Do you want to give up alcohol for science? Do scorpions run fast in the lab? Do you want to build your very own moose crash test dummies? The question of why legal documents are so hard to understand is a thorn in the side of many. The recipients of the annual Ig Noble Prizes were announced in a virtual ceremony tonight. It's that time of year again when the serious and silly come together for science. The ceremony can be watched here.
The Ig Nobles honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think, they were established in 1991. Miniature operas, scientific demos, and the need for experts to explain their work twice in 24 seconds are some of the things that are included in the award ceremony. 60 seconds is the limit for acceptance speeches. The research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth the paper it's written on.
The premiere of a mini-opera, The Know-It-All Club, in which every member makes clear their opinion that there is only one person in the Know-It-All Club who knows anything, is also available to watch. The public talks given by the winners will be posted on the Improbable Research website.
The winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes are shown.
The study was "A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery."
I could write an entire article about the 1986 paper, which was adapted from the PhD thesis. The study focuses on depictions of palace scenes, ball games, hunting parties, and dances associated with human sacrifice in the pottery of the late classic Maya period. The administration of an enema was depicted in several Maya jars.
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The pottery scenes suggest that the Maya may have taken enemas in a ritual setting. They looked at the iconography on several pottery pieces depicting enemas. They compiled a list of substances that could have been taken by the Maya.
In the tradition of scientific self-experimentation, de Smet administered enemas to himself to test the efficacy of a few suspected substances. He drank an alcoholic drink for comparison and then gave aclyster. A lot of the mixture needed to be consumed since it had an alcoholic content of 20 percent. A breathalyzer was used to measure intoxication levels. The results show that alcohol is absorbed well from an enema.
The evidence for toxic side effects made De Smet decline to self-administer a tobacco enema. None of the less likely candidates for use in the rituals depicted on the pottery were tested by him. The Bufo alkaloid bufotenin was skipped by him. He did not find a noticeable effect with the enema of dimethyltryptamine. This is an N of 1 with a low dose. We didn't dig deeper to find out if any other researchers followed de Smet down the self-administered enema path.
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