 Hey, welcome, everybody. I would welcome you to our session at Orisha 2022, but Orisha 2022 isn't quite happening. This is the session that was going to be part of Orisha 2022. I'm Mark Abrams, editor of the Anals of Improbable Research. And I also founded the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which I'll tell you a little bit about in a moment. What we're doing here is dramatic readings. We have gathered some of the finest dramatic improbable readers from around the world. They will each be reading to you from studies, research studies. These are real published studies, which you probably have not run across. And they're going to be brief readings, followed by a little bit of questions and answers. Our readers tonight, I'm going to introduce, this is the order in which they will be reading. So you'll be seeing each of these people a couple of times. I'm going to introduce each now and ask each of you at the time to please tell us in a sentence or two, a little bit about who you are speaking to a stranger. Speaking to a lot of strangers. The first dramatic reader in series will be Mason Porter. Mason? Hi, well, as you heard, my name is Mason. I am a professor of mathematics at UCLA. I research a number of things, including the spread of epidemics on networks. The last time I saw Mason was several years ago when we did a show in London in England when Mason was a professor at Oxford and he took the train in his pajamas and got up on stage in London in his pajamas. And he's not doing that tonight. The next reader in series tonight will be Sonya Tafe. Sonya? Hello. I write short stories, poetry, film criticism. I say that I tell living stories, but most of the languages that I can read are dead. Third dramatic reader in series will be Dean Grozens. Dean? I am a historian in a nice sweater. A or M? I would say A. I write on American history and I'm going to be talking a little bit about, well, you'll see, things that are sort of religion and other things, which I'm also interested in. And the final dramatic reader in series tonight will be Gary Dreyfus. Gary? Oh, good evening, Mark. Good evening, everybody. I have been associated with the eggs since the very first annual ceremony all those years ago. And for most of those years, I've been the major domo for every year that we've done a live show. And if we're all alive next year, I hope to be the major domo again. Thank you. There are two other people here. You see on the screen who are vital parts of the woodwork tonight. David Kessler has done much of the organizing for tonight. DK, please say hello. And DK will be showing you little portions of the studies that are being read. DK? Yes, hello. Nice gloves. And Michelle Ligori will be perhaps the most important person in all of this. She will be running the timekeeping of this because each reading is going to be brief. Thanks to Michelle. Michelle? Hello, everybody. Okay. A couple of words about who we are again. The magazine, The Annals of Improbable Research. We've been around for coming up on 30 years now. And we publish all sorts of reports and bits about research, real research that makes people laugh then think. And every year, in fact, every year since 1991, we put on a ceremony called the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony in which we present Ig Nobel prizes to 10 people or groups, each of whom has done something that makes people laugh and then think. We just had the 31st, first annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. You can see lots of detail about all this stuff at our website, improbable.com. And now we're going to do the dramatic readings. Again, each of these is real. You can go and find these yourself. You're gonna see just a little smidge of it, but it's easy to go and Google and get these papers. First, we'll show you just bits of two papers that we're not gonna be reading tonight. And Michelle, could you read the title of each of these as we show them? DK, slide. The particular slides are out of order. So while Michelle reads the titles, I will be looking for them. In the first slide or the first paper is in search of preventative strategies, novel anti-inflammatory, high CBD, cannabis sativa extracts, modulate ACE2 expression in COVID-19 gateway tissues. Okay, but we're not gonna be reading to you for now. And what's the next paper that we'll not be reading to you from? What's the title of that, Michelle? The next one is possibility of disinfection of SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 and human respiratory tract by controlled ethanol vapor inhalation. Okay, we're not gonna be reading to you from that paper either. The first paper that we will be reading to you from will be read dramatically by Mason Porter. Each reading will be two minutes long. And to make it easy for the reader to understand how much time has passed, Michelle Ligori will make a sound every 30 seconds. We'll demonstrate that now. So Michelle, after 30 seconds of the reading, you will make this sound, which wasn't very loud. Try it again. Okay. Better. After 30 seconds more passes, in other words, a whole minute has gone by during the reading, she'll make the sound twice, Michelle. This is a very strange phenomenon with the sound here. Try it again. Let's see if we can get some actual sound in that sound. Mason, you are the resident physicist in the group. Any idea why there's very little sound? Is there a limiter on her volume control? Good gracious. Do you have your limiter on? I've often thought I have no limits, but we'll find out. It's only later in life that