‌Three

‌Ears, Tongues, Noses and All That

May we recommend

‘Post-Nasal Drip Syndrome: A Symptom to be Sniffed At?’

by Alyn H. Morice (published in Pulmonary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, 2004)

Some of what’s in this chapter: Old men and their big ears • Look at everything upside-down • A bright thumb in the eye of the paparazzo • The Hapsburg eye, the Coburg nose • Print, lip • Experimental ant gulp • Pet-mounted noise alarm • Music’s eyebrow • Some swallow it hot • Christian smells, holy smells • The afterlife of aristocrats’ body parts • Chalk dust up the nose • Sit, hand; Bite, tongue • Monkey flossing • Cured pork up the nose

‌All ears research review

Old men have big ears is the consensus of several medical studies on the question. The most celebrated work focused exclusively on men, according with British male doctordom’s smug tradition of showing interest mainly in themselves. But in Japan and in Germany, wide-ranging investigations broke through the patriarchal hegemony. The newer studies made plain, for anyone who cared to know, the long-untold half of the story: old women have big ears too.

The British action played out in a characteristic location: the pages of the British Medical Journal, where any body part is always of interest.

In 1993, Dr James A. Heathcote, a general practitioner in Bromley, ‘set out to answer the question “As you get older do your ears get bigger?” ’ Heathcote and three colleagues examined the ears of 206 men of various ages, then presented his findings in a monograph called ‘Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?’ They report: ‘A chance observation – that older people have bigger ears – was at first controversial but has been shown to be true.’

Using the pronoun ‘we’ in a manner that excludes half of the population, Dr Heathcote wrote: ‘As we get older our ears get bigger (on average by 0.22 mm a year).’

The biggest oddity, ears aside, comes at the end. Almost in defiance of its title, the paper mutters: ‘Why ears should get bigger when the rest of the body stops growing is not answered by this research.’

Outside Britain, ear-growth data-gatherers took the bother to also look at man’s counterpart: woman.

In Japan, primary care physicians Yasuhiro Asai, Manabu Yoshimura, Naoki Nago and Takashi Yamada measured the ears and height of four hundred adult patients – of both sexes – who visited their clinics. The team’s 1996 report called ‘Correlation of Ear Length with Age in Japan’, also appeared in the sometimes-seemingly ‘we’re-all-ears’ British Medical Journal. The doctors claim two discoveries:

1. ‘Ear length correlates significantly with age, as Heathcote showed, in Japanese people’
2. ‘ear length corrected for height shows [even] greater correlation with age’

A decade later, Carsten Niemitz, Maike Nibbrig and Vanessa Zacher at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, took a bisexual look at lots of ears. They examined data from a thesis by a scientist named Montacer-Kuhssary, published at the university in 1959. Montacer-Kuhssary’s data were of a rare kind: photographs of 1,448 ears from newborn children, older children and adults up to and including ninety-two-year-olds.

For each ear, the team made fifteen different measurements. They confirmed, they say, that ears never really stop growing throughout a person’s lifetime.

But the big surprise came from comparing women and men: ‘In all parameters where post adult growth was observed, female ears showed a lesser increase than those of men.’ Old men have bigger ears than old women.

Montacer-Kuhssary, by the way, noted back in 1959 that people’s noses, too, usually grow throughout their lifetimes. But in the race toward biggerness, said Montacer-Kuhssary, ears outpace noses.

Heathcote, James A. (1995). ‘Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?’. British Medical Journal 311 (23 December): 1668.

Asai, Yasuhiro, Manabu Yoshimura, Naoki Nago and Takashi Yamada (1996). ‘Correlation of Ear Length with Age in Japan’. British Medical Journal 312 (2 March): 582.

Niemitz, Carsten, Maike Nibbrig and Vanessa Zacher (2007). ‘Human Ears Grow Throughout the Entire Lifetime According to Complicated and Sexually Dimorphic Patterns: Conclusions from a Cross-sectional Analysis’. Anthopologischer Anzeiger 65 (4): 391-413.

In brief

‘Glue Ear and Grommets’

by D. Isaacs (published in the British Medical Journal, 1992)

An upright Austrian vision

In the middle of the twentieth century, an Austrian professor turned a man’s eyesight exactly upside-down. After a short time, the man took this completely in his stride.

Professor Theodor Erismann, of the University of Innsbruck, devised the experiment, performing it upon his assistant and student, Ivo Kohler. Kohler later wrote about it. The two of them made a documentary film in 1950, ‘The Reversing Glasses and the Upright Vision’. (You can watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlHYcN789N4.)

The professor made Kohler wear a pair of hand-engineered goggles. Inside those goggles, specially arranged mirrors flipped the light that would reach Kohler’s eyes, top becoming bottom, and bottom top.

At first, Kohler stumbled wildly when trying to grasp an object held out to him, navigate around a chair or walk down stairs.

In a simple fencing game with sticks, Kohler would raise his stick high when attacked low, and low in response to a high stab.

Holding a teacup out to be filled, he would turn the cup upside down the instant he saw the water apparently pouring upwards. The sight of smoke rising from a match, or a helium balloon bobbing on a string, could trigger an instant change in his sense of which direction was up, and which down.

But over the following week, Kohler found himself adapting, in fits and starts, then more consistently, to such sights.

After ten days, he had grown so accustomed to the invariably upside-down world that, paradoxically and happily, everything seemed to him normal, rightside-up. Kohler could do everyday activities in public perfectly well: walk along a crowded sidewalk, even ride a bicycle. Passers-by on the street did ogle the man, though, because his eyewear looked, from the outside, unfashionable.

