Spermicide Coke, stale chips research wins Ig Nobels

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A researcher who figured out that Coke explodes sperm and scientists who discovered that people will happily eat stale chips if they crunch loudly enough won alternative "Ig Nobel" prizes Thursday.

Other winners included physicists who found out that anything that can tangle, will tangle and a team of biologists who ascertained that dog fleas jump farther than cat fleas.

The Ig Nobels honor real research, but are meant as a funny alternative to next week's deadly serious Nobel prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics, economics, literature and peace.

Awarded by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humor magazine, the prizes are based on published research, some intended to be humorous but often not. Usually the "honored" researchers go along with the joke.

Deborah Anderson of Boston University Medical Center and colleagues were awarded the chemistry prize for a 1985 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that found Coca-Cola kills sperm.

She said she was serious in testing the soft drink because women were using it in a douche as a contraceptive and, later, to try to protect themselves from the AIDS virus.

"It definitely wouldn't work as a contraceptive because sperm swims so fast," Anderson said. But Coke made with sugar quickly kills sperm, she said, probably because sperm soak it up. "The sperm just kind of explode," she said in a telephone interview.

It kills the AIDS virus too, she said.

The Ig Nobel committee made up a "nutrition prize" to go to Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Britain's Oxford University, who tricked people into thinking they were eating fresh potato chips by playing them loud, crunching sounds when they bit one.

The biology prize goes to a French team that found dog fleas can jump higher than cat fleas, while the medicine prize was awarded to a team at Duke University in North Carolina who showed that high-priced placebos work better than cheap fake medicine.

Dorian Raymer of the Scripps Institution in San Diego and a colleague won the physics prize for demonstrating mathematically why hair or a ball of string will inevitably tangle itself in knots.

The peace prize was given to the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology for adopting the legal principle that plants have moral standing and dignity. There is a website explaining this: here

A team at The University of Sao Paulo in Brazil won a special archaeology prize for showing how an armadillo can mess up an archaeological dig.

The economics prize went to researchers at the University of New Mexico who learned that a professional lap dancer earns bigger tips when she is most fertile, while David Sims of Cass Business School in London won the literature prize "for his lovingly written study 'You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations'," the committee said.

Past winners include the creator of the plastic pink flamingo, a researcher who recorded a mallard duck sodomizing a dead drake and a doctor who cured hiccups by applying digital rectal massage.

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Animal Instincts: Main Street Seeks Revenge on Wall Street

By Robert Roy Britt and Jeanna Bryner

Protesters march outside of the U.S Treasury building in protest of the proposed Wall Street bailouts, Friday Sept. 26, 2008, in Washington. Credit: AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin.

The outrage expressed by many so-called Main Street folks over the proposed Wall Street bailout is based on more than a sense of injustice.

It's about revenge, a basic animal instinct shared by humans, chimpanzees and even blue-footed boobies.

And Washington politicians would be wise to listen up and stick some get-back-at-'em clauses into the bailout bill if they hope to get the support of the average American, says one behavioral economist who studies these things.

In phone calls made by constituents to politicians, as well as e-mails to news organizations and other media, the public has expressed a preference for a package that helps consumers and homeowners without assisting fat cats on Wall Street. In fact, a Pew Research Center survey conducted Sept. 27 through Sept. 29 found that nearly 70 percent of Americans say they feel angry about the government's plan, and half admit they are scared.

President Bush and other leaders who support the bailout warn, however, that if financial institutions are not propped up quickly and significantly with public money, the average American will pay the price.

Bring it on, many people seem to be saying.

Dan Ariely would agree.

"People are willing to lose money to get those people [on Wall Street] to suffer" because the corporate financial leaders have violated a social contract, says Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University. "We need to include revenge in the bill."

The bill should also include a code of punishment for exacting revenge for future financial misdeeds, Ariely said last night on "Marketplace," a radio program produced and distributed by American Public Media.

However, psychologist David Schroeder of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, doesn't think revenge is technically the right word for what the public seeks, because it implies an urge to make others suffer at whatever cost. The public wants retribution, he says, for what is seen as a violation of the rules of the game, one they put their trust in.

"Retribution involves a punitive component," Schroeder said, "and we're hoping that's going to deter these people from doing it again and we'll get them to abide by the rules in the future."

Trust games

Ariely's analysis is rooted in studies he and others have done involving trust games.

They work something like this: Two individuals are each given $10. The first participant can give his partner the money, and when doing so that $10 quadruples into $40, meaning the partner now has 50 bucks. Why would you just give away money? It has to do with trust, because then the partner has the choice of either splitting the money with the giver or taking it all for himself. Many players do give away their money and end up getting the split amount back, Ariely said.

But not everyone is so trustworthy and reciprocating. So the game has a revenge twist. The giver can choose to use his own money to get back at the other player for not sharing the $50. For every $1 out of the giver's pocket, the greedy player takes a hit of $2.

"The first thing that is surprising is that people actually take revenge [even though] revenge is costly," Ariely said. "You just gave away 10 dollars, and now you're willing to invest even more to make me miserable."

Aaaah! revenge

It turns out revenge can be pleasurable. Ariely referred to a group of Swiss researchers who have found that when players take revenge, the same part of the brain normally triggered by reward lights up.

It's no surprise that humans love revenge. Other research has shown that people feel satisfaction when someone they dislike suffers, and interestingly, men in particular are found to enjoy physical vengeance.

Even chimps are vengeful, a study last year found. The primates become "exploding black balls of rage" when food is stolen, said a scientist involved in the study. Other primates are known to seek revenge against relatives of an attacker. Studies have shown that revenge is in fact widespread among animals, from birds of the Galapagos, called blue-footed boobies, to elephant seals.

Revenge on Wall Street

The same emotional process, Ariely said, is happening around the nation's current financial crisis.

"People feel that Wall Street has betrayed our social trust," Ariely told LiveScience. "In some sense they've walked off with our 50 dollars. Actually it's more than 50 dollars. And now the question is — how do we feel about it? And the truth is we feel really angry. Because of that, we're willing to take revenge."

He added, "It means that all of us are willing to lose money in order for those 'bastards on Wall Street' — I'm just using a general expression — to suffer even more."

And so in order for the public to support a bailout for Wall Street, and the thinking goes, for the bill to pass through Congress, revenge must be incorporated, Ariely said.

"In some sense, it's in [the public's] best interest to have the bailout, but they really want somebody to pay for it," Ariely said. "So we are all going to lose for these guys to lose more."

Two types of revenge could give the bill a swifter passage.

Retroactive revenge would make the CEOs and other higher-ups at banks suffer. For instance the bill could include something like, "if we bail out the banks, we are going to take all the stock options of the people in the bank," Ariely said.

Future revenge would mean "creating more general legislation that will ensure that in the future if people misbehave we will punish them," he added.

Schroeder thinks the bailout plan just needs to be framed in a different way. That's because the public seeks a sense of fairness. Right now, he said, the everyday person views the recipients as people who are already making lots and lots of money, so it's not fair they should be "bailed out."

"I think the retribution side probably got into play because they [the government] talked about it as a bailout — 'We're going to help the people who were cheaters,'" Schroeder said. "If they had talked about this instead as sort of a loan package," the public may have reacted more positively.

Social animals

In addition to the "feel good" factor, revenge can serve as a means of maintaining social order, particularly in times or under conditions when it seems like policing and government regulations are non-existent.

Ariely gives the example of someone taking your donkey, way back when. The rational solution would be to figure out how long it would take to get back the donkey and whether it's worth it. If it took a month to chase the thief down but a week to work enough to buy another donkey, the revenge would be too costly.

"What if I will chase you to the ends of the world to get my donkey back? And I not only will take my donkey, I will take your donkey and your sister's donkey and so on," Ariely said. If word gets out that you'd carry out such revenge, others would steer clear of your donkeys in the future.

"In an odd way, revenge is very useful in getting people to behave well," Ariely said.

So perhaps it's not surprising that humans, one of the most social of animals, would show such a penchant for enacting revenge, he said.

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Could Quotas Keep Fish on the Menu?

By Peter Ritter Wednesday

A fresh catch of halibut is prepared for market on a dock in Homer, Alaska

Giving a man a fish — not teaching him how to do it — may actually be a better way to preserve the world's dwindling fish stocks, according to a new study published in Science on Sept. 19. Scientists and fishermen have known for years that global fish populations are in bad shape. According to one bleak 2006 study, all of the world's major commercial fisheries could collapse by 2048 because of overfishing and loss of habitat. Now a team of economists and biologists say they know one way to prevent the loss of this crucial resource in global waters: more quotas.

In the past, fishing quotas — or the government allotments of set amounts of fish to private parties — have not always won over the hearts of seafarers. But looking at more than 11,000 fisheries worldwide, researchers led by scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that countries that had effectively privatized their fish stock by doling out quotas to individual fishermen were half as likely to experience a collapse as those that did not. "The idea is that by securing access for individuals or select groups for a long period of time, they have an incentive to steward the resources," explains the study's lead author, Christopher Costello, a resource economist at U.C. Santa Barbara. "If they overharvest or destroy habitat today, they will have a less vibrant stock in the future, and thus lower future profits."

According to Costello, fisheries, or areas where a certain kind of fish is caught, represent a textbook example of a tragedy of the commons — the classic economics metaphor for a shared resource that is ruined because of competition between users. Giving fishermen catch shares — also known as Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQs) — doesn't dampen competition for fish, but manages it by essentially making fishermen stakeholders in a fishery. Costello explains that IFQs, which can be bought, sold or traded just like stocks, discourage overfishing by giving fishermen a vested interest in preserving the future health of the resource.

Despite growing evidence of their effectiveness, catch-share programs are still a relative rarity. Only 121 of the more than 11,000 fisheries Costello and his team studied were using the system. But Gunnar Knapp, an economist at the University of Alaska, says the idea of privatizing fish is catching on as fishermen realize that it may be the best way to protect fish — and their own jobs.

Take Alaska's halibut fishery, which began a catch-share program in 1995. At the time, the halibut season had become a 48-hour scramble to catch the most fish allowed by law, according to Linda Behnken, director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association and a commercial fisherman in Sitka since 1982. "No matter what the weather was, everyone with a line and hook was going out," says Behnken. "And this is Alaska. The weather gets bad here. Boats went down. Lives were lost." Things got even worse when the fishermen all returned with their catches at the same time, flooding the market and driving down the profits they were risking their lives to secure.

Since the introduction of catch shares, however, Alaska's halibut season has gone from one or two short days to nine months. Fishermen are also less likely to risk bad weather, pushing fatalities down 15%. And because the market is no longer flooded with halibut one week out of the entire year, the price of fish has increased fourfold. "IFQs have made fishing safer," Behnken says. "And it's better for the resource."

But as evidenced by the handful of countries that practice them, catch-share programs remain controversial. In New Zealand, where they've been in place for decades, fishermen complain that the practice leads to unfair consolidation: as large companies buy and amass quotas, smaller operators can't compete with the low prices those big firms can afford to set because they're selling more. Others have raised concerns about the privatization of what has traditionally been considered a public resource. But Knapp says the biggest problem with fish quotas is figuring out how to allocate them fairly in the first place. "It's analogous to open range land that you divide up and give to ranchers," Knapp says. "If you come back in 10 years and ask the ranchers how they feel about it, they're going to think it's great. The people who didn't get any land won't be so happy."

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