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>> I have the great pleasure of having Professor David who from the school of mechanical engineering but also has appointments in physics and biology we take turns claiming him. And tonight he's going to tell us about the chemical shape of wombat poo and the Ig Nobel Prize his 2nd prize that he's won since he was at Georgia Tech.

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Sound effects optional. David earned his bachelor's and ph d. at mit he has won many awards in strangers' attack including a career ward and most recently a American Institute of Physics science communicator award which I think we're really proud of so without further ado please give Fessor who a warm welcome thank you thank you thank you thank you.

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So we're going to begin the talk with the ritual ceremony of the Noble Prize which is to throw paper airplanes at the speaker and his costume friends so if you give you about 10 seconds to fold how many 10 seconds for your airplane and on one we're going to all grow them in this direction.

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I'm taking video. 10. 9. 807. 6. 4. 30201. Ok. As I would turn out fine all right the show over again. And the show we're also going to have to pick up these paper airplanes so that. So the 1st thing I do is a thank a special member audience which are Yang and stand up what I'm going to show you is actually our doctoral thesis.

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So this was the wombat work and the dedication and urination work was result of working between Georgia Tech and the University of Tasmania. It was pretty much funded by pure proposals these are proposals for undergraduates to do work at Georgia Tech mile Chan he worked with wombat theses bullies a Ph d. student currently he's going to go to Australia in January to collect wombat feces Michael and Kelly they both made mimics of wombat intestines which I'll show you then the talk Scott Carver is a handler of wombat he and actually an alien have they shipped a special shipment of wombat intestines and he says to us Christmas last year which we've been analyzing ever since this whole story begins around 2015 when I won my 1st ignoble prize for studying how long it takes animals to pee and this was this is inspired at the time because I had a very small son who was outed in diapers and sometimes when you change diapers they pee on you.

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And I was actually noticing that the t.v. took longer than I thought I had to wait and wait and wait until the pain came out and I was given very concerned I was taking too long. And I couldn't figure out why infants should pee for such a long time because they've got less volume of fluid adult I have 10 times much food I should Pete much longer so what I did was I went to my food mechanics class as anyone here a mechanical engineer became a mountain is one day I can have I might have you in my class and when I did that year I asked for a few special volunteers to do experiments at the Atlanta Zoo to figure out what is the longest urination time that animals get bigger should they urinate longer and when they found this they came back they went to their Lanzhou for a period of 2 weeks and came back with a series of videos showing the evolution of the year in this system if you've ever seen a rat urinates it happen very quickly this is actually high speed photo grabs at 10000 frames per 2nd the pressure that comes on our bodies actually not even enough to push surface tension so they just generate a small urine Gumbel's that's the best they can do then as you get bigger you get probably more what resembled what you did before you came this lecture this is a goat which you're Nate's similar to how you do what we call this is a really plateau instability when jet turns the drop because of surface tension even bigger still you're in comes out of basically flat bases flat she's We call this a beautiful fluid fishbones it's an entire bucket of urine.

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And the biggest animal of all is elephant and that's part one of Patricia species he says and part 2 all in the same video so we're really happy to get to. This the talk is p.g. 13 by the way. And so these poor a student they came back to my office with this data.

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It's. Mass of these animals and you knows that elephant goes up to 8000 kilograms you know that's that's almost $100.00 times as much as we weigh all the way up to a mouse and these dozers is sort of 2 regimes one when you're really small you know you're in it in a very just split 2nd but for the rest these animals the bigger you are it didn't seem like the longer the year needed in fact there seems that there is average that most animals urinate between 10 and 30 seconds with an average of 21 seconds across the universe so $21.00 plus and minus 13 seconds you've got to keep in mind it's basically a 50 percent error but these animals they've got a 100 times more urine in their bladders you'd expect air of a 100 times not just so why in the world do these 2 regimes Well 1st of all when you're small you've got to fight the forces of surface tension like I said the rat has this problem of having a user that's just too small it just can't push it out so it has a fluid that looks like this and as you go through maybe if you drive around your car walk around maybe you'll feel small rats or insecurity on you they just leave small drops one by one they can actually generate the forces necessary to create a jet recently that was studied in greater detail by saw bomb a professor in civil engineering here.