Erismann and Kohler did further experiments. So did other scientists. Their impression is that many, perhaps most, maybe just about all, people are able to make these kinds of adjustment. Images reach the eye in some peculiar fashion, and if that peculiar fashion is consistent, a person’s visual system eventually, somehow, adjusts to interpret it – to perceive it, to see it – as being no different from normal. Kohler writes that, ‘after several weeks of wearing goggles that transposed right and left’, one person ‘became so at home in his reversed world that he was able to drive a motorcycle through Innsbruck while wearing the goggles’.

This may strike you as extremely unusual. But the basic ability – to adapt to visions seen topsy-turvy or backwards – is something you have almost certainly witnessed. Many people develop the ability to read documents that are upside down. Many teachers, especially, treasure this as a semi-secret skill they’ve picked up without having worked at it.

This automatic, almost-effortless adaptation to visual weirdness is one of many bizarre things that brains do that scientists simply do not understand. Were we not talking about the brain, it would be appropriate to say that these behaviours, these abilities, are so weird that they are ‘unthinkable’.

Kohler, Ivo (1962). ‘Experiments with Googles’. Scientific American 206: 62–72.

Flashy ways to fight off paparazzi

A new invention aims to foil paparazzi who try to photograph people who do not wish to be photographed. Wilbert Leon Smith Jr and Keelo Lamance Jackson of California obtained a patent in 2012 for what they call ‘Inhibiting Unwanted Photography and Video Recording’. Their invention builds on a simple idea patented in 2005 by Jeremy and Joseph Caulfield from Arizona.

The Caulfields equipped celebs with a flashgun that fires automatically the instant another flashgun fires nearby. Smith and Jackson’s device goes that bit better: it’s a rotating, swivelling, oscillating device that can emit multiple strobe lights and other light beams for as long as the celebrity deems necessary.

The device has uses beyond deterring pesky paparazzi. As Smith and Jackson explain, it can also protect our own spy agencies against nosy foreign bad guys: ‘A surveillance camera detects a covert government operative with access to photographic equipment outside of the government building. Once the covert government operative is detected, the image distortion apparatus subsequently emits a plurality of deterrents in the direction of the photographic equipment to distort images captured therein.’

‌Inhibitions demonstrated: A celebrity fights off a paparazzo (left) and a soldier shows off a helmet-mounted version of the apparatus (inset)

Paparazzi and spies are but a tiny segment of the population. A decade earlier, Maurizio Pilu, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, took aim at the more general problem. Whenever people set foot in a public place, they can be photographed by strangers who have tiny (or, for that matter, big) cameras. This can happen countless times a day without anyone realizing it. Stroll down a street, and your image may have been captured in images by hundreds of people who were intent on photographing fire hydrants, cats or some civic official who waved at the populace while riding a bicycle.

Pilu’s method could prevent these unwanted captures. Anyone who wants privacy would carry on their person a special signalling device that transmits an electromagnetic message that indicates ‘Do not photograph me’. The scheme requires, perhaps quixotically, that every camera – every camera, owned by anyone – has a special circuitry built into it to receive such signals and alter the camera’s behaviour accordingly.

Pilu no longer works at Hewlett- Packard. But he still keeps an eye on the problem in his new job as lead technologist for digital in the Innovation Programme Directorate at the UK government’s executive innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board.

Pilu has clocked the arrival of Google Glass – the expensive, not readily available video camera/computer/transmitter/receiver that allows its owner constantly to gather video imagery of whatever happens to be in front of them, wherever they go. On 8 March 2013, in a message sent via Twitter, Pilu (@Maurizio_Pilu) warned the world that Google Glass is just the beginning and that cheaper alternatives to it are coming.

Caufield, Joseph A. (2005). ‘Apparatus and method for preventing a picture from being taken by flash photography’. US patent no. 6,937,163, 30 August.

Jackson, Keelo Lamance, and Leon Smith Wilbert Jr (2012). ‘Inhibiting unwanted photography and video recording’. US patent no. 8,157,396, 17 April.

Pilu, Maurizio (2004). ‘Image capture method, device and system’. US patent no. 7,653,259, 14 October.

In brief

‘The History of the Evil Eye and Its Influence on Ophthalmology, Medicine and Social Customs’

by George H. Bohigian (published in Documenta Ophthalmologica, 1997)

Features, predictably

Researchers in one field do not always pick up on good suggestions from those outside their specialty. Take, for example, the case of the Hapsburg lip.

‘I do not propose to deal with one of the most famous inherited features, the “Hapsburg Lip” … because it could almost be described as a medical condition, about which I am not qualified to speak. However, I feel sure that the “Hanoverian Eye”, the “Coburg Nose” and the “Danish Neck” will prove equally fascinating.’ So said Frances Dimond, curator of the Royal Photographic Collection, in a lecture that that was published in 1994 in The Genealogists’ Magazine. In the years since, however, the biomedical research community has displayed a collective lack of curiosity about the Hapsburg, Hanoverian and Coburg lip, eye and nose.

Partly this is because certain aspects of these phenomena are well understood. Dimond pointed this out when she said: ‘The true enthusiast for the Coburg nose was, however, the Queen and Prince Albert’s cousin, Prince Augustus of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who, possessing a fine nose himself, married a French princess, Clementine, who was similarly endowed, with predictable results.’

