functional benefit to the collective system. The team hypothesized that, despite the prevalence of the aforementioned interacting-particles model in such research, it can't explain certain empirical observations. For instance, prior studies have found that interactions between pedestrians are influenced not by the current positions of their neighbors (distance-dependent physical force) but by anticipating their neighbors' future positions. In other words, "pedestrians in a crowd are not just passively repelled by other pedestrians, but actively find a passage through a crowd by anticipating and negotiating with neighbors to avoid collisions in advance," the authors wrote.

The researchers recruited 54 male university students and had them walk repeatedly along a straight corridor, with a waiting area on either end. They divided the participants into two groups walking in different directions, after assuming randomly selected starting positions. The twist: some of the participants were "distracted walkers," instructed to peruse their mobile phones while strolling down the corridor (the authors note that distracted walking is a major cause of pedestrian accidents). Their movements were tracked via video recordings.

The team found that the addition of distracted walkers into the mix delayed pattern formation in the crowd and led to more collisions between pedestrians, regardless of whether they were looking at their phones or not. "These results imply that avoidance maneuvers are normally a cooperative process and that mutual anticipation between pedestrians facilitates efficient pattern formation," the authors concluded. "Our findings may influence various fields, including traffic management, decision-making research, and swarm dynamics."

Entomology Prize

Citation: John Mulrennan Jr., Roger Grothaus, Charles Hammond, and Jay Lamdin, "for their research study 'A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines.'"

Submarines constitute a closed system when operating underwater; they recycle their air via purification, for instance. That makes controlling cockroach populations aboard subs a unique challenge, since it's impossible to fumigate with the usual insecticides without the toxic vapors lingering in the air. According to Mulrennan et al., both diesel and nuclear submarines employ carboxide fumigation for cockroach control (or at least it was standard practice in 1971, when this study was published.) But there weren't any uniform regulations.

To explore alternatives, the researchers treated eight submarines with a commercially prepared aerosol called dichlorvos. They also made sure all cabinets, drawers, and void spaces were opened and all ventilation systems turned off. After two hours, all the vessels were ventilated for an hour before crew members were allowed to reboard. Mulrennan et al. counted all the dead cockroaches right after ventilation to determine an initial kill count, and after 24 hours, any remaining roaches were flushed out. They also took air samples inside all the submarines to determine the concentration of dichlorvos before and after ventilation.

The results: dichlorvos proved to be 97 to 100 percent effective in controlling cockroaches on the vessels after 24 hours, and the air concentration of the chemical dissipated rapidly to safe levels within one to four hours. The treatment had no effect on any cockroach eggs, however, so the authors recommended re-treating submarines after two weeks (by which time any lingering eggs would have hatched). It's worth noting that science has progressed significantly since 1971. The European Union banned the use of dichlorvos in 1998, and the US EPA has restricted its use since 1995 because of concerns of lingering toxic effects—such as a 2010 study showing an increased risk of ADHD in children.

Listing image by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

Sex can relieve nasal congestion, and other work honored by 2021 Ig Nobels