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Who showed that insects can actually see. There's a thing p. that comes in like rain from these insects. In so much that basically you can actually what your cars and things like and all these animals have got to be bigger than have a user that's bigger than point one millimeters in order to urinate otherwise the surface tension pushes back in the body and they just can generate these bones so that's what it's like for small animals but when you're big like my kids you urinate through this thing called a pee pee pipe so my kids are always arguing my son always says I have a pretty pipe and my daughter says.

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Well she basically I tell her peeps on the inside so all animals the female animals have people that are about $17.00 to $1.00 aspect ratio that for mice always elephants the males have to be pipes that are 20 $5.00 to $1.00 they're just little bit on the outside but both of them have these pipes in their body and from the perspective of an engineer you'd wonder why would you want to have a pipe What does that help you will what pipes do is they take advantage of what's called what we call a Georgia Tech beer keg physics it's how you would want to empty a beer keg So this is actually discovered by Pascal and his contemporaries he used to do a parlor trick where he put water into a barrel and then he put a long skinny pipe on top of the barrel and just filled that pipe with water you know that pipe is just an inch wide so the amount of volume in this pipe is really negligible but if he made that pipe 10 meters tall he found that he could be generate arbitrarily high forces and burst these barrels this is what this tells you is that the pressure that food generate doesn't depend on how much volume you have it only depends on how tall the vessel is and for that same reason when you are drinking your gator aid or your beer if you put a hole near the top it dribbles out slowly the middle aged out faster and the bottom dribbles out the fastest.

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The speed of the urine or the beer goes out as the height of the barrel to the point 5 pounds or so that's why we always put our holes near the bottom of the barrels to take advantage of this dependence of pressure on height so how does that actually help us understand how animals journeyed.

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Well if you think about the range of animals that I showed I'm on one side I have a pretty pipe that's about this big maybe the couple Millers wide and the base of 10 senators long but think of a female elephant a female if it has to be vote that's a metre tall almost as tall as I am and a whiff of my fist so when she you're in eights imagine that you're the uterus like a highway multiple lanes allow all the urine molecules to go down in the height of the p.v. pipe allowed to come down even faster so the combination of these 2 effects allow elephants to urinate at a rate of about 5 showerheads like 5 people taking a bath at once in urine that's how the elephant can let their 20 liters of bladder empty base the amount the same amount as a kitchen garbage can to be released in the same amount of time about 21 seconds and if you don't believe me you can do some of these experiments at home.

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Here's an experiment can do where you take the bladder. And causes start over we basically have replicated the bladders of these different animals a rhino which is 3 leaders a human which is a sort of leader and that's my wife's dog that's the p.t. place on her knees and if you have a piece of the right length and diameter you can get these to all empty at the same time no motors needed no batteries just by using gravity in a clever way that these animals have evolved all at the same time so we did this just for fun but it turns out that there's a lot of your ologist very interested in our study so there's a Japanese game show where the 0 is interviewed 2700 people about their urination time and they found that there's actually a very nice relationship between your age and the time that you're urinate and maybe some of our older members audience can contest to themselves.

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That as you get older your nation goes from an average of 21 seconds all the way up to about 31 seconds as you're about 7 years old and this is because as you get older for the males the prostate increases and begins to constrict the Yuri's are for females and males the bladder begins to muscle begins to weaken and the muscles cannot push the year round as quickly which is an added effect to the gravity so Seiji Matsumoto things that this will actually become sort of a non non invasive test for how healthy your bladder system is one day when you go to the doctor instead of doing test lasers they could just ask you how long did you learn it today Other studies have been using this 21 second rule as a benchmark for how to basic design urinary prostheses So as you get older you have this problem of incontinence and they need to design these small devices to zap your bladder every time you take you need to urinate and they zap it so that you urinate for about 21 seconds if you get your genitals chopped off and you need to basically make basically a college and transplant they test these things for Derby by making sure that it can last 21 seconds once every few hours and they did this test for several days so this is now become a benchmark even though for us it was just for fun so about 2 years later after we published the study I came upon a surprise.

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My university told me to watch the show Fox and Friends which I'll show a brief segment here. Why. Here. Ok so there's a t.v. show called Fox and Friends and Jeff Flake had highlighted 20 of the world's most wasteful studies of the u.s. most wasteful studies and it turned out I was responsible for 18th of the list so 3 of those 20 studies was all done here at Georgia Tech thank you.

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So I took a hit for all my fellow scientists. And I have to confess I've read this entire report these studies are actually fascinating the one that he really highlighted was this cheerleaders are Schiller is more effective attractive in a squad it had to do with image processing and how we can basically see multiple face in a crowd we basically look at the average of those faces which makes us look at sort of pictures and for turning pictures as more attractive as we see these faces and more average is basically an insight into neurobiology so.

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When I was saw this waste this space again this basic t.v. show on Fox and Friends. My only response was basically just do nothing and crawl up in a hole and feel bad about myself. But Georgia Tech Jason major He was a press press person Ga He said you need to respond none of the others scientists are saying anything but you're on this list 3 times you've got to respond to all of them so so basically gave me 3 days to wait write a response which I called Confessions of weasel scientists I published in Scientific American.

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And I talk about the history of these kinds of attacks and this kind of attacks have been going on for the last 20 or 30 years. The original original award was called the Golden Fleece Award which was given to any public official in the u.s. for reportedly wasting public money and there's these historians that have commented that Congress people have always found a way they can beat up on us eggheads that anyone who does science or technology or any diversity.

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The congressperson can show itself to be a champion of the common person by beating up people who seem to be like they have their heads in the clouds and the media will then pick up off reports like flakes because they're looking for something cute and humorous and that sounds ridiculous it's the equivalent of a cat video so basically gets politicians a lot of hits to their websites but has a terrible terrible effect not on scientists but on the public image of science it has what the president picture called a chilling effect on research that everyone doing research becomes a little bit more conservative and a little bit more scared that they're going to get caught doing something that they could fail at but as the president picks are says failure in research is until if you basically if you fear failure can distort the way you choose projects and ultimately you can says impede society's progress so when I wrote that report center flight response the same day on Facebook and he said I appreciate Dr who's thoughtful response to my 20 questions and I welcome his input on how to better identify those projects that he believes are indeed wasteful so I consider that a win for me.

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And there's been a lot of criticism of his report because the base is incorrectly cited dollar amounts omission of essential content and it's also a serious problem for the public image of science because the reason it's so serious is that people are not in a position to evaluate what this senator says and whether the report is really valid the fact that some prominent center is putting this out cast some serious doubt on whether federal agencies can function efficiently and effectively so so this is a serious attack in science and this is going to happen again.

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And after dealing with Senator Flake I said I will not publish another paper on your nation so 4 months later after his report I published a study called 100 in hammocks of defamation. And the journal soft matter. I think I learned my lesson and this paper had basically some scientists the other fields that I had no idea what interest in this work there is one civil engineer who said I really enjoyed your paper on definition.

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Your paper a clue to the hope that inspires others to further quantified body processes I like to measure the exit velocity of diarrhea. So he's actually an environment engineer that's trying to quantify disease spread by putting sensors in toilets to determine how often people have diarrhea and he actually has a grant from the Canada science foundation to build such a device and work clobbering with him and there's also an astronomer who says I'm working on a hypothesis of advanced extraterrestrials eating stars that I call Stella bores they're stars that other stars and things some of the physics that we found is consistent with Basically them ingesting and putting out another star.

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And I would have met these people unless I base it stood up to Senator Flake and publish his work on another collaborator His name is Joe Brown. Who studies poop in the brown water group a Georgia Tech. And he wanted to use our study to calculate how much poop there is on the planet.

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There instant how much bacteria is getting in the air and how much disease is transferred and he finds that. Based on our base the measurement that animals poop about one percent of their body weight every event. Using the number of agricultural and wild animals in the world we calculated that the World Cup is about $3000000000.00 tonnes per year and it's increasing at a high rate.

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And the conclusion from this study is basically countries need to find a way to deal with manure because that manure is increasing far faster than human So what was our study of this so we were actually trying to understand how quickly animals poop. If you don't want to look at the video you can look at these nice graphs but.

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The students went to the Atlanta Zoo and all and basically measured the speed this is that you can see a nice steady speed of desiccation of these animals across 10000 orders 10000 times in body mass some animals like they got they have bass a little bit of loose still going on maybe they have to eat some more fiber.