we discover truths about ourselves. If we're lucky and unlucky enough to ever to discover them. Okay. Okay. Try it again. Make a sound. I dare you. She's looking for something. That's good. Okay. Thank you, Mason. All right. After another 30 seconds during a dramatic reading, in other words, a minute and a half has gone by, Michelle will make the sound three times, Michelle. And at the end of two minutes, Michelle will make the sound again and will continue to make that sound until the reader stops reading. That's how things are going to work. Readers, when you present it, I'm going to ask you to first read the title of the paper and the names of the people who wrote it and tell us where it was published. So here's Mason Porter. Mason, what's the title of this paper you'll be reading? This paper is called Influence of Perceived Threat of COVID-19 and Hexico Personality Traits on Toilet Paper Stockpiling. Could you read that again? One more time, please. Influence of Perceived Threat of COVID-19 and Hexico Personality Traits on Toilet Paper Stockpiling. The authors are Lisa Garb, Richard Rao, and Theo Topp, and it was published in the Journal Plus One. Okay, and you have not seen this paper until just a few hours ago, really, correct? That's right. I've heard of it before, but I had not actually looked at it. And that's true of all the readers in all the papers. They're reading from and presenting themselves in only a surface manner as experts on these papers, but they're reading to you from papers which are completely unfamiliar to them. And in fact, the general topics are probably not all that familiar to them. So here is Mason Porter. Ready, set, go. Okay, I'll start with the abstract. Following the fast spread of COVID-19 across Europe and North America in March 2020, many people started stockpiling commodities like toilet paper. Despite the high relevance for public authorities to adequately address stockpiling behavior, empirical studies on the psychological underpinnings of toilet paper stockpiling are still scarce. In this study, we investigated the relation between personality traits, perceived threat of COVID-19, and stockpiling of toilet paper in an online store in two countries. Results suggest that people who felt more threatened by COVID-19 stockpiled more toilet paper. Further, a predisposition toward emotionality predicted the perceived threat of COVID-19 and affected stockpiling behavior indirectly. Finally, conscientiousness was related to toilet paper stockpiling, such that individuals higher in conscientiousness tended to stockpile more toilet paper. These results emphasize the importance of clear communication by public authority, and at the same time, transmitting a sense of control. Introduction. Within a few weeks, the output of the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a severe global health crisis in spring 2019. The resulting scarcity of toilet paper in some households has led to problematic consequences, such as the clogging of outfill fall pipes after people started using products other than toilet paper. Which individual difference variables can account for toilet paper hoarding? Another explanation that has been properly featured in the media revolves around an overgeneralization of disgust. According to this notion, people experience an increased sensitivity to disgust in times of disease spread. However, even the most, instead, even the most humble and moral individuals might stockpile toilet paper as long as they feel sufficiently threatened by a pandemic. It's also been interpreted in terms of classical psychoanalytical theory. In this line of reasoning, individuals with a marked pattern of orderliness and self-discipline or an anal-visual personality are happy to be particularly blinded. Thank you, Macy Porter. And now we have time for just a few questions. When we do this in a large room full of people, the audience, which is the way we normally do this, the audience asks the questions, but of course the issue is canceled so we don't have a room full of anything. We're all sitting here pretty much, each of us by ourselves. So the readers who are not reading are free to ask questions of the reader who did read. Let me remind you who are watching this that the reader has not even seen this paper until a few hours ago. And the people who are asking the questions probably haven't either. So you've got people who don't know anything about the subject, asking questions of somebody who also doesn't know anything about the subject. When you're answering questions, there's only one rule. You can answer any way you like, but no bullshitting. Don't pretend to know something. It's fine to say you don't know something. It's fine to speculate, but if you speculate, make it clear that's what you're doing. Are there any questions for Mason on this? Sonia. Does the paper address the related phenomenon of once the toilet paper to hoard has run out the people who clear other paper products off the shelves, i.e. why can I never find any Kleenex nowadays? I do not remember seeing that, but there was as you heard in a sentence, issues of people using other products other than the paper when they ran out. Okay, Michelle, question. Are the conscientious members of this study more likely to have the paper rolled this way over the roll or that way over the roll? I do not believe that that was addressed, but that does in terms of speculation get into core psychology of people. Okay, and we want to keep things moving, so we'll limit it to about three questions. Gary, a question. The title mentioned