One has to search the medical literature back to 1988 to find more than a cursory mention of these matters. That was the year that E.M. Thompson and R.M. Winter of the Institute of Child Health in London published their report ‘Another Family With the “Habsburg Jaw” ’. Their report does not stint on detail: ‘We report a three generation family with similar facial characteristics to those of the Royal Habsburgs, including mandibular prognathism, thickened lower lip, prominent, often misshapen nose, flat malar areas, and mildly everted lower eyelids.’

A year earlier, W. Neuhauser had gone into even more depth, in his study entitled ‘Example of Potentiation of Genetic Traits Due to Inbreeding: The Habsburg Chin, Burgundian Lip, Spanish Insanity’. But because it was published in the German journal Zahnärztliche Mitteilungen, Neuhauser’s work is little-read in English-speaking countries.

A neurologist of my acquaintance recently moved to east Texas, where he discovered a most unexpected source of research material. He reports that, thanks to many generations of inbreeding, the region is full of genetically based neurological phenomena that he had seen only in medical books. What he had thought to be rare curiosities turn out to be commonplace in Texas. Inbreeding can, indeed, produce offspring with unusual characteristics.

The royal families of Europe and the hoi polloi of east Texas are both there, quietly waiting for scientists to come study and make sense of them.

Dimond, Frances (1994). ‘Face Values: Inherited Features’. The Genealogists’ Magazine 24 (10): 893–908.

Thompson, E.M., and R.M. Winter (1988). ‘Another Family with the “Habsburg Jaw” ’. Journal of Medical Genetics 25 (12): 838–42.

Neuhauser, W. (1977). ‘Example of Potentiation of Genetic Traits Due to Inbreeding: The Habsburg Chin, Burgundian Lip, Spanish Insanity’. Zahnärztliche Mitteilungen 67 (15): 914–6.

In brief

‘Broken Hand or Broken Nose: A Case Report’

by B.P. Shravat and S.N. Harrop (published in the Journal of Accident and Emergency Medicine, 1995)

‌On everyone’s lips

They are on everyone’s lips always, and sometimes on a shred of evidence in a murder trial, and occasionally in the title of a scientific report (as in the recently published ‘Morphologic Patterns of Lip Prints in a Portuguese Population: A Preliminary Analysis’).

Lip prints – lip patterns – have become the subject of formal study. That formal study has a formal name: cheiloscopy.

Basic questions still nag at cheiloscopists.

The Portuguese population lip print patterns paper, written by Virgínia Costa and Inês Caldas of the Universidad do Porto, appears in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Costa and Caldas show how scientists have worked hard to classify the universe of lip patterns into a set of standard categories. They slightly lament the existence of competing standards, the field being too new for its experts to settle on a single taxonomy.

‌‘Suzuki and Tsushihashi’s classification’ scheme for prints

They also worry at the how-do-the-lips-change-after-death conundrum. Criminal investigators find themselves haunted by a scarcity problem with both before-and-after patterns. ‘Very few’ corpses arrive with a companion set of pre- and postmortem lip prints, Costa and Caldes say, ‘which obviously impairs a comparative study’.

Does each of the seven billion or so people on earth (and each of their ancestors) have a unique set of lip prints? Jerzy Kasprzak of the Military Police School in Minisk Mazowiecki, Poland, addressed that in 1990, in an article called ‘Possibilities of Cheiloscopy’, in the journal Forensic Science International. ‘Cheiloscopy deals with the examination of systems of furrows on the red part of human lips’, he specified, then explaining that Yasuo Tsuchihashi and Tazuo Suzuki at Tokyo University had examined the lips of 1,364 persons. Thanks to those 1,364 sets of lips, Kasprzak said, Tsuchihashi and Suzuki ‘established that the arrangement of lines on the red part of human lips is individual and unique for each human being’.

According to the paper, ‘After applying the lipstick on ten volunteers and waiting the recommended five minutes for the lipstick to fix, lip impressions were made on tissue paper and white cotton fabric using sustained pressure for three seconds. The samples were exposed to ambient conditions.’

Do women’s lips have identifiably different patterns from men’s? In 2009, a team at Subharti Dental College in Meerut, India, attacked the question, using ‘lipstick, bond paper, cellophane tape, a brush for applying the lipstick, and a magnifying lens’. Their resulting treatise, ‘Cheiloscopy: The Study of Lip Prints in Sex Identification’, reports success in identifying the gender of eighteen of twenty women and seventeen of twenty men.

Lips being often associated with romance, cheiloscopy smacks occasionally of glamour. Ana Castelló, Mercedes Alvarezu, Fernando Verdú of the University of Valancia, Spain, noticed that advanced developments in the fashion industry had forced crime-fighters to come up with their own, countervailing technological leaps. In 2002, they and colleague Marcos Miquel published a study called ‘Long-lasting Lipsticks and Latent Prints’, in which they complained that ‘the cosmetics industry has developed long-lasting lipsticks that often do not leave visible prints’.

‌Evidence: ‘Latent lip print on cotton fabric developed using Oil Red O (powder) after 30 days’

The Valencia team experimented with chemicals – especially a dye called Nile red – that helped reveal nearly invisible prints left by such lipsticks. That led them, three years later, to publish one of the most romantically titled reports in the history of forensics: ‘Luminous Lip-prints as Criminal Evidence’.

Costa, Virgínia A., and Inês M. Caldas (2012). ‘Morphologic Patterns of Lip Prints in a Portuguese Population: A Preliminary Analysis’. Journal of Forensic Sciences 57 (5): 1318–22.