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And like your nation we found that the bigger the animal not message the longer it took it means that their animals are doing some kind of trick to keep their feces going out out at a really high rate so no one actually measured all these properties of animals before but one of the things we found is that the rectum is a lot like people fight like your Isa that the people have had of respect which you have 25 to one so rectum has an aspect ratio of 13 to one Ok for all these different animals.

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And the width of the feces corresponds to the width of the rectum so really defecating is really like pushing pasta out of a tube which as I will show the wombats are very different from that. The length of all your pieces for these animals actually in the head in the medical books they always thought it was in the rectum but actually 2.5 times the length of the right time so it extends farther into the body than people thought the reason why poop comes out is as shown in this.

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I should this news it's a little dramatic. This is what happens when you basically need to get a rectal exam and they basically put this special visualizing fluid but you can see the entire body contract. In a dramatic fashion. To basically push it out and all these animals are applying actually the same pressure and that's because the properties the muscle the stress of most of the force for your area is a property of tissue and it can change as you get bigger so all these animals are applying forces that are equivalent to basically 40 centimeters of water now what allows them to have it come out so well is that.

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Let's turn this one on this Congress this is a coat off be where they actually visualize the inside of your intestines and one of the things you notice it's very shiny so the body is producing this basically lubricant all over the intestines and especially at the end to help to help get it out and according to our calculations this is absolutely necessary because the cost of the of feces is about a $1000.00 times as much as.

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As nucleus So for example if you have this mimic where you basically this is what you would this is how you would poop if you didn't have mucus it would take about 60 seconds it would take a very long time and once you have the thinnest layer mucous because it's so slippery the feces just slides out.

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So we have a model that involves the thickness of the of this which we've measured for these different animals and the time to defeat gives the length goes the length of the piece is divided by the speed the speed goes the pressure that's being pushed divided by the viscous forces and we can calculate that these animals should indeed decade around the same time so even though the bigger animals have more poop the mucus allows it to come out at a very high rates of all the model of Kubrick ation All right so I saved the best part for last and partly because our study of wombats is still ongoing we're still in the midst of understanding how they work.

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And engineers engineers we are really interested in this problem because cubes and corners are rare in nature. The current way you make cubes right now one way is injecting a hot material letting it cool off and it solidifying just like this plastic and dice this is more similar to extrusion pasta making that I talked about how regular proof is made These are blocks of straw and the other way is busy drilling or basically chipping away at a hard material and clearly that last one is not possible to do for one that's.

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So actually after the talk I've got these 3 wombat faeces here if you want to take pictures with the wombat feces and touch them you can feel free to come over but if you can see from this far away I'll show you the technique and technology visualizing this feces for you that is actually one of the features that comes out the wombat which I'll show in this one but I'll describe in a 2nd it really is pretty cubic it's so cubic that we can play games of chance with the wombat species in the lab.

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It really does have. 6 faces so where in the world did these cubic feces come from. Art They come from Tasmania where Scott Carver works with his collaborators to face the find these underground burrows and then they chase wombat. And. It's he says it takes practice. But basically these one bats there you know they're about the size of a toddler but they're really built for speed I mean that run faster than than a human human being and they just escaped into their underground burrows.

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So he caught a few wombats and this is what they look like they're number 2 in the world for cute animals Number one is a panda Number 2 is the one bats they spin the daytime into their underground burrows but when they come out they have to defecate what they do everything is composed of mostly grass they're the most drought tolerant animals marsupials in in Australia and they've evolved basically pouches that face backward so this is pooping on its own baby places again that's how the pieces are made.

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The patches have to freeze backward because as they dig into their burrows they would get dirt into their pouches they've got to face it backwards so the baby is pooped on rather than dirty Don So from the biologist perspective these animals have only one of cubic feet because of their way of life they live their lives underground and when they come out they have their very territorial they don't actually like to spend time with each other and they mark their territories like many animals with cc's sometimes you'll see carnivores they will just poop right in the middle the trail to mark their territory wombats their poop.

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They want to put it on the highest place they can climb which with their cubic she body is really just a short rock or a log and they want to basically lay them on top and then if we think if they're cube shaped they won't roll as far after they fall down and sort of stay and what the biologist called the trains which act as basically the markers for this is their territory now they're all Sterns have known about the Cubic faeces for a long time and there's been many theories for why there are humans.