something called a hexaco. Yes, it does. I don't know what that is, and I was wondering if you did. That is definitely defined in the paper. Now all I have to do is find where in the paper and actually remember it. That's a very good answer. Thank you very much, Mason Porter. The next paper will be read by Sonia Tafe. Sonia, what is the title of this paper? Students have become invisible again. The title of the paper is Melody in Human Cat Communication, Miaoziq, Origins Past, Present, and Future. It was written by Suzanne Schutz, Robert Echlin. Excuse me, DK, that's not what you're showing us on the screen. Oh dear. Would you like me to repeat the paper's title? Please. Melody in Human Cat Communication, Miaoziq, Origins Past, Present, and Future by Suzanne Schutz, Robert Echlin, and Just van der Weijer, whose name I have probably just mangled on account of not speaking Dutch. It was presented in 2016 at the Phonetic Conference in Stockholm. Okay, and we're okay. And here we go. Ready, set, go. The recently funded five-year project, Melody in Human Cat Communication, Miaoziq, has received vast media attention both nationally and around the world. The purpose of the project is to study the communication between humans and domestic cats. Specifically, we will investigate how prosody, including voice, melody, intonation, and speaking style in human speech as well as cat vocalizations and influences vocal communications. As we speak by Burnham Kitamura and Valmar Khanna, pet-directed speech shows many of the characteristics of infant-directed speech. However, we do not know whether pets like infants are also more drawn to this kind of speech than to speech that lacks these characteristics. In order to investigate this question, we will carry out a discrimination experiment in which we expose cats to audio samples of pet-directed and adult-directed speech, natural as well as synthesized stimuli and record their reactions to these samples. These are the characteristics of two purposes. First, we want to explore which behavioral responses and cats may be used in an experimental setting as preliminary candidates for such responses. We consider head and eye turns, ear and body movements, and exploring behavior. Second, we want to investigate whether any of these responses are suggestive of a preference for either a pet-directed or adult-directed speech. Children's or adult voices, familiar, unfamiliar voices to minimize the stress level of the cat participants, the experimental sessions will be carried out in the cat's home environment. Further inspiration from certain language learning comes from both ancient and recent sources. Already, Aristotle observed that birds exhibited both learning and dialectal variation. Moreover, recently it was discovered that the Norwegian fin whales have at least six different dialects, which does not come as a surprise since the literature is replete with reports of dialects and animal vocalizations. Thus, we hypothesize to find dialectal variants of domestic cats. And another issue is to what extent if at all vocal learning can be observed. This is, as already, Aristotle- Is it correct with dialectal variations without learning? Thank you, Sonia. Are there any questions? Raise your hand, please, if you have a question. Mason, your hand was up first. Yeah, so some human dialects are much easier for listeners to understand than others. Does the same occur with cats? The paper actually didn't get as far as studying dialect. It just talked about proposals in order to study them. This was admittedly in 2016, but with a limited time between being presented with the paper and being permitted to present it with the kind help of my assistant, Etolicus. I didn't actually go looking to find out if they found cat dialects. Dean, question. So do cats like being addressed like children or being addressed like adults? Personally, since I talked to this one, like an adult, I think the baby talks just confused them. Dialects. Any further questions? Okay, DK. I think I heard you say in that paper that part of this study was taking place in the cat's own environment. What part of the world is not the cat's own environment? I mean, according to the cat, it is indeed all cats all the time. So, you know, where there is a cat, there is a home environment. Thank you, Sonia. I should mention that the authors of that paper were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize this past fall for that work and also for related work, a whole series of papers about cat human communications. You can see that the presentation of the prize and some discussion by the authors on our website, improbable.com. Now we move on to our next reader, Gary Dreyfus. Gary, what's the title of this paper? And you seem to be muted. Yeah, the wasted chewing gum bacterium. Could you, DK, could you show that? And Gary, would you mind reading that title again? Yeah, the wasted, I think they mean disposed of, but I don't know, the wasted chewing gum bacterium. And it was written by Lila Satari, Alba Guillen, Angela Vidal Verdu and Manuel Porcar. And it was appeared in scientific reports of nature research. Okay, and I'll mention this paper also was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize. All set, here we go. On your mark, get set, go. The wasted chewing gum bacterium. Here we show the bacterium of wasted chewing gum from five different countries and the microbial successions on wasted gums during three months of outdoor exposure. Our results reveal that the oral microbiota of gums after being chewed, characterized by the species