This is Improbable Too Page 21

  Given this well-seeded disagreement and confusion, the community of cuke farmers, gardeners and consumers suffered. Todd C. Wehner saw the confusion, and acted.

  The main objective of Wehner’s research, he writes in the rather awkwardly named journal Hortechnology, ‘was to determine whether oriental trellis cucumbers cause less burping when eaten’.

  Wehner specializes in the study of cucurbits – the plant family whose siblings include cucumber, watermelon, cantaloupe and certain gourds. He is an acknowledged expert on watermelon DNA, on sex expression in luffa gourds, and on other matters that, throughout most of history, were utter mysteries. He took a straightforward approach to this new question.

  ‘It has been suggested by researchers that burpless cucumbers contain less of a burping compound … or are just the marketing term for oriental trellis cucumbers’, he writes. ‘The objective of this experiment is to determine whether oriental trellis cucumbers cause less burping when eaten.’

  Wehner fed three kinds of cucumber to six judges. ‘Judges were grouped (three each) into susceptible or resistant, based on their previous experience with cucumbers. Fruits were evaluated for burpiness using six judges eating a 100-millimeter length of fruit per day. Burpiness was measured on a 0 to 9 scale … Ratings of burpiness were made within an hour of eating.’ The trials went on for three days. Upon sifting through his data, Wehner discovered that the judges who were susceptible to burping burped slightly less after eating the burpless cucumbers.

  But this may not be the end of the story. Professor Wehner takes care to point out that ‘Additional research is needed on cucumbers of all types to identify cultivars that are free of burping for susceptible judges, and to identify the compound responsible for the burping effect.’

  Wehner, Todd. C. (2000). ‘What Are Burpless Cucumbers?’. Hortechnology 10 (2): 317–20.

  Research spotlight

  ‘Queasiness: An Informal Look’

  by John W. Trinkaus (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1990)

  Laying waste onto the enemy

  Aleksandr Georgievich Semenov patented an efficiently disgusting weapon system. Using his method, soldiers inside an armoured tank, under battle conditions, can dispose of their biological waste products in an unwasteful way: encasing those materials, together with explosives, in artillery shells that they then fire at the enemy.

  Semenov, residing in St Petersburg, can and does brag of having Russian patent no. 2,399,858, granted in 2009, officially titled ‘Method of Biowaste Removal from Isolated Dwelling Compartment of Military Facility and Device for Its Implementation’.

  As patents go, it’s of modest length: twelve pages, with only two technical drawings. The original document is mostly in Russian. The prolific inventor (he has about two hundred other patents), sent me a full translation into English.

  Figure 2 seems, at a glance, unremarkable: a cutaway side view of an artillery shell in its cartridge, tipped with a screw-in ‘nose cone’. There’s a large charge to (in Semenov’s description) ‘burst’ the shell, and a small charge to trigger that burst. The shell itself contains – indeed is mostly – a compartment for the payload.

  Figure 1 is larger and more complex, showing the entire tank in cutaway side view. A single crewman perches inside. Beneath him, an empty shell collects the waste that emerges from his anus.

  ‌Figure 1

  Here’s how the patent describes the scene, with numbers referring to specific items in the drawing: ‘A military man (3) puts the wastes (8) into the capacity (7) directly (fig.1) or in two steps. After it’s complete or, if it is necessary, incomplete filling the capacity is tightly sealed by the cover.’ The key action is in one sentence: ‘The gun charged with special projectile is targeted on a safety zone or on any enemy target which is worth for catching it.’

  As the projectile leaves the tank, it removes what would eventually have become a source of stinking misery for the poor soldiers who, in combat, could be forced to remain sealed inside their vehicle for several days.

  That misery transfers directly, forcefully away through the air, smacking into and dabbing onto the enemy.

  This method of warfare aims to kill the enemy’s spirit and psyche. The patent conveys this fact in spirited, if not belletristic, language: ‘Except damaging factors, significance of which is secondary in this case, the military psychological positive effect takes place: comprehension of the facts of “delivering” and distribution on enemy territory (on equipment and uniform of an enemy) by the staff as well as the opportunity of informing other soldiers and the enemy about it. As a result, in addition to the basic purpose reaching (full wastes removal) additional military-psychological and military-political effects are achieved.’