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The 1st one is that they make poop like pasta and so the 1st thing we test is that they do not have a square anus. So this is actually a wombat in a c.t. scan and you can see the whole is not super square Ok so they do not have a square and as it means that the Cubic ness must have been made already it couldn't have been made by pushing it through the other brought home without having a trying to push it through a screen is that the fish is actually too dry to actually do anything partly because they're so drought tolerant the one bats.

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The feces has a density that's among the lowest of these animals so these are from which is the study the sinkers of the world which have the carnivores that cater for and bones and and guts and the floaters with deaf Akkad vegetation and mostly air and the one bats have one of the latest and driest feces of the other animals so the fishes must be cubed on inside and we didn't believe it until we received this Christmas gift in the mail and that was this.

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That so this there are no one that I think killed in the study unfortunately they're hit by cars quite regularly in Tasmania and so our Congress got one is not chasing the wombats is going and picks up a poor one but when it's euthanized this is what comes out then half the body is completely filled with intestines and in the beginning the intestines are really watery this is what you would expect from a cow that's what you saw in the videos.

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That you probably wish you could forget and then as the intestine proceeds it's like pushing forward in time it gets drier and drier and then there is a transition where you go from basically wet mush to corners and it's quite short transition. You can see that here this is that similar intestine where in the beginning it's Bobus it's really filled with liquid and as it dries it goes through this process where about 100 centimeters in you start getting a more strict lengths to with height ratio and factoids the wombat pieces are not actually cuboid they're actually prismatic because it's 4 by 2 by 2 so how in the world can you get structure out of soup How can nature generate concrete edges this is a study in physics called pattern formation and it's been known for the last couple 100 years that this happens all over the world some of you might have the great luck to go to Giant's Causeway arland a location that basically had lava sitting on the ground at base of the lava cooled at such a slow rate these natural hexagonal rock formations formed and these go all the way down for about 20 feet.

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This has been known since the Victorian era and since then they've been doing experiments to replicate how nature creates flat edges and hexagons and they've done experiments instead with cornstarch mixed in with water when heat emanates from this love slurry It's similar to water evaporating from this cornstarch both materials as they either cool down or evaporate shrink that shrinkage generates stresses in the material that there is really a living in the vertical direction because you can shrink this way but more difficult to leave it in the plane and that's when these kinds of structures so we think that basically and both of these structures are only formed if you cool or dry them for a very long time so giant cars are when it takes them 100 years for these sort of crust to form you can only do this with a specialized lamp with cornstarch if you wait 3 or 4 days and that's similar to the wombat because the one that has a very long what we call mean retention time so they get the idea across of mean retention time.

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I thought I would tell a personal anecdote. I was traveling when my 2 kids were home with my wife and then I got a text as Mrs from my wife saying. I lost my engagement ring and. I looked all the house and I can't find it and I think there's only one place that could be.

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Luckily Harry at the time really couldn't talk but we gave him other rings and he would look at it and then he would put in his mouth and so we went to the My wife went to the e.r. at 2 am to take this picture. I didn't sure if there's no insurance on that ring.

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Which I kind of regrets but this is my 1st encounter was what was called Mean retention time which is the time it takes for you to eat something for to go through for a human which is 20 feet of intestine and come out the end. And there it is at the end here it is there it is so we actually did get it back and so it's a pretty happy story.

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To have the stories of humans about one to 3 days before wombat is about 3 to 5 days. So one that's allowed a very slow process of drawing to help form cracks the formation cracks is known as is given by this dimension of group which is the ratio of how much water gets dispersed radially to the intestine to dispersing by the fusion horizontally and if you basically cool if you drive this at a slow enough rate for example if you have 29 feet intestines like the wanted and you and you basically allow 5 days for to proceed very slowly water can proceed slow enough that you get very regular cracks as shown this diagram so that's basically where they get their overall aspect ratio now their shape is something that we're still trying to understand right now but indeed the one bad test is unknown because it really does form corners they're not just sort of like spheres of that shape but they really do have corners of a certain size and we our intuition for doing this experiment what we decided to do as we hung the intestines from the ceiling of my lab which looks like I should clean once in a while and we found I mean I had this intuition that that basically the corners of the cube should have some coordinate system so the intestines have basically a 0 degrees of 30 degrees of 6 degrees that somehow set by the intestine and indeed when the student measured miles he showed that all the corners face the same direction.