in the blah, blah, evolved in a few weeks to an environmental bacterium. Our findings have implications for a wide range of disciplines including forensics, contagious disease control or bioremediation of ways to chew gum residues. Chewing gums have been with us, have been used for thousands of years since wood tar from the mesolithic and neolithic periods have been found with tooth impressions which suggests a role in teeth cleaning as well as its usage in early adhesives. The first modern chewing gum was introduced in the market in the late 19th century and chewing gums today are vastly consumed worldwide. It is estimated that Iran and Saudi Arabia are the countries with the highest chewing gum consumption where 80% of the population are regular gum chewing consumers. The value of chewing gum trade has been estimated at more than 30 billion US dollars in 2019. The colonization process of wasted chewing gums. A specific experiment was carried out to shed light on the microbial succession taking place in the waste and chewing gum once discarded. 13 gums were chewed and placed on an outdoor pavement over a period of up to 12 weeks and a high throughput RNA sequencing was carried out to follow the dynamic changes of the bacterial content. It is interesting to compare the bacterial profile of the chewing gums exposed outdoors for several weeks in the controlled experiments we performed with that of old wasted chewing gums. We have sampled it from different locations around the world. Thank you, Gary. Questions, raise your hand if you have a question. Yes, yes. Oh, Dean. Experiment or 2D fruity? They use different gums in different places around the world. Culture-dependent experiments, characteristic. I don't know. Other questions? Michelle. Did any of this research take place in Singapore and were any of the researchers tamed as a result of this research? There's a graphic. And Singapore is on the graphic, actually, but I think so. It's hard to read the graphs, they're little. There's no mention of physical punishment to the researchers. I think when they put it on, oh, yes, when they put it on pavements, it was like their own pavement set up for these. They didn't just, yeah, that's in here. It was in a laboratory, not in the wild. They found gum in the wild in as many cities as they could and compared them to see the differences. But you're right, in Singapore, I would think they would just have to do the laboratory kind. And before Sonya asked the next question, I should mention that Lee Kuan Yew, who was for a long time the leader of Singapore, won an Ig Nobel Prize many years ago for a whole series of achievements, one of which was banning the chewing gum. Sonya, you have a question. Would I be correct in interpreting from the focus of chewing gum left on the pavement and in the wild that the all important question was not answered in this paper, namely, does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bed post overnight? You are correct. There is no mention anywhere in here of old chewing gum being retasted to ascertain whether it retains flavor. They just, they sampled, there's a lot of stuff in here about how they did the RNA sequencing and tested to parse out exactly what bacteria were growing on it at different periods of time, but at no point did anyone actually retaste the gum. I don't normally do what I'm about to do here in these kinds of events, but Sonya and Gary, you were both noted and accomplished musicians. I wonder if you would mind joining in to perform just the first few lines of the song. I've never performed it, but if you start, I'll join in. Sonya? I've never performed this one either. I have to think of actually no the melody or if I just see it quoted incessantly. Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bed post overnight? If your mother says don't you have to swallow it in spite and it catches on your tonsils and you swing it left and right, does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bed post overnight? Post overnight. Hey, Nani. Thank you very much. That's the first round of readings and now the second and final round. We have one more question that's pressing, Michelle. I would like to request before we go on to the next round that we return to the first round. We have skipped one of our readers and I would really like to find out which saint are we supposed to be saint? I'm sorry. Dean, I apologize greatly. That's not a problem. I was so mesmerized by your questions that I have no excuse. Mesmerized by the song. Okay, Dean Grodzins. Dean, what is the name of the paper you're going to be reading from? Which saint to pray for fighting against COVID infection a short survey? Okay, could you read that little again for us, please? Which saint to pray for fighting against COVID infection a short survey by A. Piercia Conte, A. Coralee, and P. Charlier. It appeared in ethics, medicine, and public health. Okay, here we go on your mark. Go. In the absence of a treatment still considered universally effective, we wanted to know which Catholic saint the European Christian community turned to in the event of infection with COVID-19 to request miraculous healing. We conducted a survey on two of the most used social networks, Twitter and Facebook. This survey was conducted in the United States on Twitter and Facebook. This survey was conducted between August 21st and 25th, 2020. A total of 1150 adult anonymous participants, mainly from France, and Natalie answered our question. Who did you pray to? Analyzing the results in more detail from the survey, it emerges that the majority