  Semenov, Aleksandr Georgievich (2009). ‘Method of Biowaste Removal from Isolated Dwelling Compartment of Military Facility and Device for Its Implementation’, Russian patent no. 2,399,858, 19 January.

  May we recommend

  ‘Stool Substitute Transplant Therapy for the Eradication of Clostridium difficile Infection: “RePOOPulating” the Gut’

  by Elaine O. Petrof, Gregory B. Gloor, Stephen J. Vanner, Scott J. Weese, David Carater, Michelle C. Daigneault, Eric M. Brown, Kathleen Schroeter and Emma Allen-Vercoe (published in Microbiome, 2013)

  Overblown beans

  ‘People’s concerns about excessive flatulence from eating beans may be exaggerated.’ That conclusion emerges loud and clear at the end of a study published in the Nutrition Journal.

  Donna Winham, of Arizona State University, and Andrea Hutchins, of the University of Colorado, call their report ‘Perceptions of Flatulence From Bean Consumption Among Adults in 3 Feeding Studies’. ‘Many consumers avoid eating beans because they believe legume consumption will cause excessive intestinal gas or flatulence’, they explain.

  Winham and Hutchins had volunteers eat half a cup of beans daily. Every week everyone answered a questionnaire.

  In the first week, fewer than half of the bean eaters reported increases in gas production. Then came a further surprise: ‘Seventy percent or more of the participants who experienced flatulence felt that it dissipated by the second or third week of bean consumption.’

  Winham and Hutchins suggest that beans owe their unhappy reputation to ‘psychological anticipation of flatulence problems’.

  ‌A half cup of beans was consumed daily during the study period

  Their opinion of 2011 is opposite, nearly, to one expressed by Geoffrey Wynne-Jones of Waikato Hospital in Hamilton, New Zealand, in 1975. Dr Wynn-Jones published a treatise in The Lancet, with the alarming title ‘Flatus Retention is the Major Factor in Diverticular Disease’.

  Dr Wynne-Jones said: ‘Diverticular disease is confined to modern urban communities: flatus retention in a rural, primitive society would be pointless … [The disease] afflicts the cultured, the refined, the considerate … It should be recognised as originating in suppression of a normal bodily function.’

  He declared that patients must ‘avoid “windy” foods’. He identified beans as a chief example of a ‘windy’ food.

  Winham, Donna M., and Andrea M. Hutchins, ‘Perceptions of Flatulence From Bean Consumption Among Adults in 3 Feeding Studies’. Nutrition Journal 10 (128): n.p.

  Wynne-Jones, Geoffrey (1975). ‘Flatus Retention is the Major Factor in Diverticular Disease’. Lancet 306 (7927): 211–2.

  May we recommend

  ‘Childhood Constipation Is Not Associated with Characteristic Fingerprint Patterns’

  by C.R. Jackson, B. Anderson and B. Jaffray (published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2003)

  God-awful polluted waters

  Do the gods pollute? Scientists in India, worried about the public health consequences of immersing idols in lakes and rivers, have been looking anew at water pollution. They hope, and perhaps in some cases pray, to harmonize their medical concerns with some people’s religious priorities.

  Most of their research has focused on
idols of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, created for the annual Ganesh Chaturthi celebration. Once a fairly quiet, mostly private practice, Ganesh Chaturthi now involves large, public festivals in many parts of the country. Researchers have also looked, a little, at the effects of immersing other idols, especially those of the many-armed goddess Durga.

  One of the latest studies is called ‘Assessment of the Effects of Municipal Sewage, Immersed Idols and Boating on the Heavy Metal and Other Elemental Pollution of Surface Water of the Eutrophic Hussainsagar Lake (Hyderabad, India)’. A team sampled water repeatedly from different parts of the lake, including one spot ‘immersed with hundreds of multicolored idols of Lord Ganesh and Goddess Durga’, and another near ‘the outfall of black-colored, untreated raw sewage containing a collection of industrial effluents’. Sewage, they conclude, accounts for most but not all of the pollution. High levels of zinc, calcium and strontium ‘were probably due to the immersed idols painted with multicolors’.

