Do Sparrows Like Bach?: The Strange and Wonderful Things that Are Discovered When Scientists Break Free

by Unknown

  As far as we know Hurtubise never made it back into the cage with another grizzly. He reportedly sold the bear suit and invested the money in designing indestructible suits for soldiers and a device that allows humans to see through solid objects (as well as going bankrupt). Still, he’s not the only researcher who ever donned an animal suit.

  It takes one to know one

  Some days when Joel Berger got dressed for work he put on a pair of jeans. On other days, it was a moose suit. That’s right: a big, moulded styrofoam head covered in synthetic moose fur on top of a long moosey cape that reached down to his ankles. And if being the moose’s front end sounds humiliating, imagine having to impersonate a moose’s backside. That irksome task fell to Berger’s long-suffering collaborator, Carol Cunningham.

  ‘We do it to get data. It’s that simple,’ he said preemptively. ‘We have to get close to unhabituated animals.’

  In 1999, Berger and Cunningham, biologists at the University of Nevada in Reno, wanted to know if animals behaved differently when their predators disappeared. Moose in Wyoming, for instance, were at the top of the food chain. Over the previous decades, all their predators had died out, mostly through human interference. But it was a different story in Alaska, where wolves and grizzly bears still hunted the gentle beasts for supper.

  So Berger and Cunningham wondered: how did the two populations differ? Did moose in Wyoming still react to the scents of their erstwhile predators? Or had they simply stopped bothering?

  The question was not as easy to answer as you might imagine. Berger and Cunningham had to devise a way to put scents under a moose’s nose and then measure how it reacted. But moose tend to live in remote forests and don’t mingle casually with humans. First the researchers tried leaving dung and scent marks in the woods, going back later to see if the moose had approached them. That didn’t work very well, said Berger. It could take weeks for the moose to run across the samples. ‘By that time the odour is diffuse,’ he said. He and Cunningham tried hurling the stuff in with masterful baseball pitches. They even catapulted it in with slingshots.

  But in the end, going undercover as a moose seemed to be the only solution. Their unusual outfit didn’t exactly keep them toasty—and the fur and foam had some major disadvantages when it came to outdoor pursuit. ‘It’s a hassle to use,’ complained Berger. ‘It’s big and bulky. But it does work.’ They even made moose sounds. ‘It’s a high-pitched “moo”—a “mew”,’ said Berger. He also pointed out that it wasn’t exactly easy to navigate with the suit on, since they could barely see. The two had been known to fall over.

  And a cumbersome moose suit was not their only distraction. Dangling round their necks were stopwatches, a pad of paper, pencils, a camera—and, er, research samples. ‘Yeah, we’re carrying bags of shit with us, too,’ said Berger. Not just any old stuff, but Siberian tiger, grizzly bear, black bear and cat, not to mention an assortment of fine urines, including wolf, coyote and human. All in individual bags.

  When they got to within about 25 metres of the moose, the real research would begin. Berger would make a ‘scented’ snowball and lob it near the moose subject. Sometimes she ignored it, said Berger. Other times, she ran away. A couple of times, moose got downright furious and looked as if they were about to charge. ‘We dropped the moose suit and ran,’ said Berger. ‘We had to go back to get it.’

  But if the moose did go over and sniff at the snowball, Berger and Cunningham would be ready to time how long it would take her to get back to foraging. They found that moose from regions where there were no predators took significantly less time to return to their feeding and were pretty uninterested, even when sniffing the faeces of ancient enemies.

  We hope they keep it up. But we reckon that if Joel Berger had been a child he’d have been told that it was all neither funny, nor clever—but we think it is. However, we know what isn’t: swearing. Rude words are neither clever nor funny. But studying the words and which people say them might just be…

  Expletive deleted

  Swearing ‘recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest’, wrote Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in his book, The Stuff of Thought. Yet despite being a showcase for creativity, swear words are taboo in virtually all societies, even though their subject matter—usually sex or excretion—describes activities fundamental to human existence.