Kasprzak, Jerzy (1990). ‘Possibilities of Cheiloscopy’. Forensic Science International 46 (1/2): 145–51.

Sharma, Preeti, Susmita Saxena and Vanita Rathod (2009). ‘Cheiloscopy: The Study of Lip Prints in Sex Identification’. Journal of Forensic Dental Sciences 1 (1): 24–7.

Castelló, Ana, Mercedes Alvarez, Marcos Miquel and Fernando Verdú (2002). ‘Long-lasting Lipsticks and Latent Prints’. Forensic Science Communications 4 (2): n.p.

Castelló, Ana, Mercedes Alvarez-Seguí and Fernando Verdú (2005). ‘Luminous Lip-prints as Criminal Evidence’. Forensic Science International 155 (2/3): 185–7.

A snack with bite

There once was a man who swallowed some ants.

’Twas done with intent, not merely from chance.

The ants were alive,

But did not survive.

The research was done without government grants.

The man in verse was and is Volker Sommer, professor of evolutionary anthropology at University College London. He and his colleagues Oliver Allon and Alejandra Pascual-Garrido travelled to Nigeria’s Gashaka Gumti national park. There, chimpanzees and army ants and sticks are plentiful – the former use the latter to dip into nests for presumably delicious helpings of fresh, lively army ants of the species Dorylus rubellus. As the scientists describe it: ‘Army ants respond to predatory chimpanzees in a particular way by streaming to the surface to defend their colony through painful bites. In response, chimpanzees typically harvest army ants with stick tools, thereby minimizing the bites they receive.’

The team craved more knowledge about this chimp/ant give-and-take. So they ‘mimicked the predatory behaviour of tool-using chimpanzees at army ant nests to study the insects’ response’.

How? They used discarded chimp-manufactured ‘dipping wands’.

Some things were fairly easy to measure: how fast ants run up a dipping wand; how many ants one can expect to harvest in a single dip; the typical weight of those ants.

The most demanding part of the research is described in the report section headlined: ‘Ant remains in chimpanzee faeces and self-experiments’.

The goal was to estimate the numerical relationship between (a) ants that go into a chimp and (b) discernible ant parts that come out.

Anyone can wander through the park, collect chimp faeces and try to count its ant content. The pure measurement aspect is straightforward, if one utilizes simple accounting techniques. Here’s a technique mentioned in the report: ‘Counts of broken ant heads (usually only those of large workers could still be identified as such) were divided by two and added to the number of complete heads.’

Detail of methods in Allon, Pascual-Garrido and Sommer (2012)

But measuring how many ants go into a chimp requires an expensively high degree of controlled, intimate access to the animal. Sommer, Allon and Pascual-Garrido suggest that some day this might be done: ‘Controlled experiments in which captive chimpanzees are fed known numbers of army ants followed by faecal inspections could clarify this issue further.’

In the meantime, Sommer offered himself as a substitute for a chimp: ‘Correlations between numbers of ingested ants and remains detectable in faeces were assessed via [three] self-experiments by VS. For each of these, 100 large Dorylus workers were immobilized in whisky, ingested, masticated with 12 chewing motions and swallowed. Remains detectable in subsequent excreta were counted.’

Sommer produced some interesting results. The study lists summary data for the ‘number of detectable heads’; the number of ‘other fragments’; and the ‘interval (in hours) between ingestion and excretion’. Calculations suggest that one can ‘assume that 10.1% of ingested insects are detectable in excreta produced during the subsequent three days’.

Allon, Oliver, Alejandra Pascual-Garrido and Volker Sommer (2012). ‘Army Ant Defensive Behaviour and Chimpanzee Predation Success: Field Experiments in Nigeria’. Journal of Zoology 288 (4): 237–44.

An improbable innovation

‘Automated Surveillance Monitor of Non-humans in Real Time’

a/k/a a pet-mounted noise-sensing alarm, by David Shemesh and Dan Forman (US patent no. 6,782,847, granted 2004)

‌Fig 18. from US patent no. 6,782,847

The highs and lows of the musical eyebrow

When singers sing high notes, their eyebrows go higher than when they sing low notes. While that may not be an absolute physiological rule, a team of Danish and American researchers discovered that it happens pretty consistently. They lay out the evidence, and explain what it may mean, in a study called ‘Facial Expression and Vocal Pitch Height: Evidence of an Intermodal Association’, published in the journal Empirical Musicology Review.

When scientists tackle a new question, they begin with the knowledge that finding the answer – if there is an answer – might entail lengthy, slogging effort. Some questions take years to settle. Some take decades. The eyebrow/high-note evidence comes from ‘an experiment lasting less than one minute’.

Sofia Dahl, at Aalborg University Copenhagen, and David Huron and Randolph Johnson, at Ohio State University, ran their experiment forty-four times, each with a different volunteer. They asked each person to sing, but intentionally did not solicit any information as to whether anyone had musical training.

The one thing each person did have was an ice-cream bar. The study says that each volunteer received one, as inducement to sing, and that it was free.

The experiment was simple, as well as quick. To prompt each volunteer to sing, Dahl, Huron or Johnson used this script: ‘I want you to sing a comfortable pitch and sustain it while we take your picture. Sing whatever vowel you like. Now hold the note … [Take picture]. Now I want you to sing a higher [lower] pitch – the highest [lowest] pitch you can. Good. Now hold it. [Take picture]’.

The research team then showed the photographs to judges who had not been present during the vocalization. The judging yielded results that were, on the face of them, stark. The report says the ‘independent judges selected the high-pitch faces as more friendly than the low-pitch faces. When photographs were cropped to show only the eye region, judges still rated the high-pitch faces friendlier than the low-pitch faces.’