  Some studies concentrate on isolating the effects of idols from those of other sources. ‘Impact of Ganesh Idol Immersion Activities on the Water Quality of Tapi River, Surat (Gujarat) India’ tells of sampling the water ‘at morning hours during pre-immersion, during immersion and post-immersion periods of Ganesh idols’. The conclusion: the ‘main reason of the deterioration of water quality … is various religious activities’, with special blame given to ‘the plaster of paris, clothes, iron rods, chemical colours, varnish and paints used for making the idols’.

  Several studies examined a lake in the city that suffered India’s most famous act of pollution: the 1984 chemical leak from a Union Carbide factory, which resulted in several thousand deaths.

  Of particular note, ‘Heavy Metal Contamination Cause of Idol Immersion Activities in Urban Lake Bhopal, India’, published in 2007, finds that idol immersion has become ‘a major source of contamination and sedimentation to the lake water’. It warns that idol-derived heavy metals, especially nickel, lead and mercury, are likely to find their way into ‘fishes and birds inhabiting the lake, which finally reach the humans through food’. The authors want to ‘educate idol makers’ to make their idols small, of non-baked, quick-dissolving clay, and with ‘natural colors used in food products’.

  Lord Ganesh versus Goddess Durga, as found in Hussainsagar Lake, Hyderabad, India (weight in tonnes)

  Reddy, M. Vikram, K. Sagar Babu, V. Balaram and M. Satyanarayanan (2012). ‘Assessment of the Effects of Municipal Sewage, Immersed Idols and Boating on the Heavy Metal and Other Elemental Pollution of Surface Water of the Eutrophic Hussainsagar Lake (Hyderabad, India)’. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 184 (4): 2012, 1991–2000.

  Ujjania, N.C. , and Azhar A. Multani (2011). ‘Impact of Ganesh Idol Immersion Activities on the Water Quality of Tapi River, Surat (Gujarat) India’. Research Journal of Biology 1 (1): 11–5.

  Vyas, Anju, Avinash Bajpai, Neelam Verma and Savita Dixit (2007). ‘Heavy Metal Contamination Cause of Idol Immersion Activities in Urban Lake Bhopal, India’. Journal of Applied Sciences and Environment Management 11 (4): 37–9.

  Bajpai, Avinash, Anju Vyas, Neelam Verma and D.D. Mishra (2008). ‘Effect of Idol Immersion on Water Quality of Twin Lakes of Bhopal with Special Reference to Heavy Metals’. Pollution Research 27 (3): 517–22.

  Vyas, Anju, Avinash Bajpai and Neelam Verma (2008). ‘Water Quality Improvement after Shifting of Idol Immersion Site: A case study of Upper Lake, Bhopal, India’. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 145 (1/3): 437–43.

  Aniruddhe, Mukerjee (n.d.). ‘A Case Study of Idol Immersion in the Context of Urban Lake Management Religious Activities and Management of Water Bodies’. Jabalpur Municipal Corporation, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India, http://parisaraganapati.net/archives/83.

  In brief

  ‘Cow Dung Ingestion and Inhalation Dependence: A Case Report’

  by Praveen Khairkar, Prashant Tiple and Govind Bang (published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 2009)

  The authors, at Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha, Maharashtra, India, report: ‘Although abuse of several unusual inhalants had been documented, addiction to cow dung fumes or their ashes has not been reported in medical literature as yet. We are reporting a case of cow dung dependence in ingestion and inhalational form.’

  Nappy odours

  When a mother compares and contrasts the stench from her baby’s nappies with that from those of someone else’s baby, the question of disgust arises. The question drove a team of psychologists to do an experiment. Richard Stevenson and Trevor Case, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and Betty Repacholi of the University of Washington in Seattle issued a report called ‘My Baby Doesn’t Smell As Bad As Yours: The Plasticity of Disgust’. It appeared in a 2006 issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

  Stevenson, Case and Repacholi present their work as an addition to a body of earlier smelly investigation. Theirs accords, they say, with a ‘line of research on interpersonal preferences for armpit odour’. That old underarm research ‘reveals that we have a preference for our own body odours and those from close kin’.

