Britain is trying to come to terms with the launch of extra-strong Marmite, but it seems the original born-in-Blighty foodstuff with a whiff-of-superhero-comic-book name is more than just a condiment. Marmite, together with its younger, Australian kinsman Vegemite, is an ongoing biomedical experiment.

Streaky dabs of information appear here and there, spread thin, on the pages of medical journals dating back as far as 1931.

The 30s were a sort of golden period for Marmite. A steady diet of Marmite reports oozed deliciously from several medical journals. Likely many physicians ingested them whilst munching Marmite on toast.

Dr Alexander Goodall of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh regaled readers of The Lancet with a case report called The Treatment of Pernicious Anæmia by Marmite. Goodall told how a British Medical Journal article, published the previous year, had inspired him and benefited his patients…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

BONUS: The Guardian is conducting (in connection with this column) a poll about Marmite — “love it or hate it?”

Professional basketball player Stephon Marbury recommends — and demonstrates — his treatment for a sore throat: eat Vaseline.

(Found via Charlie Pierce.)

Scientists have long engaged in a race to catch up with evil-doers who would slip forbidden substances to unsuspecting creatures. This study documents on little chapter in the history of that struggle:

“Detection and Determination of Theobromine and Caffeine in Urine After Administration of Chocolate-Coated Peanuts to Horses,” T.M. Dyke and R.A. Sams, Journal of Analytical Toxicology, vol. 22, no. 2, March–April 1998, pp. 112–6.  [AIR 15:6]

A news report from Fall River, Massachusetts recalls a beloved dental study about a paper clip. The report in the Boston Globe, says: “A former Massachusetts dentist is accused of putting paper clips in patients’ mouths during root canals, then billing Medicaid for the stainless steel posts he should have used.”

The classic study is:

“Foreign body in a deciduous incisor: A radiological revelation,” G. Lehl, J Indian Soc Pedod Prev Dent. 2010 Jan-Mar;28(1):45-6. The author, at Government Medical College and Hospital, Chandigarh, India, reports: “A 6-year-old boy was brought to the dental department with a history of toothache in the anterior maxillary region. Intraoral examination revealed caries in the deciduous upper central and lateral incisor teeth. Radiological evaluation revealed the silhouette of a metallic paper clip in the pulp chamber of the deciduous right maxillary central incisor. The tooth was extracted as the permanent incisor was erupting below. Children often avoid informing their parents regarding such incidents due to fear of punishment.”

From a portrait of 2005 Ig Nobel chemistry prize winner Bijan Pakzad:

Bijan dresses some of the world’s most powerful men: former President of the United States George W. Bush, Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, American actor Tom Cruise, German TV host Thomas Gottschalk, British actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, President of Russia Vladimir Putin,…

[A] fragrance from Bijan, DNA, earned Bijan an Ig Nobel Prize in 1995 for chemistry. The perfume contained no deoxyribonucleic acid and came in a triple helix-shaped bottle (as opposed to the double helix structure of DNA).

Can the basic attributes of a cheese remain stable over half a millennium or so? Fortunately, written details of the visual, olfactory, taste and texture characteristics of Parmigiano-Reggiano™ cheese can be traced back as far as the Middle Ages. Allowing the collection, consolidation and examination of historical data to form the basis of a new study by professor Mario Zannoni, curator of  The Museum of Parmigiano-Reggiano in Soragna, Italy.

“Until XIX century the characteristics of the cheese remained relatively stable. Important sensory changes happened in the XX century in relationship to the accelerated rate of modernization of the environment. The cheese still retained its granular texture being also tasty, a little sweet and rather fatty.”

But what of modern-day Parmigiano-Reggiano™ ?  Zannoni continues:

“The characteristics of Parmigiano-Reggiano mean that, as in XIV century Italy, it is still suitable today for grating over pasta.”

The research paper : Evolution of the sensory characteristics of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese to the present day is scheduled for publication in a forthcoming edition of the journal of Food Quality and Preference.
In the meantime, readers can savour in full an online essay from the same author (on broadly the same subject) :  Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese from the Middle Ages to the XX century

Angelina Souren came to the Portsmouth show of the Ig Nobel Tour of the UK, and wrote a detailed account of what she saw.

The tour will now move on to Liverpool, London, and Bristol, with a somewhat different lineup in every city.

Lee Forrester writes [AIR 15:6]:

I, too, am a student of the history of breath testing equipment. Tyrone Amphew’s letter (AIR Vents 15:4) about the famous Montague Laboratory experiments is very, very misleading, to say the least. I have a copy of the entire photo, enclosed here.
What Amphew showed was just a piece of it. A glance is enough to show any engineer at least six reasons why the Montague device would have been unreliable. I challenge your readers to list all six. It is a challenge I issue to my students every spring in my Engineering for Alcohol Detection for Forensic Detection Laboratories” course, which is among the most popular courses I teach, as any of my former students will be happy to tell you.

Research work may be glamorous, but… this study is evidence that sometimes it’s not easy:

“Hepaticoliasis: a Frequent and Sometimes Fatal Verminous Infestation of the Livers of Rats and Other Rodents,” F.D. Weidman, Journal of Parasitology, vol. 12, no. 1, 1925. pp. 19–25. [AIR 15:4] (Thanks to investigator Wendy Cooper for bringing this to our attention.) Weidman supplies details: “This second rat died in six months and two filariform worms were found in its liver but no ova. Before the writer could determine their structural details they were lost, being eaten by cockroaches during a short absence from the laboratory room, but is believed that they were adult male Hepaticola.”