Building on a mound of earlier research that is documented in the scientific literature, Dahl, Huron and Johnson assessed the brow/pitch behaviour they saw and heard. Their data, they conclude, is ‘consistent with the role of eyebrows in signaling aggression and appeasement’.

The prior work by others gathered evidence about the role or roles eyebrows play in expressing human emotion. This new study mentions a discovery in 1978 that ‘raised or arched eyebrows are indicative of appeasement or friendliness’, a 1979 finding that ‘when angry, the eyebrows are lowered, resulting in a more pronounced brow ridge’, and a 1981 treatise explaining that in many cultures lowered eyebrows are ‘interpreted as displays of greater dominance or aggression’.

Having, this once, focused on a notably fleeting musical phenomenon – the brow-arched single note – Johnson eventually moved to a new institution and towards an opposite extreme. Ensconced at Oklahoma Baptist University, he presented a paper called ‘The Fullness of God’s Time in Brahms’s Requiem’.

Huron, David, Sofia Dahl and Randolph Johnson (2009). ‘Facial Expression and Vocal Pitch Height: Evidence of an Intermodal Association’. Empirical Musicology Review 4 (3): 93–100.

Johnson, R. (2011). ‘The Fullness of God’s Time in Brahms’s Requiem’. Paper presented at the Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, 19 March.

Heat over hotness

To drink really hot coffee (or hot tea) is to swallow a paradox of pleasure and pain. Hye-Seong Lee, Earl Carstens, and Michael O’Mahony, at the University of California, Davis, solved the puzzle, more or less. They explain it in a study that, for the sake of clarity and directness, they call: ‘Drinking Hot Coffee: Why Doesn’t It Burn the Mouth?’

Industries acquire standards. The various industries that make and serve hot beverages have acquired standard notions of how hot people expect a good cuppa to be.

‘Drinking Hot Coffee Why Doesn’t It Burn the Mouth?’: Abstract

Meticulous researchers showed that these industries think that people like their coffee to be really, really hot – between 80 and 85 degrees Celsius (175 and 185 degrees Fahrenheit). An authoritative source for this kind of information is a paper entitled ‘Consumer Preferred Hot Beverage Temperatures’, published in 1999 by Carl P. Borchgrevink and John M. Tarras of Michigan State University and Alex M. Susskind of Cornell University in New York. Other studies, by other scholars, hint that the industry has a little problem with precision, and that hot beverages are often professionally served a few degrees hotter or cooler than that ideal.

No matter. Several other experimenters discovered that anything even nearly that hot, if placed in the mouth, tends to hurt. And it hurts in both senses: pain and damage.

Lee, Carstens and O’Mahony describe the pain studies in some detail. They speak of a Dr Yamada, who ‘mapped the mouth for spots sensitive to pain, using Miller’s dental broach’, and of a Dr Svensson, who ‘mapped pain thresholds in the mouth using argon laser stimulation’. They say that for thermal pain, a Dr Green ‘measured mean thresholds in the dorsal surface of the tongue (47.8 degrees C [118.04F]) and the inner wall of the lower lip (47.5 degrees C [117.5F]) with an ascending series method’. They also describe the damage studies, which can be boiled down to a single word: burns.

‘Thus’, they write, ‘it would seem that for a substantial number of people, the preferred temperatures for drinking were not only above reported pain thresholds, but also above possible damage thresholds in the mouth.’

Lee, Carstens and O’Mahony answered the ‘why don’t people burn their mouths?’ question by sticking electronic sensors inside people’s mouths. They used thermocouples to measure the temperatures at four locations inside the mouths of eighteen coffee-drinkers while those coffee-drinkers drank hot coffee. One thermocouple was placed on the anterior dorsal surface of the tongue, near the tip. The others were situated to measure the bolus – the roiling slurp – of coffee as it passed through the mouth.

After all the measuring and analysing, they concluded that, probably, ‘during drinking, the bolus of hot coffee is not held in the mouth long enough to heat the epithelial surfaces sufficiently to cause pain or tissue damage’.

O’Mahoney proudly says the study has been quoted in several legal cases that arose from coffee-burn incidents, ‘sometimes by both sides!’

Lee, Hye-Seong, Earl Carstens, and Michael O’Mahony (2003). ‘Drinking Hot Coffee: Why Doesn’t It Burn the Mouth?’. Journal of Sensory Studies 18 (1): 19–32.

Borchgrevink, Carl P., Alex M. Susskind, and John M. Tarras (1999). ‘Consumer Preferred Hot Beverage Temperatures’. Food Quality and Preference 10 (2): 117–21.

Smells like Holy Spirit

Did early Christians smell inspiration? Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s book Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination assures us that yes, they did. The book might, metaphorically, help other academics wake up and smell the stale coffee: here is a pungent research topic that researchers have, until now, hardly bothered to sniff at.

Harvey is a professor of religious studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Her 442-page tome explores (1) the most compelling odours, and (2) what and how early Christians thought about those odours.