  So why are we such potty-mouths, and what gives certain words the power to shock?

  One theory is that cussing is the form of language that comes closest to a physical act of aggression. When you swear at someone, you are forcing an unpleasant thought on them and, lacking earlids, they are helpless to repel this assault. ‘It’s a substitute for physical violence,’ said Timothy Jay, a psychologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams. Most of us are able to restrain ourselves from launching these linguistic assaults—at least some of the time—but studies of people who lack this restraint are revealing.

  Individuals with Tourette’s syndrome have characteristic tics such as blinks and throat-clearing, and between 10 and 20 per cent also exhibit involuntary swearing, otherwise known as coprolalia. Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, a neurolinguist and speech pathologist at New York University, said that coprolalia can be regarded as a kind of vocal limbic tic. People with Tourette’s have damage to a part of the brain called the basal ganglia—clusters of neurons buried deep in the front half of the brain that are known to inhibit inappropriate behaviour. This leads to uncontrollable swearing, she said.

  As Pinker sees it, the basal ganglia are responsible for tagging certain thoughts as taboo. When the ‘don’t-go-there’ label is no longer applied, as with Tourette’s, taboo thoughts can reassert themselves and the urge to cuss becomes overwhelming. There is even one recorded case of a man with Tourette’s who was deaf from birth and expressed his coprolalia through sign language. In 2000, doctors at London’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery reported that his swearing was randomly interspersed within his signed speech, just as it is in other people with coprolalia. What’s more, rather than flipping the finger or making other obscene gestures that hearing people deploy, he used the recognised signs for rude words.

  Tourette’s aside, many people fear that bad language is on the increase. Most studies of the subject have found that men swear more than women. But a survey conducted in 2008 by Mike Thelwall at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK suggested that, among young British users of the social networking website MySpace, strong swear words were used by males and females about equally—and a lot. ‘Where once the only swear words young people wrote might have been furtively scribbled on the walls of public toilets, now they type them casually on to a computer screen,’ said Thelwall. ‘And there, they never run out of space.’

  By poring over our rich library of filth, researchers have been able to get a handle on just what makes a good swear word. It is not just its sound, said Tony McEnery, a linguist at the University of Lancaster in the UK: after all, ‘shot’, ‘ship’ and ‘spit’ are not considered obscene, whereas ‘shit’ is. Besides, the German and French equivalents sound quite different and still pack a very satisfactory punch. It cannot just be about semantic content either, because the use of words denoting faeces or sexual matters in a medical context remains acceptable. ‘Something about the pairing of certain meanings and sounds has a potent effect on people’s emotions,’ Pinker said.

  Swear words also go in and out of fashion in line with the taboos they breach. ‘“Damn” was the undisputed king before “fuck” arrived on the scene,’ said McEnery, ‘but lost its piquancy as the fear of burning in hell faded.’ ‘Poxy’, ‘leprous’, ‘canker’ and other disease-related words went the same way as hygiene improved. From the 19th century on, English speakers have mostly vented their frustration by reference to two different classes of taboo: the sexual and the scatological.

  Today ‘fuck’ reigns supreme, but there is still room for innovation. So, what will be the next big thing
in swearing? Most experts decline to predict any winners. ‘Paedophile’ seems to be an especially offensive thing to call someone today, explained McEnery, and therefore a good candidate, but there is no evidence it is gaining ground as a swear word. ‘Something is missing with that word,’ he said. Pinker said the word ‘cancer’, while not yet obscene, is acquiring taboo characteristics—note how it is often referred to as ‘The Big C’.

  Jay road-tested a few contenders of his own. He once muttered ‘Expletive!’ on a golf course, and got some strange looks. You can’t impose swear words on a language, he noted, they arise organically. Just because you personally dislike cheese, shouting ‘stilton’ out loudly is unlikely to catch on.

  Bloody hell, fancy that!

  3 The yuck factor

  Welcome to the world of yuck, or what the academic world calls grossology. Anybody who had anything to do with the creation of this book insisted that we include a chapter on the yuck factor. Which, as luck would have it, we had every intention of doing from the very beginning. How could we deny anybody the pleasure of reading about the smell quotient of farts?

  We’re not going to suggest that we came up with the science behind this chapter. But what we are delighted to discover is that grossology is a genuine scientific field practised by its leading proponent and inventor, Sylvia Branzei, who gave birth to the discipline in 1993 in order to get children more interested in biology and chemistry. But what exactly qualifies a subject to fall into the grossology category? To be honest, it seems to be everything that kids find funny. Farts are a very important component of the discipline. As is urine. And faeces. Which reminds us of an old joke.

  Five-year-old Alice walked into the kitchen one morning as her biologist father was reading the newspaper. ‘Where does poo come from?’ she asked. Startled, he regarded her for a moment before replying. ‘Well,’ he began. ‘You know we’ve just had breakfast?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. He went on: ‘The food goes into our tummies and our bodies take out all the good stuff and whatever’s left comes out of our bottoms when we go to the toilet, and that’s poo.’ She was silent as she digested the enormity of what he’d divulged. ‘And Tigger?’

  Naturally, you don’t get far in the field of grossology without knowing a thing or two about underpants, vital if you are thinking of going into space. Let’s face it, what on Earth—pun intended—do you do with a pair of dirty Y-fronts when you are 3 parsecs from the nearest solar system? You design a cocktail of bacteria to eat them, according to Russia’s Institute for Biological and Medical Problems.

  Yes, soiled underwear is big in the world of yuck. One set of smalls that didn’t make it into this chapter, however, were the damp leather pair found in the wreck of a Bronze-Age boat being excavated near Dover in England. They were of great importance archaeologically, being possibly the world’s oldest surviving pair, but we struggled to justify their inclusion in this chapter because they weren’t so much gross as a vital component of the vessel they were found in. The researchers who discovered them said they had been used to plug a leak in the boat’s hull during a Channel crossing. We wonder which sweaty oarsman volunteered to hand his over when the boat started listing?

  Since its invention, grossology has splintered into different branches, most of which, down the years, New Scientist has covered in depth. First up, bodily excretions. We’re not sure our lead story comes as much of a surprise, but science exists to confirm the expected as much as it does to discover the unexpected.

  It’s a gas

  Australian men fart more than Australian women, and their farts smell more. These were the findings of one of the largest ever studies of flatus emissions (what the wider world knows as farting), carried out in 1993 by R. A. Stanton, a nutrition consultant from Sydney, and T. D. Bolin of the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick, New South Wales.

  Each of the 60 men and 60 women who took part in the study was given a small pocket ‘Flatometer’ to record the number of daily emissions. The participants also gave a subjective estimate of the aroma of the emission, rating it on a 4-point scale from ‘odourless’ to ‘severe’ in order to arrive at an ‘aroma quotient’ for the day’s farts. A dietary diary was kept to reveal the flatus potential of different foods.

  At the end of the 5-month study period, men reported an average 12.7 farts per day with a mean aroma quotient of 0.86. Women reported a lower 7.1 farts per day, with a more discreet aroma quotient of 0.54.

  The study revealed a high correlation of emissions with dietary fibre intake, consistent with popular wisdom about baked beans. However, an expected correlation between farts and beer remained unproven.

  We worry that this survey may suffer from the kind of objectivity failure that befalls similar surveys studying sex lives. Men tend to boast and women tend to be more circumspect regarding their sexual experiences (and/or aroma quotient) out of respect for social ‘norms’. Nonetheless, we are certain there is a commercial opportunity for flatometers, because there’s obviously a thriving research community out there studying farts…

  Raising a stink

  Here’s a piece of trivia with which to impress your drinking pals. The average adult in the Western world farts roughly 10 times a day, releasing enough gas to inflate a party balloon. More than 99 per cent of these emissions are made up of five odourless gases. What exactly causes their foul smell has long been a matter of debate. But in 2001, one man believed he had the answer.

