Science Friday - Ig Nobel Prizes | Stop Flushing Your Health Data Down The Toilet

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Saluting Science's Silly Side, VirtuallyIn science, there are some traditions: Every October, the Nobel Prize committee announces the winners of that year’s awards, which are presented in Sweden in December. And every September for the past 33 years, a different committee has awarded the Ig Nobel Prizes in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Science Friday plays highlights from the awards ceremony. The Ig Nobel awards are a salute to achievements that, in the words of the organizers, “make people laugh, then think.” They are presented by the editors of the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research to 10 lucky(?) winners for unusual achievements in science, medicine, and other fields. This year’s ceremony was held virtually, with a webcast taking the place of the traditional raucous ceremony in Harvard’s Sanders Theater. However, it still contained many elements of the in-person Igs, from flying paper airplanes to the participation of real Nobel Laureates in the ceremony. This year’s awards included prizes for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks,  for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools, and for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils. SciFri producer Charles Bergquist joins Ira to discuss highlights from this year’s ceremony.Stop Flushing Your Health Data Down The ToiletYou could be flushing important information about your health right down the toilet—quite literally. Pee and poop can tell you a lot about your health, so what if your waste…didn’t go to waste? What if, instead, it could tell you more about your health? Like number one, it can catch a condition like diabetes early. Or number two, check out what’s going on in your gut microbiome.That’s the goal of the smart toilet—a device that gets all up in your business to tell you more about your health. Ira talks with the inventor of the PH Smart Toilet, Dr. Seung-min Park, instructor of urology at Stanford’s School of Medicine in California, about how the toilet works, how it can be used to catch diseases early on, and the ethical implications of such a device.To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday’s newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It's one of the annual traditions of science, the Ig Nobel Prizes. If you didn't win an Ig Nobel Prize this year, and especially if you did, better luck next year. A salute to unusual science. Yeah, today's Black Friday, but skip the shopping trip. It's also Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Charles Bergquist. Each fall, the Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded. Prizes for science that first makes you laugh, but then makes you think.

The prizes are in their third. third year, and in our own holiday tradition, we play highlights from the ceremony on the day after Thanksgiving. So grab a slice of leftover pie, if you have some, and join Ira and me for a look at this year's awards, including one winner we spoke with earlier in the year for his research. Okay. Tell us, are things back to post-COVID normal yet, or at least as normal as they can be for the Yiggs? Not exactly. So you've been to the ceremony in person. Pre-pandemic, they would hand out the prizes, big ceremony, packed theater on the Harvard campus. There was music, flying paper airplanes, costumes, the whole bit, right? This year, it was virtual once more. The ringleader

of the ceremony, Mark Abrams, says, fingers crossed. They're hoping that they'll be back in the theater again next year. But this year's event was a big Zoom call on webcast. But the winners were still awarded their prizes by real Nobel laureates. Uh-huh. Right. Okay. Reminds. Reminds. What you have to do to earn this honor? Well, you have to do something that, in the words of the organizers, first makes you laugh and then makes you think. Anyone can nominate somebody for the prize, but the decisions get made in secret by a committee of editors of a science humor magazine, the annals of improbable research. So it's something that when you hear it, you say, oh, that's stupid. But then when you think about it, you realize there's a reason or it tells us something important about the world.

Exactly. Okay. I was looking at the list of winners, and I noticed the Chemistry and Geology Prize was for a researcher who wrote about why paleontologists like to lick rocks, which sounds crazy. But you know what? I remember back in 2018 when we were before a live audience in Salt Lake City, a youngster in the audience asked paleontologist Randy Ermis about this very thing. How can you tell if you're just walking by if it's a rock or a fossil? Well, we have a very scientific way of telling that it's fossil bone, which is to lick it. I'm not joking. I'm not joking. That's really true. Wait, wait, wait. It's technical. You lick it. Yeah. Yeah, so generally... I don't see that on National Geographic or any of, you know, maybe their shows would be more popular if they showed them. No, it's, I'm not, this is not a fib. Rock typically does not stick to your tongue, but fossil bone generally does.

And I haven't gotten any diseases, I don't think, so. There's actually multiple different types of taste tests in geology and paleontology. What do you mean? Well, now I like to this. So one of the things you want to know about in geology is whether the sediment was deposited by fast-moving water or slow-moving water. and the finer grain the sediment, the slower the water was. And when you get down to really fine grain sediment, you can't really see it with the naked eye or even with a little hand lens.

So to tell the difference between mudstone and silt stone, you bite off a little piece and grind it between your teeth. And the mudstone will be very smooth, you know, sort of like a milkshake you get a fast food place because they actually put clay in those. And then the silt will grind a little bit and be a little gritty. So, yep, you're right, I right. I remember that now.

Exactly. It's totally a real thing. Here's Jan Zelasiewicz accepting this year's prize. Thank you very much indeed. It's a great pleasure to have this prize for such a fundamental thing as licking rocks, which geologists do all the time in the field because something that's not very clear, then becomes much clearer. When you look at it with a wet surface, I'm a field geologist. I've licked a million rocks. But 200 years ago, geologists were licking rocks to find out what they were.

With no machines, no textbooks, no microscopes, no chemistry indeed. They did geology, at least in part, by taste. Wow, who needs the fancy equipment? I mean, this certainly fits the first makes you laugh and makes you think idea. Let's move on next. Who else won? Well, you know how sometimes a word, if you look at it too long, can sometimes start to feel wrong? The literature prize went to researchers who studied the sensations that people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many times.

It's a sensation called jaie-vous. Oh, something like deja vu. Yeah, it's almost like the inverse, where instead of getting the sense that something is spookily familiar, it's the sense that something is spookily familiar. It's the sense that something that should be super familiar is suddenly weird or unknown. I saw something about the engineering prize, kind of creepy spider robots? Exactly. The researchers were using dead spiders as mechanical gripping tools, kind of like the claw hand toy in stores. Here's a clip.

Have you ever seen a dead spider and wondered why its legs curl up? We did. And the answer led to us repurposing a dead spider as a robotic spider. griper. Humans have antagonistic muscle pairs like the biceps and triceps which flex and extend the elbow joint. However, while spiders have flexor muscles to curl their legs inward, they rely on hydraulic pressure to extend their legs outward, which is why they curl up after they die. Starting with a dead spider, we tapped into its hydraulic system with a needle and used pressure to extend its legs. It ended up looking like a claw machine. We call this approach necrobotics based on the source material, a dead spider,

hence necro, and the application a robotic gripper. Using the necrobotic gripper, we picked up delicate objects, as well as objects heavier than the gripper itself. Because nature creates these dexterous grippers for us, necrobotic components are easy to attain. We hope that this new fuel of necobotics will inspire curiosity-driven research and spark ideas for how we can respectfully and sustainably use biotic materials for robotics. Wow, I can see Mark Abrams had a lot of time on his hands this year to find some really interesting ones. And, you know, there were a lot of rituals in the theater version of the awards, especially when I was there, like the paper airplane throwing. And I always like the little girl who would interrupt speakers who went on too long.

Is she still doing that? Well, Miss Sweetie Poo, there's been several iterations of her. She hasn't been around for a few years, but you will be happy to know this year she did make an appearance during the awarding of the Education Prize. which was researchers studying boredom in the classroom. Please stop, I'm bored. Please stop. I'm bored. Okay, we get it. Ms. Sweetie Poole is bored.

But why? And that is a very serious empirical question. Two papers were cited by the award committee. The first one suggests that we are bored because we expect to be so. We demonstrate that our expectations walking into the classroom can influence the extent of our boredom. In other words, if you expect to be boredom, bored by me, chances are you already are. I'm bored.

In the second paper, we looked at how teachers boredom affect their students. We found that if the students thought their teachers were bored while teaching, they too felt more bored, which in turn made them less motivated to study. We thank the teachers and students who participated in our studies. We also thank Mark and the award committee for overcoming their own boredom by creating this award that makes us laugh, then think. think. Please stop.

I'm bored. Never get bored of hearing this sweetie poo. What about the medicine prize? That's always a big one every year. Nose hairs. Nose hairs? Researchers used cadavers to

explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils. I think we better let them explain. What are noose hairs for? That's a very good question. I look to the anatomy books. Not a single thing on nose hair. We need to study this. Sure, that sounds reasonable on cadavers. Okay, thank you. Okay. That's what we did. We studied nose hairs in 20 cadavers and found that

there were about 112 to 120 nose hairs each one of these nostrils. So we also found that the hairs tended to grow mainly in the frontal location of the nose and essentially only grew up to about one centimeter inwards. This supports its presumed role as a protective barrier from environmental exposure, as particles theoretically deposit more on hairs in the front nostril than along deeper passages. We hope this research raises awareness of the importance of nasal hairs, especially in our alopecia area of patients in which their loss results in an increased risk of allergies and infection.

So thank you for this noseworthy award. So as you see, there was a reason that they were doing this silly. sounding thing. They were trying to study whether patients with severe hair loss were going to be at more severe risk of respiratory diseases. Well, it's giving me something to talk about over a beer tonight. I think we have time for one more prize, Charles, before the break. Do you have a favorite one? Well, so you've spent time in New York, and I'm sure you've seen people, usually tourists, standing on the sidewalk, just staring up at the top of a building. Yeah, kind of makes you want to stop yourself to see if something important is happening. Exactly. And that is the topic of the

Psychology Prize. Thank you for this award. The senior author on this publication, Stanley Milgram, is world famous for the studies he did on obedience. Unfortunately, he passed away at the age of 51 in 1984. I was one of his first advisees in a seminar with 17 students in 1968 when we did this study. We looked at the relationship between the size of a crowd ranging from one to 15 composed of members of the center. We were standing on 42nd Street, Manhattan, looking up at a building that then held the City University Graduate Center. We filmed the reaction of the crowd from the sixth floor. As a size of the stimulus crowd was increased, a greater proportion of passes by, adopted the behavior of the crowd. With one stimulus person,

4% stopped and looked up while with 15, 40% did so. This publication has been cited over 7% or times with a dozen times in just the last few months. Stanley Milgram, the Stanley Milgram? Exactly. That's the reason I especially like this award. The idea that someone who's really strongly known for that famous experiment where people played the role of prison guards and were willing to give other people electric shocks can still get attention for some Igworthy research.

Yes, yes, very nice to hear. I think, you know, we've run out of time, but where can people find out more? So we've got a link to all the winners, the full webcast on our site at ScienceFriiday.com, and thanks to Mark Abrams and all the folks at the Annals of Improbable Research for their help this week.

And thank you, Charles. You're welcome, Ira. Continuing our annual salute to the Ig Nobel Prizes, science that first makes you laugh, and then makes you think. If you've been listening to our show over the years, you may have noticed that we regularly report on research involving, well, how shall I put it? Poop. And this year, the Ig Nobel Public Health Award went to Sungman Park for inventing the Stanford Toilet.

That's a device that uses a variety of technologies, including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal print sensor paired with an identification camera and a telecommunications link to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete. Here he is accepting his award. Oh, and he arrived to the awards webcast writing on a toilet. I'm honored to be standing here to accept this year's Ignoble Prize. I'd like to dedicate this award to my late mentor, Professor Samp. Sanjib Sangh and Beer.

I'm not alone in this, of course. We've all heard about Bill Gates' interest in a toilet. But Bill, I believe you're missing a critical element. Our toilet can do more than keep us clean. They can keep us healthy. So here's my shout out to you. Let's transform hygiene into healthcare because the ultimate goal of hygiene is effective healthcare.

Thank you all for this honor, and remember, don't waste your waste. You may recall I spoke with him earlier this year. I want to bring on a guest who is doing his duty to literally do his duty. He's developing a toilet that analyzes your waste and might be able to help diagnose an illness from sampling it. In other words, you could be flushing important information about your health right down the toilet, and I mean that literally. But what if your waist didn't go to waste? What if instead it could tell you more about your health, like number one, checking on your number one

and catching a condition like diabetes early? Or number two, checking out number two, to see what's going on in your gut. Maybe your microbiome needs some attention. That's the goal of the smart toilet a device that gets all up in your business to tell you more about your business, so to speak. Conditions like urinary tract or kidney infections, even cancer can be detected by what gets dumped into a toilet. And as cool as it may sound, it does bring up concerns about privacy and ethics. For example, the toilet keeps track of who is using it by taking fingerprints of your fingers and, well, of your rear end, even photos of your butt. So how do we keep that very personal stuff out of the wrong hands?

Just a brief heads up, we're going to get a bit graphic in the interest of science, of course, all the way to the end, if you know what I mean. Joining me is the inventor of the pH Smart Toilet, Dr. Sunming Park, instructor of urology at Stanford University School of Medicine, in Stanford, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, thank you for having me today. How does the toilet learn about me?

Even if you are a superhuman, you cannot avoid number one and number two processes because it's a very natural. It is always called the nature's call. So what we're trying to do is trying to glean biomarkers from human excretion because we believe the human excretion is a wealthy resource for your health tracker.

So we're collecting data such as digital biomarker. That's a physiological, biochemical, and behavioral data collected by smart sensors in the toilet. So you have sensors and probes in the toilets. So walk me through this. I go to the toilet. I do my business. Yes. Then do I flush it or does it collect it before the flush and what happens?

Yes. We are trying to make it as passive as possible, which means you don't have to do it thing, single thing. So naturally, you do your natural behavior, then all the procedure will be performed by the smart tool itself. So you don't have to do a thing. So we have sensors which detect the users sitting. Sensors that detect the users, you know, end of defecation or urination. We have sensors to collect the data from excreted specimen. So how does it know if it's me or someone else? on the toilet? Yes, it's a very important question because your toilet will be shared by

roommate or family members. It's also for a personalized health care. So we're trying to provide as personalized as possible. So we're trying to put the fingerprint scanner at the flush lever. So whenever you flush it, we're trying to capture your fingerprint scan so that we can match the result that's collected by the smart toilet. So that's a one way to identify a person. And second way is We're utilizing human anus as a biometric identifier, which is a very unusual case. But I collaborate with a colorectal surgeon for last five years, and they already knew that it can be used as a biometric identifier because it's so unique for a person. So we utilize that as a biometric identifier, and we proved that it's more than a 95% accuracy that identify a person. Let me just see if I understand this. Are you saying that my anus is unique, is unique like a fingerprint?