The table of contents offers topics to tempt even a casual bookstore browser. Read these seven items aloud to a friend or loved one, and you’ll see:

• The Olfactory Context: Smelling the Early Christian World
• A Martyr’s Scent
• Olfaction and Christian Knowing
• The Smell of Danger: Marking Sensory Contexts
• The Fragrance of Virtue: Reordering Olfactory Experience
• Sanctity and Stench
• Asceticism: Holy Stench, Holy Weapon

At least one other soul is spreading the word about Scenting Salvation. Brent Landau, a doctoral student at Harvard Divinity School, published an appreciative essay in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. ‘Wake up, fellow scholars!’, he virtually shouts. This book ‘will be a valuable and provocative resource for scholars working on ancient conceptions of the body, the history of science, ritual studies, asceticism, and Syriac Christianity, among other topics’.

Professor Harvey is not the first to savour early Christian smells, Landau reminds us. But ‘her book represents the most comprehensive work on this subject. If there is a watchword that characterizes [Harvey]’s research, it is most certainly “ambiguity”; for not only do odors themselves straddle the line between corporeal and incorporeal, but the judgment of what makes a given smell “good” or “bad” changes drastically for Christian interpreters depending upon the circumstances.’

Modern scholars do not work in hermetically sealed rooms. In addition to writing the book, Harvey gives talks about her work at academic conferences. Among the topics and locations, these have included: ‘The Odor of Faith’ in Chicago in 1994; ‘Sanctity and Stench: When Holy Fragrance Turns Foul’ in Michigan in 1994; ‘Why the Perfume Mattered: the Sinful Woman in Syriac Exegetical Tradition’ at the University of Notre Dame in 1999; later that year, ‘On Holy Stench: When the Odor of Sanctity Sickens’ in Oxford; and ‘Making Sense of Scents: Olfactory Guides for the Late Antique Christian’ at Yale in 2006.

She also publishes titbit-packed specialized studies. One of them, 1998’s ‘St. Ephrem on the Scent of Salvation’, tells how, in the fourth century, odours delivered both Good News and Bad News: ‘Ephrem emphasizes the experience of smell as the means by which the believer encounters the divine … and learns God’s favor or disfavor.’

The study of Christian olfaction once was lost, but now is found. Harvey tells us that, in the fifth century, Christian writers regularly wrote about ‘an olfactory dialogue in which human and divine each approached the other through scent’. Professor Harvey has started a dialogue about that dialogue about smells.

Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (1998). ‘St. Ephrem on the Scent of Salvation’. Journal of Theological Studies 49 (1): 109–28.

Landau, Brent (2007). ‘Review: Scenting Salvation’. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2: n.p., http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2007/2007-02-44.html.

Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (2006). Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Research spotlight

‘Celebrating Fragmentation: The Presence of Aristocratic Body Parts in Monastic Houses in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England’

by Danielle Westerhof (published in Citeaux Commentarii Cistercienses, 2005)

A measured look at chalk

At long last, after millions of students in thousands of classrooms have freely and incautiously breathed trillions of breaths, there’s a report about the question: how much chalk dust enters the air when a teacher uses a blackboard?

The study, ‘Assessment of Airborne Fine Particulate Matter and Particle Size Distribution in Settled Chalk Dust during Writing and Dusting Exercises in a Classroom’, was done by Deepanjan Majumdar, D.G. Gajghate, Pradeep Pipalatkar and C.V. Chalapati Rao of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in Nehru Marg, India.

The team weighed each piece of chalk before and after using it. They collected chalk dust from the air, and also the dust that fell on to a long sheet of paper laid over the base of the blackboard.

Their experiment featured three kinds of chalk, one blackboard, an eraser, an aerosol spectrometer (to measure and record the amount of dust floating in the air) and a Cilas model 1180 particle-size analyser.

The researchers tried to ensure maximally pure conditions for the measurements. ‘All the windows and the only door were closed airtight’, the ‘fans present in the classroom were not operated’, and ‘personal movement in the classroom was completely restricted during the experiment to minimise resuspension of dust from floor’.

The report explains that in schools that still use chalk, teachers brave the greatest direct risk: ‘During teaching, entry of chalk dust in the respiratory system through nasopharyngeal region and mouth could be extensive in teachers due to their proximity to the board and frequent opening of mouth during lectures and occasional gasping and heavier breathing due to exhaustion.’ As per current state of knowledge on particulate matter vis-à-vis chalk dust, it ‘may remain suspended in air for some time before settling on the floor and body parts of the teachers and pupils’.

The scientists acknowledge that chalk and chalkboards these days are being supplanted, in many schools, by whiteboards and other more modern, less intrinsically dusty technology. But chalk still enjoys wide usage in many countries.

The study, published in the journal Indoor and Built Environment, ruefully concludes: ‘Though real-time airborne chalk dust generation was found to be low in this study … and did not contain toxic materials, chalk dust could be harmful to allergic persons and may cause lacrimation and breathing troubles in the long run and certainly is a constant nuisance in classrooms as it may soil clothes, body parts, audiovisual aids and study materials.’

Majumdar, Deepanjan, D.G. Gajghate, Pradeep Pipalatkar and C.V. Chalapati Rao (2011). ‘Assessment of Airborne Fine Particulate Matter and Particle Size Distribution in Settled Chalk Dust during Writing and Dusting Exercises in a Classroom’. Indoor and Built Environment 21 (4): 541–51.

In brief

‘Does Sitting on Your Hands Make You Bite Your Tongue? The Effects of Gesture Prohibition on Speech During Motor Descriptions’

by Autumn B. Hostetter, Martha W. Alibali and Sotaro Kita (paper presented at the annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2007)

The authors, who are at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Birmingham, report: ‘Participants in the hands restrained condition were given a 25 x 60 x 2 cm wooden board to place across their laps. On the top of this board, there were several strips of Velcro. The participants were also given cotton gloves to wear that had the opposite side of the Velcro attached to the palms and fingers. They were asked to place their hands on the board, so that the two sides of the Velcro adhered. In this way, they were discouraged from moving their hands during the task without being forcefully restrained … It seems … that sitting on your hands does influence your tongue, though it does not make you bite it completely.’