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Which means these intestines are very good from any other animals that they actually have a north and a south. And in fact that pro promoted us to basically do this experiment we used as Stalin g.b. very high image microscopic to look at how thick it is and we found there's these laundered new bands that run down the intestine that are twice as thick in certain places than others and there are 2 such bands that we've found measured through this technique what these bands do is as the fishes goes through they help the corners of the cube and we observe how they change the material properties by taking a clown balloon so my student both loves making clown balloons and we thought why don't you just fill the intestine with one of these convolutions and he marked a little point on here and measure how much they stretch and he found that that twice as much thickness can increase the elasticities can make it twice as stiff so that this thing can base that one expands it doesn't expand uniformly it expands more in some places dollars Now unfortunately intentions are very stinky and very fragile so what we do is we do experiments with the bases sewed mimics where we build sort of these fabrics where we increase the thickness into regions just like the intestines and we basically make a process of construction we mimic basically by including we include 3 tabs just to make sure we're not catering 4 corners for tabs we include 3 tabs and we apply we try to apply.

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As they move the contractions so it's like the entire testin is shrinking and that's what happens and your belly intestines are sort of constantly going in and out and we find is that basically if you don't have these bands you get what you would expect sort of circular structures that have been squeezed a little bit but if you do have those bands and you can look at that tab that tab is actually not in the edge of a corner sort of in the middle of one of the corners.

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If you do that you can sort of start to see the formation of these sharper regions which we think is responsible for ultimately sculpting the corner so this is this is these 2 students there they built they built this device and we're trying to basically build a planetary system to make it more systematic and we're looking for more people to work on it so the rest is a sort of a call to arms for you basically don't attack we've got to know well from 2015 a number one you've got to ignore Well from 2100 number 2 what is number 3 going to be it really depends on who how I can recruit students to my lab.

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We've got a project on earmarks that I think is quite promising showing that all animals have this earwax and no one knows what it's for the people we think it's there to absorb dust and it we've found that it has special what we call sheer sitting properties like paint so that as you move your mouse the earwax slowly pushes out here is I think the rate is about a millimeter per week and that slowly pulls dust out of here and keeps your ears from getting too dirty.

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But if you isn't that you can email me and we have a v.i.p. on science in June of animal conservation where we send students to come to China and Africa to basically measure how they can figure out what pandas should be released to the wild Currently our message is building these obstacles courses and measuring how well they can climb to escape predators.

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If you like this talk there are 3 good references for you The New York Times selling book does it forwards what shall that which is allows you to identify bird poop and the new game who proved a matching and memory game for your budding your budding base the game animal tracker and I've written my own book which I'll be teaching a course on a Georgia Tech I'll be teaching many Master next year on how to walk on water and climb the walls or talk about my adventures like in this talk.

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And I've gone on a long series of book tours today this is Georgia College of Science next week I'll be at Lawrenceville science have and then the pineapple Science Prize and the junk China which is the Ig Nobel Prize of China dormice American College of Rheumatology Caltech I'm going to go on a t.v. show with Will Smith in December Austria Institute of Science tech Seattle and in Austin the book has been translate into Korean Japanese and Chinese and been read by 7 hours white Italian American actor and with that I'm happy to open up the phone for any questions thank you.

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Yes sir scratching the front Yeah. I was. I use out this theory that that people can see your feet no one's going to notice what you're wearing but it's usually been shown to be wrong. And I see a barefoot runner so I like to like to run barefoot and I like not to wear shoes of I can and I think it does help me with my work but we don't where we don't go barefoot when we're working with a wombat faeces That's just gross.

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So I'm just wondering how does your proposal get funded own. One of these so this work is actually. Not funded by anybody except Georgia Tech. Yeah I think I mean I usually have a good idea of what what should be funded I mean we're going to we're trying to fund the work with a National Geographic and I think there's some ecology ideas of how they basically communicate to each other with piles piles of poop but I think there's a category of research that should be done but if you're going to compete with 20 other scientists to try to get money.

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Sometimes they don't always feel nice and category what were the 3 funded studies Senator Flake was picking on so my 3 most wasteful studies for 2 done 16. For. Let's see I'm number. How many shakes to the take for a wet dog to dry off so that is a study where we measured how animals tend dry themselves.