saint is St. Rita. From a young age, Rita of Caskia dreamed of consecrating herself to God in a difficult situation that she faced in her life as wife, mother, and nun. Today she's considered the patron saint of lost causes. And she is invoked in the most difficult situations. Therefore, St. Rita's first place clearly reflects the pessimistic and fatalistic nature of the current situation and the lack of credit given to the therapeutic offer in the face of COVID-19. The second and the third place we find respectively, St. Roque and St. Sebastian who based on Catholic tradition or the two principal saints consider protectors against the plague whose epidemic pattern has been compared to that of COVID-19. Interestingly, we note the presence of some saints whose choice may have been dictated by linguistic proximity with charismatic personalities linked to the fight against disease, St. Didier and St. Roque in reference to now famous professor Didier Roque from Marseille with a name linked to the taxonomy of the infectious agent, St. Corona. With the place of the emergence of the viral strain, St. Jean Gabrielle. I love you and you're more than on China. Thank you, Dean. Questions, raise your hand if you have one. Michelle. Michelle. How does one beseech St. Rita or any of these? Are you supposed to like bury a statue upside down in your backyard? Are you supposed to wear a medal? What does one do? They don't specify what one does. I assume one... I would speculate because I'm not Catholic that you go to a church and you light a candle at the appropriate site and you do those kinds of things. I don't know of any little statue that people carry around, but maybe they have them now. Next question? Any other question? Sonja. And I also want to... Another, I cannot resist Sonja since you have such a deep and extensive knowledge of the world's music. I'm wondering if any old traditional piece of music leaps to mind pertaining to this. I mean, I could always do your ring around the rosies, but I think that one's a folk etymology. Otherwise, I've just gone straight to the DA Cirae as featured in the seventh seal. A couple of bars of that. We read a meter maid. Could you perform a couple of bars of that? A couple of bars of that. At the DA Cirae? Yes. Oh, okay. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So, the second in body, tested at it, conceived. Thank you very much. Now you have a question. Thank you. That was wonderful. Now you had a question. Oh, yeah, right. Does the paper... I'm genuinely interested in this one. Does the paper address current popularity of plague saints against historical popularity of plague saints? I would have expected Saint Sebastian, for example, to be much higher up the current list than he is, but he appears to have been displaced by a significantly more depressive saint, which I find really interesting. So is there any historical cross-section in the paper or is it basically does not go straight for the lost causes? Well, they don't quite explain it. They just say that Saint Rita gets the most. The next is Saint Roque, who actually suffered from the plague and had to go out into the woods and a dog attended to him and then a nobleman followed the dog and then attended to him. And anyway, he became, and then Saint Sebastian, who of course got all those arrows and therefore became symbolically, those are the top three and then it goes on, but then goes on from there. I personally like Saint Corona myself, but that was, the associations, the associational saints appealed to me. Thank you. And now... It makes it very important to Ashley the Crumb-Tinies poster if all 26 letters are died from the plague. And now it's time for round two, our final round, in which each of the readers will read from a different paper. Not all of them reading from the same paper. Four readers, four papers. Mason Porter, what's the title of this paper you're going to be reading for? I'm going to switch my character, my headpiece here. And what is that on your head? That is a knit beholder, which is a character from Dungeons and Dragons, with, in this case, lots of different colors. And surprisingly comfortable, I didn't think it would be comfortable, but it turns out that it is. How often do you wash it? Well, Dungeons and Dragons is something that I play. It's just I happen to... This is something that was a targeted advertisement. So that tells you all you need to know about me as a target and what gets to be targeted advertisements. But then I liked it and an individual was making these, and they normally sell them at conventions, but a lot of those people actually have much less of an income source in the last couple of years. So I was happy to buy it. The question was, how often do you wash the hat? Oh, how often do I wash it? Well, I hardly ever actually wear it because I usually tend to not wear hats. So I have not tried to wash it yet, but I've not actually worn it in public before, except for videos and stuff like that. So good. Thank you for honoring us tonight. Yeah. What is the title of this paper? The title of the paper, Pandemic Practice. Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. Great. Could you repeat that title again, please? Yes. Pandemic Practice. Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors are Colton Scrivener, John A. Johnson, Jans, Jell guard Christensen, and Matthias Clayson. Okay. And it was published where? In Personality and Individual Differences. This is the name of the journal. Okay. And here we go. On your mark, get set, go. One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from which individuals can gather information and model possible worlds. Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study tested whether past and current engagement with thematically relevant media fictions, including horror and pandemic films, was associated with greater preparedness for and psychological resilience toward the pandemic. We found that fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of prepper genres, alien invasion, apocalyptic and zombie films exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness. Intentionally exposing oneself to fearful situations is, on its face, a peculiar phenomenon. In a simulated experience, such as an oral story, a novel or a film, one can explore possible futures or phenomena, gathering information about what the real and learn how to prepare for analogous situations in the real world. The most important part of many stories may not be their literal similarity to real life, but the meaning that can be extracted from them and applied to real world situations. Although zombies do not exist and thus represent no real threat to humans, situations that occur in zombie movies may be analogous to situations that would occur in real world events. In line with simulation account, Scrivner found that individuals high and severe morbidity became much more interested in pandemic themed films in the early weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak than less morbidly curious individuals. Though a greater propensity to gather information about dangerous phenomena, through a greater propensity, morbidly curious individuals may accrue a larger repertoire of knowledge and emotional coping strategies that would be useful in dangerous situations. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that morbidly curious individuals and horror fans exhibit greater psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also investigated, I don't know what they also investigate. Was that three or four, Michelle? It was the end. That was a four. I just had a better stopping point than last time if I stopped. Good. All right, questions. Raise your hand if you have a question that you'd like to ask. Mason. About this. Gary. I think you read a section where it says that zombie movies are unrealistic because there aren't actually zombies in the real world. Yes, they did write that in the paper. So the authors believe that there aren't actually brain-eating zombies in the real world. Well, yes. And they actually even made that statement without citing a single paper in support of it. Thank you. Yeah, that was, I was curious about that. Next question. There is one. Raise your hand if you have a. Sonja. Does the paper address the widening gap of reality if one is using fictional stories as a way to prepare for real world horror when it arrives? Does the paper go into the fact that we have been conditioned by years of zombie movies to take an example, to assume that people will say, resist zombies or shoot them or run away rather than walk toward them declaring that the zombies are a liberal hoax? So I have not seen, I don't remember seeing that in the paper. I know of not with zombies, but other studies of misinformation. I don't remember if any of those brought up zombies per se. But yes, it is a good point and it could be addressed in a paper along these lines. OK, time for one more question. If anybody has one, Sonja, have another question. You're just raising your hand. Doing the only way I can mute and unmute my tablet. Ah, you're just muting. OK, all right. Well, thank you very much, Mason Porter. Our next dramatic reader is again, Sonja Tafe. Sonja, what is the title of this paper? I'm reading sneezing in times of a flu pandemic. Public sneezing increases perception of unrelated risks and shift preferences for federal spending. It's a long title. Could you read that again, please? Sneezing in times of a flu pandemic. Public sneezing increases perception of unrelated risks and shifts preferences for federal spending. It is like W. S. Lee, nor Daniel Tellman on how it was published in 2010 in Psychological Science. Here we go. On your mark, get set, go. The public's perception of a given health risk increases with coverage of the risk in the news media. Laboratory experiments further suggest that the heightened perception of the risk posed by one hazard fosters heightened perception of the risk posed by other unrelated hazards. Accordingly, minor everyday events that bring a current effectively charged threat to mind may influence risk perception in unrelated domains. We present a naturalistic test of this possibility. To instantiate the threat of contagion, we arranged for. Feel under a sneak increase, the perceived risk of contract. A serious disease, which might include flu, as well as the perceived risk of unrelated threats, namely having a heart attack and dying from a crime or an accident. Moreover, sneezing elicited more negative evaluations of the country's health care system. On May 26th to 30th, 2009, an experimenter asked pedestrians in shopping malls in downtown business areas in Ann Arbor, Michigan to participate in a one minute survey. Sneezing was manipulated after respondents agreed to participate. Holding the questionnaire in her right hand, the experimenter coughed and sneezed once while covering her mouth with her left forearm before handing the questionnaire to participants in the sneezing condition in the control condition. The same experimenter did not sneeze. Compared to participants in the control condition of study one, those who had just passed a sneezing confederate perceived the average American is more likely to contract a serious disease to have a heart attack before age 50 and to die from a crime or an accident. The experimenter said that a few participants in the sneezing condition were more likely than those in the control condition to favor federal spending on production of flu vaccines rather than on the creation of green jobs. Finally, participants general evaluation of whether the country was going in the wrong direction was unaffected by the manipulation, which suggests that sneezing did not elicit a general negativity bias. Debriefing suggests that people have no insight into these processes. They assume that exposure to a sneeze may influence their perception of the risk, but not their perception of unwavering risk. Future research may quickly attend to having mediation of the abhorred effect of the symptoms over time. Thank you, Sonia. Questions? Thank you. Thank you. Questions? Questions? Comments? How's about rage? So so could we substantially change public opinion just by having all the pollsters sneeze beforehand if you choose the right choose the right topic? We can substantially change public opinion. This paper suggests about things that people already worry about. This paper does not suggest that it is possible to reassure people by sneezing on them. OK, and if there are no further questions, we will move on to the next reader. Thank you, Sonia. The next reader is Dean Grozens, who I'm not forgetting this time around. I apologize again for skipping over you in that first round. Dean, what's the title of this paper? Why methodology is important? Coffee as a candidate treatment for COVID-19? Question mark. OK, and please read the title one more time. Why methodology is important? Coffee as a candidate treatment for COVID-19? Question mark. I'm not going to read all the names, because there are so many of them, but of the author's names. So I'll say Yanis Belruci at all. And it appeared in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. OK, and here we go on your mark. Get set, go. We evaluate the effect of coffee's active part. T137 triethylxanthine, if I pronounce that correctly, TMX on patients with COVID-19. A cohort of 93 patients with a diagnosis of COVID-19 is analysed. The patients from two centres, the Centre hospitalier universitaire, la PTA Sainte-Petrière-Pérée-France, and Centre hospitalier universitaire de Poitiers-Poitiers-France were included during an April 2020. They were assessed for eligibility at the hospital admission in the same centre. All patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection were assessed for the following inclusion criteria, 18 or greater, no TMX contraindications before inclusion. All patients had to give their consent. And the result was that they found a cohort of patients that received the TMX treatment at a significantly shorter hospital stay, 9.5 days versus 15 days. In fact, however, we cannot conclude to a direct effect on TMX on COVID-19 because of a huge lack of methodological considerations. The aim of this study is not to prove the efficacy of coffee, but to reveal how anyone can prove anything with an on-rigorous study. For instance, the multiple bias, the selection criteria, the clinical relevance of the end point, the methodological structure of our study weakened the external and internal validity. We cannot conclude any association with the efficacy of caffeine and horse dewormer. No, no, they just stuck to caffeine. Next question. Sonya, are you stretching or? Was as much of that paper written in all caps as it sounds metaphysically like it should have been? Only TMX and COVID-19 are in all caps. One last question, anybody? OK. Michelle? I thought you said something about the authors saying that methodology and conscientiousness were important. Yes. I think they did say that. Were these the same conscientious researchers who were hoarding the toilet paper in the earlier study or is this a different conscientious group? I think that would be worth itself a survey, perhaps using social media. You could make that determination, but it's not in this paper. Thank you, Dean Brodsons. And now it's time for the final dramatic reading of the evening or morning, whenever it is, you're listening to this and watching this. Gary Dreyfus, what is the title of this paper? Oh, oh, the title of this paper is impact protection potential of mammalian hair, testing the pugilism hypothesis for the evolution of human facial hair by E.A. Basteris, Essie Nellouay, and D.R. Carrier, University of Utah. And it was in integrative organismal biology, a journal for the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. And for ultra-clarity, could you repeat the title of it? I'll try. Impact protection potential of mammalian hair, testing the pugilism hypothesis for the evolution of human facial hair. And here we go to commence the final dramatic reading. On your mark, get set, go. Because facial hair is one of the most sexually dimorphic features of human and is often perceived as an indicator of masculinity and social dominance, human facial hair has been suggested to play a role in male contest competition. Some authors have proposed that the beard may function similar to the long hair of a lion's mane, serving to protect vital areas like the throat and jaw from lethal attacks. This is consistent with the observation that the mandible, which is superficially covered by the beard, is one of the most commonly fractured bones in interpersonal violence. We hypothesize that beards