The piercing sounds of science

The sounds of science are in some cases surprising. Or annoying. Or both.

BANG. One of history’s most stimulating experiments – stimulating for the volunteer research subjects, at least – was carried out by W. Dixon Ward and Conrad Holmberg of the University of Minnesota. Their summary report, ‘Effects of High-Speed Drill Noise and Gunfire on Dentists’ Hearing’, appeared in a 1969 issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association.

The Ward-Holmberg paper is a pleasure to read. It begins: ‘A high-pitched, whining noise can be most annoying …’ Concerned that constant exposure to the whirr of a dental drill might be dangerous to the dentist’s hearing, Ward and Holmberg decided to investigate.

Their report specifies that ‘most of’ their testing was done on volunteers. It also mentions that ‘two elderly men could not be induced to respond properly to [the] testing procedure.’ The scientists also allude to ‘a misunderstanding’ in eleven cases, wherein data seems to have been gotten from the dentists’ wives, rather than from the dentists.

Ward and Holmberg concluded that ‘there is only scant evidence that high-speed drills have much influence on the hearing of dentists in Minnesota, especially in comparison to the effects of gunfire.’

BOOM. Margaret Bradley and Peter Lang of the University of Florida meticulously exposed people to what they called ‘naturally occurring sounds (e.g., screams, erotica, bombs, etc.)’. These various sounds – there were sixty of them altogether – included beer, cows, a roller coaster, bees, a growling dog, a ticking clock and lovemaking. The volunteers were also shown pictures, including photos of a lamp, an owl, a cow and a burn victim. Drs Bradley and Lang say for the most part their volunteers responded emotionally to sounds pretty much the same way as to pictures. But their report, published in the journal Psychophysiology, does note that ‘larger startle reflexes were elicited when listening to unpleasant, compared with pleasant, sounds’.

HISS. Some research subjects get a less meaningful, less sharply defined listening experience. In 2002, Tetsuro Saeki, at Yamaguchi University in Ube, Japan, and several colleagues published a report called ‘A Method for Predicting Psychological Response to Meaningless Random Noise Based on Fuzzy System Model’. The title speaks for itself. Details, for those who cannot infer them, can be found in the journal Applied Acoustics.

YIKES. To the non-specialist, some of this research may sound surprising, annoying or even meaningless. But for someone, somewhere, such reactions may themselves sound like something worth studying.

Ward, W. Dixon, and Conrad J. Holmberg (1969). ‘Effects of High-Speed Drill Noise and Gunfire on Dentists’ Hearing’. Journal of the American Dental Association 79 (6): 1383–7.

Bradley, Margaret M., and Peter J. Lang (2000). ‘Affective Reactions to Acoustic Stimuli’. Psychophysiology 37 (2): 204–15.

Saeki, Tetsuro, Shizuma Yamaguchi, Yuichi Kato and Kensei Oimatsu (2002). ‘A Method for Predicting Psychological Response to Meaningless Random Noise Based on Fuzzy System Model’. Applied Acoustics 63 (3): 323–31.

Monkey, floss

Monkey flossing became a formal practice, at least experimentally, in the late 1970s, thanks to a dentist named Jack Caton. Twenty years later, a physician named David C. Sokal, inspired by the monkey flossing, patented a top/bottom flossing-reminder and floss-dispensing device for humans. Monkeys themselves apparently began unassistedly flossing themselves not long afterwards. But likely those animals did so on their own, not influenced by either Dr Caton’s experiment or Dr Sokal’s invention.

Caton became the world’s foremost monkey flosser in 1979, when he published a small study in the Journal of Clinical Periodontology. Based at the Eastman Dental Center in Rochester, New York, he worked with six Rhesus monkeys, all of whom had ‘gross amounts of plaque and generalized moderate to severe gingivitis’. (‘Gingivitis’ is dental lingo meaning ‘inflamed gums’.)

Caton tested several methods to improve the monkeys’ oral condition. Flossing, brushing and mouthwashing all helped, he reported. No matter what the treatment, the healthiest result came from doing it at least three times a week.

Years later, Sokal saw the Caton recommendations (which, he points out, ‘proved adequate for Rhesus monkeys’), weighed them against other research findings, and concluded that cleaning teeth every second day is ‘satisfactory’.

But humans sometimes need reminders. So Sokal invented what he calls a ‘floss dispenser with memory aid for flossing upper and lower teeth in separate sessions’.

‌‘Floss dispenser with six floss cutters’, one for almost every day of the week

Unlike conventional dental floss dispensers, Sokal’s has two different clips to slice the floss and hold it in readiness for next time. One is labelled ‘Lower teeth – Monday Wednesday Friday’, the other ‘Upper teeth – Tuesday Thursday Sat/Sunday’. The patent offers variations: electronic day and jaw indicators, and as many as six floss clips (Saturday and Sunday share a single clip).

Monkeys can themselves be inventive. The August 2007 issue of the American Journal of Primatology features a report entitled ‘Long-tailed Macaques Use Human Hair as Dental Floss’. Written by scientists at Kyoto University, in Japan, and Ubon Rajathanee and Chulalongkorn universities, in Thailand, it builds on a report from the year 2000 that ‘two individual Macaca fascicularis monkeys in Lopburi, Thailand, used human hair as dental floss’.