  Michael Levitt, a gastroenterologist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Minneapolis, had been studying flatus for over 30 years and solved numerous mysteries that might otherwise have troubled the flatulent reader. Well known in gastroenterological circles for his painstaking research and undying enthusiasm, Levitt had written more than 200 papers on this subject and is acknowledged as a world authority. Articles about him and his work have appeared in everything from The Sydney Morning Herald to The Daily Telegraph.

  Many scientists would welcome this exposure, but for Levitt it was disastrous. Readers would write angry letters to his employers complaining that his research was a waste of money. It became so bad that he eventually refused to talk to the press for fear of jeopardising his career. Just what went wrong?

  Part of the problem was the mirth-provoking nature of the topic itself. The temptation to turn out stories brimming with puns and fart jokes was often too great for journalists to resist, and the tone of the story inevitably colours Levitt’s image in the mind of the readers. The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, began its story about Levitt with the euphemistic headline ‘Tail wind’. The Washington Post started cheekily with ‘Waiting to inhale’ but dampened further enthusiasm with the sub-heading ‘Mainstream and alternative practitioners agree that diet is central to controlling flatulence’. And online magazine Salon.com plumped for ‘Dr Fart speaks’.

  Levitt’s work attracted the media because it is serious research on a snigger-inducing topic. For instance, he was the first to correctly identify the gases that make farts smell. Previously, researchers had suspected that the guilty parties were foul-smelling compounds such as indole and skatole, created by the breakdown of amino acids in the gut. But nobody had ever bothered to check.

  Evaluating a smell is a difficult task, so Levitt turned to the noses of two people with a rather unusual ability. Both could identify different sulphur-containing gases purely by smell. These lucky individuals were asked to evaluate the flatus of 16 healthy men and women who, the previous evening, had eaten 200 grams of pinto beans to ensure ample gas production. Levitt said the results pointed to hydrogen sulphide as the culprit in smelly farts, accompanied to a lesser extent by other sulphur-based gases. But indole and skatole were nowhere to be smelt.

  Levitt even tested an artificial detox system—a commercially available device claimed to be able to reduce the odour of farts. The Toot Trapper was a foam cushion covered on one side with activated charcoal—charcoal with an increased surface area—which absorbed cer
tain gases. Since no standard technique existed to carry out such tests, Levitt developed his own by designing airtight Mylar pantaloons to trap the gases for analysis. The good news is that the Toot Trapper worked well, reducing the concentration of sulphur-based gases by a factor of 10. The bad news is that it was rather unwieldy.

  Research like this was bound to attract media coverage. But Levitt’s work was far from pointless—it has saved lives. Hydrogen and methane, two of the main gases that form in the gut, are combustible. In the 1980s, they caused a number of fatal explosions during otherwise routine operations on the gut. Somehow the purgatives used to clean the gut enhanced the production of hydrogen or methane and a chance spark during the operation triggered an explosion. Levitt and others have since developed purgatives based on polyethylene glycol, which clean the bowel with minimal gas production. Colonic detonations are now rare.

  Levitt also studied a 28-year-old man who meticulously recorded every passage of gas he produced over a 3-year period. Farting about 34 times a day, he let out over 8 litres of gas, equal to the gas in several party balloons. Through Levitt, he achieved the dubious fame of being the only thoroughly studied man with excessive flatus on record.

  Journalists certainly seemed to like Levitt, and stories about him were littered with the good-humoured quotes he would give. Explaining to The Washington Post that gut bacteria absorb gas as well as produce it, he said: ‘If we passed all the gas that we made, everybody would be farting a million times a day.’