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And Dog Takes about $44.00 shakes per 2nd but in mice has to shake 30 times per 2nd and it was the 1st to show that dogs actually lose 90 percent of the water in a fraction of a 2nd and so there was a lot of interest from a tag and other washing machine companies in understanding how you can get water off so quickly and had to do with a whip like action of their skin.

[00:41:17]
Another one was. Which has more hairs a squirrel or a bumble bee and that's what I won my Chinese Ig Nobel Prize for for showing that bees actually remove their pollen by instead of being really smooth like a table top by being really hairy and what that does allows the pollen to be basically suspended at the tips of the hairs like catapults and every time they groom the hair the hairs shoot off the pollen kind of like kind of like like pig pen in the old Snoopy Snoopy comics so sort of things that were and there's something about here about peeing like a race horse which is which is due to the study we have a question in the way back so you've already done to your wax which the creature which secretion is next on kind of running out of the creations.

[00:42:18]
We did a part study on frog tongues and showing how viscous the frog tongue is and that was and the stick. The study on the air I think I mean the body is full of amazing amazing secretions. So. I mean there's a lot of skin there's a lot of skin secretions I think there are quite interesting but the body is constantly latest spewing out fluid and I think it really is an effort to sort of keep itself keep itself clean question over here just a 2nd it's hard to move around and do.

[00:43:01]
So what are some of the practical applications the studies that made the list of this of this left right. Well for example this. This this this let me just talk about mine because I know those I know this the best well for example this dog study there's a huge There is this.

[00:43:28]
The lot of people interested in animal tracking and how to basically track animals basically understand locomotion studies and how strong they are and this show that the way the base the loose skin was really important for their for their evolution. So this dog should study it really it really also gave a lot of input to studies of.

[00:43:50]
Parkinson's disease in Parkinson's disease they actually study what's called wet rat shake and these are caused by tremors and they showed this base the study gave a lot of input for what is a true rat shake and so give them some calibration for basically when the drugs that are using for Parkinson's actually working or so a lot of these things that we sort of take for granted these animal motions no one's actually quantified them to the extent they can be used for science for example the urination study now that people know that animals need to urinate for 21 seconds they can actually start designing like these prosthetics these devices that can actually make a long sustained urine stream so that's just for the dog shake the which has more say hairs a squirrel or a honey bee.

[00:44:34]
I like that study because that was actually so we showed that basically these animals have these hairs to embed the particles and there was a later study that cited this one that basically made a medical patch. The problem of the current medical patches they put basically beads of medicine and you don't get enough contact but they showed if they made a hairy patch that mimicked the hairs on this be you'd actually like triple the amount of medicine you can put on and put in contact with this patch so the base I made a patent on of something that doesn't look at all like it be based on the same principle of having really small spines that hold medical particles it's really cool things one more question over here just a 2nd you down in the front maybe a professor who can hear you.

[00:45:30]
That ignoble. It's there to those 2 events are actually like the pretty much the happiest moments in my scientific career. I mean basically it starts with a phone call Mark Abrams calls you and the 1st time was the 1st time I ever met him and I mean I would have been at mit I thought they'd no prize was a total joke it was just there to kind of just make Laughs But then after going to meeting him and going to the ceremony and meeting there's 6 Nobel laureates that donate their time for the ceremony and the hundreds of people that are there and the huge international following the Ig Nobel Prize is really just a sneaky way to get people interested into science and it's a show that scientists have a sense of humor and I think all of you at Georgia Tech might know that but the general world doesn't have any scientific role models doesn't have any scientists that basically enjoy themselves and are just like real human beings so it really just fills this gap and makes us human and allows us to have fun for one night in our lives so it's really it's like a pleasure to be thrown paper airplanes on and heckled by a 8 year old girl which those of which all of happened during the ceremony Ok that was such a better question than mine but I'm curious the orange substance moving down the transparent pipe with them with cation Well that's Plato we were looking for material that has a similar consistency to poop without any of the bacteria congratulations thank you and fact fake poop is really really expensive people been trying to make fake poop for diapers for years it is very hundreds of dollars per little thing it's very expensive All right let's think our speaker one more time if you have this question.

[00:47:21]
Yes. Please pick up your paper airplane and if you have questions or would like to see the bag in carbonite or I don't know what you've embedded in come on down to the front Thank you.