The researchers observed similar behaviour with many monkeys, who plucked from sometimes-willing humans. They also learned that, if given human hairpieces, the monkeys in effect used them as floss dispensers, plucking out strands and spinning them into floss. These various monkey achievements are impressive, say the scientists: ‘Utilizing women’s hair as dental floss is not a simple task; the monkeys need to sort the hair, make a string with it and hold it tightly with both hands to brush their teeth when they feel that pieces of food remain … It was interesting that some monkeys appeared to remove only a few pieces of hair as though they understood that there was an optimum number of hairs required for use as dental floss.’

To see monkeys teach their young how to floss, visit http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8n4o3_monkeys-teach-young-to-floss-their_fun#.Udq-RlOxOUk.

Caton, Jack (1979). ‘Establishing and Maintaining Clinically Healthy Gingivae in Rhesus Monkeys’. Journal of Clinical Periodontology 6 (4): 260–3.

Sokal, David C. (1998). ‘Floss Dispenser with Memory Aid for Flossing Upper and Lower Teeth in Separate Sessions and Method’. US patent no. 5,826,594, 27 October 27.

Watanabe, Kunio, Nontakorn Urasopon and Suchinda Malaivijitnond (2007). ‘Long-tailed Macaques Use Human Hair as Dental Floss’. American Journal of Primatology 69 (8): 940–4.

May we recommend

‘Gagging during Impression Making: Techniques for Reduction’

by Sarah Farrier, Iain A. Pretty, Christopher D. Lynch and Liam D. Addy (published in Dental Update, 2011)

The authors, at Cardiff University, Wales, report: ‘In everyday dental practice one encounters patients who either believe themselves, or subsequently prove themselves, to be gaggers.’

Cured, therapeutically

A 2011 medical study recommends a method called ‘nasal packing with strips of cured pork’ as an effective way to treat uncontrollable nosebleeds.

Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin at Detroit Medical Center in Michigan treated a girl who had a rare hereditary disorder that brings prolonged bleeding. Publishing in the Annals of Otology, Rhinology, & Laryngology, they pack the essential details into two sentences: ‘Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae … To our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia.’

They acknowledge a long tradition of using pork to treat general epistaxis, i.e. nosebleed. The technique fell into disuse, they speculate, because ‘packing with salt pork was fraught with bacterial and parasitic complications. As newer synthetic hemostatic agents and surgical techniques evolved, the use of packing with salt pork diminished.’

In 1976, Dr Jan Weisberg of Great Lakes, Illinois, wrote a letter to the journal Archives of Otolaryngology, bragging that he, together with a Dr Strother and a Dr Newton, had been ‘privileged’ to treat a man ‘for epistaxis secondary to Rendu-Osler-Weber disease’, an inherited problem in which blood vessels develop abnormally. For their patient, the period of hospitalization was ten days and the patient was discharged with salt pork packing still in his nose.

In 1953, Dr Henry Beinfield of Brooklyn, New York, published a treatise called ‘General Principles in Treatment of Nasal Hemorrhage’. Beinfield explains: ‘Salt pork placed in the nose and allowed to remain there for about five days has been used, but the method is rather old-fashioned.’

In 1940, Dr A.J. Cone of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, praised the method in a paper called ‘Use of Salt Pork in Cases of Hemorrhage’. In Cone’s experience, ‘it has not been uncommon in the St. Louis Children’s Hospital service to have a child request that salt pork be inserted in his nose with the first sign of a nosebleed … Wedges of salt pork have saved a great deal of time and energy when used in controlling nasal hemorrhage, as seen in cases of leukemia, hemophilia … hypertension … measles or typhoid fever and during the third stage of labor’.

Way back in 1927, Dr Lee Hurd of New York published a big thumbs-up in ‘Use of Salt Pork to Control Hemorrhage’ in the Archives of Otolaryngology. Hurd enthused: ‘It is hard to say just what the action of the pork is, since several factors are present, namely, pressure, salt, tissue juices and fat… Usually I do not use any outside dressing to hold the pork in place…’

Humphreys, Ian, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin (2011). ‘Nasal Packing with Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia’. Annals of Otology, Rhinology, & Laryngology 120 (11): 732–36.

Weisberg, Jan J. (1976). ‘Rendu-Osler-Weber Disease – Is Embolization Beneficial?’. Archives of Otolaryngology 102 (6): 385.

Beinfield, Henry H. (1953). ‘General Principles in Treatment of Nasal Hemorrhage: Emphasis on Management of Postnasal Hemorrhage’. Archives of Otolaryngology 57 (1): 51–9.

Cone, A.J. (1940). ‘Use of Salt Pork in Cases of Hemorrhage’. Archives of Otolaryngology 32 (5): 941–6.

Hurd, Lee M. (1927). ‘Use of Salt Pork to Control Hemorrhage’. Archives of Otolaryngology 4 (11): November 1927, p. 447.

An improbable innovation

‘Internal nostril or nasal airway sizing gauge’

by Louise S. MacDonald (US patent no. 7,998,093, granted 2011)

‌Gauging small, medium and large digits in place of small, medium and large nostrils

According to the patent, ‘certain dimensions of an individual’s digits can be correlated to certain dimensions of an individual’s internal nostril, or nasal airway size. Gauging the size of an individual’s internal nostril or nasal airway by measuring certain dimensions of their digit(s) provides a highly correlating sizing method that is much easier, faster and more convenient than measuring the nostril or nasal airway directly.’