  For their experiment, the team crafted a simple procedure: ‘mothers of infants were presented with a series of trials in which they smelled concealed samples of their own baby’s faeces-soiled diaper and those of someone else’s baby.’ They tested thirteen mothers, whose productive little ones were aged between six and twenty-four months.

  Each mother smelled the contents of a series of buckets. Each bucket housed a soiled diaper, with a special opening that ‘prevented participants from seeing the contents of the bucket, while allowing the odour to be sampled.’

  The researchers inserted some twists. Sometimes a bucket would be labelled, saying its load came from a particular baby. Sometimes that label identified the wrong baby – thus posing a severe, almost unfair test of the mother’s power to discriminate her progeny’s output from all others.

  The mothers knew their stuff. The Stevenson, Case, Repacholi report concludes that: ‘whether the stimuli were correctly labelled, mislabelled, or given no label, mothers rated their own baby’s soiled diaper as less disgusting than someone else’s baby’s diaper.’

  The same team, but with Megan Oaten of Macquarie University in place of Repacholi, later examined disgust related to a different aspect of human intimacy: the sights, sounds, textures and odours emanating from step 1 of the baby-manufacturing process. That new report, called ‘Effect of Self-Reported Sexual Arousal on Responses to Sex-Related and Non-Sex-Related Disgust Cues’, was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

  Stevenson, Case and Oaten share how (but not why) ninety-nine men agreed to subject themselves to whatever the team would ask them to see, hear, feel or smell. The whatever included images of a ‘scar on naked women’ and ‘pollution’; sounds of someone vomiting and of someone (presumably someone else) performing fellatio; textures comprised of cold pea and ham soup and four lubricated condoms; faecal odours and rotting-fish odours.

  A few of the men had first looked at erotic images. Those sexually aroused men ‘reported being significantly less disgusted’ than the unaroused men by sex-related sights, sounds, feels and smells.

  Case, Trevor I., Betty M. Repacholi and Richard J. Stevenson (2006). ‘My Baby Doesn’t Smell as Bad as Yours: The Plasticity of Disgust’. Evolution and Human Behavior 27 (5): 357–65.

  Stevenson, Richard J., Trevor I. Case and Megan J. Oaten (2011). ‘Effect of Self-Reported Sexual Arousal on Responses to Sex-Related and Non-Sex-Related Disgust Cues’. Archives of Sexual Behavior 40 (1): 79–85.

  In brief

  ‘Parental Consumption of Nestling Feces: Good Food or Sound Economics?’

  by Peter L. Hurd, Patrick J. Weatherhead and Susan B. McRae (published in Behavioral Ecology, 1991)

  Call for investigators

  Which are more disgusting to touch – dry powders or slimy gels? A team of investigators from the depa
rtment of psychology at the University of Miami set up a series of experiments to find out – bearing in mind that, until now, touch-related disgust responses have been largely overlooked in scholarly literature.

  Participants touched substances of varying moistures, temperatures and consistencies, rating each on disgustingness. ‘Results show that participants rated wet stimuli and stimuli resembling biological consistencies as more disgusting than dry stimuli and stimuli resembling inanimate consistencies, respectively’, reported the researchers, led by Debra Lieberman, in ‘A Feel for Disgust: Tactile Cues to Pathogen Presence’ in the journal Cognition & Emotion.

  Experimental subjects rated the materials in four categories:

  • How disgusting

  • How disgusting to put in mouth

  • How willing to touch again

  • How appealing

  After correspondence with the authors, we are able to report the exact recipe for the ‘disgusting’ material used in this experiment. ‘The dough mixture was made using 2 cups of flour, 2 cups of water, 1 cup of salt, and 1 tablespoon of cream of tartar, yielding a consistency similar to Play-Doh. Each dough stimulus was formed into a fist-sized ball.’ The non-disgusting control material was cotton rope.

  The authors note that new recipes may be required for future experiments: ‘Additional studies might select more mucoid, slimy and viscous textures rated as highly disgusting to examine the range of tactile properties associated with the disgust response.’ We now ask our readers to share their recipes for this scientific endeavour.