protect the skin and bones of the face when human males fight by absorbing and dispersing energy of blunt impact. We tested this hypothesis by measuring impact force and energy absorbed by a fiber-apoxy composite, which served as bone analog when covered with skin that had a thick hair referred to here as furred versus skin with no hair referred to here as sheared and plucked. For example, peak force was 16% greater and total energy absorbed was 37% greater in the furred compared to the plucked samples. Introduction, as in the case in other species of great apes, human males perpetrate the vast majority of violence and most of these acts of aggression are directed at other males. And over here, and over here it says, thus the extent to which the mane of lions is protective remains unresolved. So there's that. There's a photo and this is a scientific paper because there's a diagram where it says diagram and also there are numbers where it says numbers. So this was an important scientific paper and in conclusion, their conclusion. Thank you, Gary Dreifers. What questions have you for Gary? Mason. Yes. Yes, Mason. So the amount of hair that many males have in the human societies is sort of cyclical, the 70s, 80s, 90s are all different. Have they done a longitudinal study to look at the different protections that people might have had back then versus now? You should write to these guys because that is like, they're so into this and they did the thing where they made bones out of epoxy and then they put sheepskin, they actually sheared, they put sheepskin, the actual skin and then they put the hair on it and they really got into details and they spent a lot of time, but they didn't even know if the lion main thing was just crap, it's unresolved. So they have a lot more questions than answers and I think adding a longitudinal vector into that would thrill them. And they won an Ig Nobel Prize for publishing this paper. Sure, because they don't know anything actually. Gary. Another question? Yeah. So I need a question. I was just wondering how the coffee methodological people would feel about this paper. The coffee people. Oh, well, I mean. Does this paper have methodology or does it just have a really, really fancy replica of somebody's jaw with fur on it? No, but this thing here is a machine. It has a striker and an anvil and there's the hair and the substrate. So they're actually like measuring stuff. And if you have enough hair and you get hit, they prove that it's gonna spread it out by almost by a little more than a third, which is probably good, but you'd have to have a lot of fleece, a big fleecy beard, I think from the picture, but they have numbers and diagrams. Good, thank you. Michelle, it must be true. You have a question, Michelle. I was just wondering if maybe the reason it has no conclusion is because the guy who was supposed to write the conclusion got injured in the whole lion plucking incident? They talk a lot about the lions. They really spend a lot of time on the lions. Can you read between the lions and let us know if there's more? Others have proposed that the beard, blah, blah, blah, blah, human beard specific to males. Well, we know that, grab and hold the beard, links, baboons, sea lions, bison, elk, provide physical protection and mail to mail fights. Darwin speculated that the beard was merely an ornament that it was a sexual display. So I don't think anybody got hurt in the lion thing, but they don't mention it. They just say, who wants to bite a lion in the mane anyway? Basically it was the question. That's not what they're trying to bite. So they don't know. I am reluctant to ask, but does anyone else have a question about this for Gary? Mason. Mason. I can ask another question. So does this explains easy top? If I was going to be in a bar fight, I would totally not try to hit ZZ top in the beards. I'd find something like clean shaving guy to hit in a bar fight. And I'm afraid we don't have time. Not the two guys with the beard. We don't have time for any further questions. I'm afraid this has been another session. This has been the improbable research dramatic reading session at Arisha, which happened despite Arisha not happening here in the year 2022. We hope that next year Arisha will be back and we hope to be doing a lot more of these readings. If you'd like to be exposed, and I guess that is the right word to a lot more studies that have this flavor, things that we think anyway, make people laugh and then think subscribe to the magazine. The Annals of Improbable Research. We go to a lot of trouble to collect stuff from around the world. People around the world go to a lot of trouble to send us stuff they discover. And comes out six times a year. Every issue is a special issue on a different topic. One issue a year is a special issue about the Ig Nobel Prize winners and Ig Nobel Prize ceremony from that year. And all of this stuff you can find at improbable.com, which is on a thing called the World Wide Web, which is on a thing called the Internet, which is on a thing whose name I can't think of, or even birth. That's it. And I think that's the end of that. Thank you very much to all of our participants tonight, to our timekeeper, Michelle Ligori, to David Kessler, DK for organizing all this, to our dramatic readers. I ask you to take a bow now. As I mentioned your name, Mason Porter, Sonia Tafe, Dean Grazins, and the bearded Gary Dreyfus. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you all again, participants, and we'll either see you or not see you when we see you or not see you. Thanks.