Yes, that's correct. Wow. Have you tested this toilet on yourself? Yes, I did. Not for the anal print stuff, but I installed the first prototype that was collaborated with the industrial partner. And it is installed in my house, and I tested almost like 87 days consecutively. There were 800 defecation and urination events combined.

It is literally called the stool and voiding diary. And the data that it collects, where does the data go? Yeah, all the data will be stored in the cloud system. So we want to connect it to local hospital or local, you know, the healthcare system so that the physician can routinely analyze or assess access to the data so that they want to find out if anything happened before the user feel ill or something. You know, some people might be uncomfortable listening to us talking conversation. But as you say, everyone poops and pees, it's nature's call. How does that affect the advancement of smart toilets among scientists and the industry?

Yes, there are huge amount of the pressure, actually, because there's a criticism about our system being too much about, like, it sounds like or it resembled like a big brother in 1984. Because we're tracking almost like a very private event of human being, right? Right. Because human excreta has been tabooed in almost every culture. So and there's a lot of different things associated with the human excretion, such as menstruation or...

Well, isn't that, couldn't that be threatening to some people? Certainly in this age that we live in about. knowing if someone is pregnant or not? Yes, this is one of the biggest challenge for us, because our system may track the pregnancy record. If it is revealed to other, like, you know, agency, then they may track the abortion. So it's kind of very sensitive subjects.

So we want to protect our system's data as much as possible. So we're just regarding all the generated data from our system as a PHI, patient health information. What about people like astronauts? You know, like, there are no doctors up there. Maybe you can detect things. Yes, I think one of the best application of our system is for the deep space mission because NASA is trying to send people to Mars in next 10 years.

But one of the biggest problem for sending people to Mars is the travel time because it will take at least six months to 12 months. And the space crew member will be exposed to the very hostile walking environments, including radiation, including like a confinement, distance from the years, et cetera, et cetera. So we're trying to protect the astronaut as much as possible and proactively. So we're trying to utilize our system to monitor the immune system by analyzing microbiome in the thesis. Right, right. You know, I imagine when you came up with this idea, what, the first thing scientists do is say, how can I get this funded, right?

Did you have any trouble finding people who would like to invest in your research? Yes. Honestly, I submitted this proposal to National Science Foundation in 2021. And I thought it was a good fit for that request for proposal because the request for proposal was titled Smart Connected, health. But even though I was able to address all the issues about the smart toilet, but the reviewers actually believe that there's a glitch in our approach, because there's going to be a lot of ethical consideration, privacy issues, and consideration for female participants, and all the issues. So, especially it is well-known subject in the field, but the people still have

some barriers or some like obstacles to adopt this system as a routine, you know, monitoring system. Right. Well, I think, I mean, just in privacy issues, no one wants incriminating photos of their rear end getting out. That's true. So we're trying to replace the sensors a little bit less invasive manner. So I think we're utilizing sensor, which we call optical sensor, but AKA it's a camera, basically. So we're trying to make it as less invasive possible, such as like we can use IR camera instead of, you know, photographic camera or some other like, you know, the LIDA sensors, which measure the distance between the point. So we're trying to replace it so that the people will not have some feeling about the invasive nature of this smart OS system. Right. Part of your

goal is getting this really in-depth individual data. a sort of an information dump, if you will. This is part of a growing idea about precision health and personalized medicine, right? That's correct. Even before a person is born, prenatal genetic screen can be done, which means the precision health starts with, can be starting with the conception. So we're trying to protect people or trying to maintain people as health. as possible by continuous monitoring of their health signatures. Do you have a special name? You have a, you know, special name for your toilet that would make it more fun to sit on instead of threatening? Yeah, we call it to a precision health toilet, but it's not

that funny at all. Well, you know, I'm thinking more like the tush toilet or something like that. So we have a motto, actually. We have a, the motto is don't waste a waste. That's a one, yeah, the one motto that tells about, even though it's a waste, there's like a wealth of biological information so that we can glean. Well, you're right. When people who need the help that the toilet might offer them, it's a very serious business. Speaking of business. Dr. Park, thank you for taking time to be with us today and good luck. Thank you so much for having me today.

It's my great honor and pleasure. Dr. Sung Ming Park, instructor of urology at Stanford. School of Medicine. And that's it for today. On Monday, we continue the Ig's salute with a conversation with engineer David Who, who's won the Ig Nobel Prize twice, once for studying animal urination, and once for investigating exactly why wombat's poop cube-shaped poo. Have a great holiday weekend.

I'm SciFri producer Charles Bergquist. We'll see you next week.