“The mystery no longer lingers:
Found, at last, two missing fingers.
They both belonged, as did one tooth,
To Galileo. That’s the truth.”

So writes Digital Cuttlefish, in response to a BBC report that begins: “Two fingers and a tooth belonging to famed astronomer Galileo Galilei have been found more than 100 years after going missing, a museum in Italy says.” The image here, reportedly of another of Mr. G’s fingers, is from the BBC site.

Are you a mental model, or do you have a mental model?

If so, then Farnam Street (their modest motto is “What the smartest people on the internet read”) wants to hear from you. They say:

Help! Mental Model Index

We need your help to ensure we have the most comprehensive list of mental models.
We’ve brainstormed the following list of mental models. This list will be the master list for the site. So, we need your help to make sure its complete. We think we’ve done a pretty decent job with Psychological misjudgments, but we need your help ensuring that we cover the big ideas in other disciplines such as Investing, Economics, Mathematics, Biology, Physics, etc.

Some folks admire the super-polymath Professor Mohamed El Naschie. Some gaze from afar in wonder. But at least one person devotes considerable energy to blogging, in a rather unfriendly manner, about the professor.

Professor El Naschie, unbothered, describes himself with simple modesty:

He is the principle advisor of the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KACST – Riyadh) since many years…. His research interests include: Stability, Bifurcation, Atomic-engineering, Nonlinear Dynamics, Chaos, Fractals, High Energy Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics and E-infinity theory. He is editor-in-chief and associate editor of numerous learned journals.

The Nautilus curiosity shop in Torino, Italy describes this as “A very nice French conformateur, a device for registering the shape of a head so that a precisely-fitting hat may be made.”

In tribute of a sort to tonight’s Ig Nobel show at the University of Dundee, not far from the Tay Bridge, here are the concluding lines of William McGonagall’s mortal poem “The Tay Bridge Disaster“:

Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

Another scientific breakthrough seen likely to improve lives almost immediately:  This one is reported in The Guardian, under the headline “Grow-your-own to replace false teeth“:

“Tests have shown the technique to work in mice, where new teeth took weeks to grow. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t work in humans, the principles are the same,” said Prof Sharpe.

That news article was published on May 3, 2004.

Liu Young, who was born in China and educated in Germany, drew some icons to show differences between the cultures. Here are examples. (Thanks to Cathy Caldwell-Harris for showing these to us.)

Anger:

The boss:

“ Although it is one of the most conspicuous features of dog behaviour, barking has received little attention from ethologists or from an applied perspective.”

This lack of attention has been remedied by new research from the Institute of Biology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
A team from the university’s Department of Ethology, finds, in a review of previous literature, that   “…barking has evolved towards an acoustic signal that can have a ‘universal’ utility in dog vocal communication.”
Canine communication can come in various forms – some identified (in previous research focussed on the Hungarian hunting dog – the Mudi – see photo)  as : meows, grunts, whines, yelps, screams, whimpers, howls, bleats, growls, yaps, barks, clicks, ‘snapping of teeth‘, and pants.But, despite the current ethological approach, some doubts still remain as to the origins and meanings of the various modes.

“Barking has been shown to be context dependent, and provides information for humans about the inner state of the dog although there are few indications that barking is used for intra-species communication. It is assumed that dog barking emerged through selective processes in which human preferences for certain acoustic aspects of the vocalisation may have been paramount.”

And indeed, the subject is far from closed – “A more experiment-oriented approach is required for the study of dog vocalisation that could shed light on the possible communicative function of these acoustic signals.”
The paper is published in The Veterinary Journal Volume 183, Issue 2, February 2010, Pages 141-147. You can also find a full copy here.
Also see : previous research (2005) from the same department : Human Listeners Are Able to Classify Dog (Canis familiaris) Barks Recorded in Different Situations. (the Mudi study)

“In 1659 he decided not to accept anything simply written in a book, instead resolving to do research himself,” says Wikipedia about the now-late Bishop Steno, and goes on to give other bits of his history:

Steno’s landmark theory that the fossil record was a chronology of different living creatures in different eras was a sine qua non for Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Another principle, known simply as Steno’s law, or Steno’s law of constant angles, states that the angles between corresponding faces on crystals are the same for all specimens of the same mineral, a fundamental breakthrough that formed the basis of all subsequent inquiries into crystal structure.

(Thanks to investigator Sylvie Coyaud for bringing this to our attention.)

“The effect odor has on a consumer’s experience of the product is still not yet understood.” Prompting investigators at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands to set up two experiments in order to clarify the possible influences of odor on consumer goods. Their research took an unusual approach, centring around what they call ‘incongruent odors’ – perhaps simply described as merchandise with ‘the wrong smell’.
For example, a pair of plastic wellington boots (see photo) was treated with a ‘rose-like’ smell and, along with other incongruously odorised items, were then exposed to test subjects in various carefully controlled ways.
The experiments had turbulent and unexpected results – for although subjects generally didn’t like, say, the banana-flavoured alarm clock, several sniffers highly rated the ‘incongruent odor’ of the boots. Prompting the research team to observe: “The present outcomes might suggest that scent hardly contributes to product liking.”
Despite the unforeseen results, however, the authors caution against completely abandoning the idea that (product) smell matters. “Even though the effects of odor appropriateness or inappropriateness were not demonstrated in the present study, it would be unwise and premature to conclude that the scent of products is unimportant.”
Their article ‘Should Mary Smell Like Biscuit?‘ is published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Design, 3(3), 1-12.

Also see:  a previous Improbable article Why they make products smell

Technology provides yet another way to play music: