There is some truth to the effectiveness of folk remedies and old wives’ tales when it comes to serious medical issues, according to findings by a team from Detroit Medical Center.
Sonal Saraiya and her colleagues in Michigan found that packing strips of cured pork in the nose of a child who suffers from uncontrollable, life-threatening nosebleeds can stop the hemorrhaging, a discovery that won them an Ig Nobel prize this year, the annual award for sometimes inane, yet often surprisingly practical, scientific discoveries.
This year’s winners honored on Thursday at Harvard University by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine included a team of researchers who wondered if owning a cat was bad for your mental health; Japanese scientists who tested whether banana peels are really as slippery as cartoons would have us believe; and Norwegian biologists who tested whether reindeer on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard were frightened by humans dressed to resemble polar bears.
As has become the custom, real Nobel laureates handed out the prizes, and winners were given a maximum of 60 seconds to deliver their acceptance speech.
Sticking pork products up a patient’s nose was a treatment of last resort when conventional treatments had failed, Saraiya said, and was only used for a very specific condition known as Glanzmann thrombasthenia, a rare condition in which blood does not properly clot.
“We had to do some out-of-the-box thinking,” Saraiya said. “So that’s where we put our heads together and thought to the olden days and what they used to do.”
The four-year-old child’s nostrils were packed with cured pork twice, and according to their study: “The nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly [and] effectively.”
The method worked because “there are some clotting factors in the pork ... and the high level of salt will pull in a lot of fluid from the nose,” she said.
Still, Soraiya does not recommend sticking pork up your nose for a routine nosebleed, as it could cause infection.
Kiyoshi Mabuchi, a professor of biomedical engineering at Kitasato University in Japan, studied the slipperiness of banana peels as an extension of his research into the human joint lubrication system.
“I have gotten ... evidence that the friction under banana peels is sufficiently low to make us slip,” Mabuchi said via e-mail.
The other good thing about his study is that his colleagues got to eat the bananas.
Several scientists won for studying the mental health of cat owners. The bottom line? Owning a cat might be hazardous to your health.
However, David Hanauer, of the department of pediatrics at the University of Michigan and coauthor of one of the studies, says there is no need for cat owners to panic.
“It may simply be that people with depression get cats because they feel depressed,” he said. “I am in no way telling people to get rid of their cats.”
University of Toronto professor Kang Lee was part of a team that won for studying the reactions of people who see human faces in slices of toast.
Although the title of the study is Seeing Jesus in Toast, no actual images of Jesus were shown. The study found that in people who merely think they see a face in a slice of toast — or in any other unusual object — the part of the brain involved in facial recognition lights up.
Lee said he is thrilled to have won an Ig Nobel.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
The death toll from a shooting in western Afghanistan rose to 11 on Saturday, after gunmen targeted civilians at a picnic spot in Herat, the provincial authority said. Bullet marks were visible on a wall of the Sayed Mohammad Agha Shia shrine, while bloodstains marked a blanket abandoned at the scene. “Eleven people have been recorded dead and eight others wounded from Friday’s incident, with the condition of two of the wounded reported as critical,” Herat’s information office said in a statement. The update raises a toll of seven killed provided on Friday by the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs
RSS