‌Five

‌Thinking, On Your Feet and Fingers

In brief

‘Arm Wrestling Fractures: A Humerus Twist’

by J.H. Whitaker (published in American Journal of Sports Medicine, 1977)

Some of what’s in this chapter: Pedestrians in space • Topsy-turvey sloth • Man’s heavy leg • Tables and chairs on the highway • Wok twists • Mosh motion • Sock not inside • Manipulation by armadillo • Giving the finger new meaning • Missing this, missing that • Fake foot indications • The knifing of pumpkins • Approaches to cutting flesh • Wealth via cockroach leg • Foot tippling

Pedestrian research

As you walk city streets, frustrated at why those other pedestrians behave so frustratingly, be aware that people are trying to improve the situation, but are making progress only in slow steps.

Dr Taku Fujiyama, one of the modern masters in this endeavour, is a lecturer at University College London’s Secret Centre, or ‘the £17m international centre for PhD training in security and crime-related research’.

Fujiyama began his work before joining Secret. In 2005, while affiliated (as he continued to be) with UCL’s Centre for Transport Studies, he wrote a study called ‘Investigating Use of Space of Pedestrians’. It proposed a series of experiments in and on a mobile lighting-and-sound-system-equipped ‘elevated demountable paved platform’.

Different kinds of people – old, young, fat, thin – ambled and strode along the platform. A laser tracking system monitored their every motion and stoppage.

‌Comparison of two pedestrian approaches

One early experiment focused on how people avoid collisions. Fujiyama observed that ‘collision avoidance of a pedestrian reflects his/her spatial requirements for the walking space’.

In a later paper, ‘Free Walking Speeds on Stairs: Effects of Stair Gradients and Obesity of Pedestrians’, Fujiyama and his colleague Nick Tyler report that they ‘did not find any significant difference between the walking speeds of normal and overweight (or moderately obese) participants’.

Fujiyama and Tyler are following the decades-old footsteps of UCL’s Ivor B. Stilitz. In the late 1960s, Stilitz analysed rush-hour crowds moving and not moving through ticket halls in five London Underground stations. He published a summary filled with detailed tables and diagrams, including a squiggles and numbers depiction of the ‘clouds’ that form near a set of ticket machines.

Stilitz sprinkled his paper with a drop of dry engineering humour. He wrote: ‘Not surprisingly, the length of queue was correlated with the number of people in it.’

‌A pedestrian flowchart

Fujiyama, Taku (2005). ‘Investigating Use of Space of Pedestrians’, Accessibility Research Group, Centre for Transport Studies, University College London, working paper, January.

— (2011). ‘Free Walking Speeds on Stairs: Effects of Stair Gradients and Obesity of Pedestrians’. In Peacock, Richard D., Erica D. Kuligowski and Jason D. Averill (eds). Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics. New York: Springer, pp. 95–106.

Kitazawa, Kay, and Taku Fujiyama (2010). ‘Pedestrian Vision and Collision Avoidance Behaviour: Investigation of the Information Process Space of Pedestrians Using an Eye Tracker’. In Klingsch, Wolfram W.F., Christian Rogsch and Andreas Schadschneider (eds). Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2008. New York: Springer, pp. 95–108.

Stilitz, Ivor B. (1969). ‘The Role of Static Pedestrian Groups in Crowded Spaces.’ Ergonomics 12 (6): 821–39.

May we recommend

‘Doll Shoes: The Cause of Behavioural Problems?’

by A.K. Leung (published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, 1984)

The author, at Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary, reports: ‘One evening, while relatives were visiting from Toronto, his mother slept with him. After 20 minutes in bed she started to feel very nauseated, felt as though she were floating and had a severe headache. At the same time she could smell a very strong odour in the bed, and when she rolled over she realized that the shoes on the doll were the cause of the odour and of her feeling ill. The shoes were discoloured and the stench was very strong. The woman put the shoes away and since that time has noticed a marked improvement in her child’s behaviour.’

‌Slothful

The name of the sloth is synonymous with a certain style of sin. But scientists pursue them for other reasons, too. The animals move – something they do on occasion – in what can seem mysterious ways. They hang upside down from tree limbs, and sometimes amble that way there. On the ground, ambling right-side-up is their preferred way to get from here to slightly over there. They often snooze.

In 2010 a study called ‘Three-dimensional Kinematic Analysis of the Pectoral Girdle during Upside-down Locomotion of Two-toed Sloths’ appeared in the journal Frontiers in Zoology. John Nyakatura and Martin Fischer of Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany, analysed the ‘suspensory quadrupedal locomotion’ of two sloths. They concluded that an earlier biologist had exaggerated, but only slightly, in proclaiming that ‘of all mammals, the sloths have probably the strangest mode of progression’.

‌Sloths, recorded, by Nyakatura and Fischer (2010)

Others hesitated less to say more. A 2007 book called Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture gets a bit slothful about facts. It says: ‘As the early Victorians well knew, the living descendants of the sloth family not only spend their lives suspended upside down in trees, but are also incapable of walking, and are, in fact, so slow that moss grows on their fur.’

There has been more careful research. In 1981, Frank Mendel of the State University of New York, Buffalo, published a painstaking analysis called ‘Use of Hands and Feet of Two-toed Sloths (Choloepus hoffmanni) during Climbing and Terrestrial Locomotion’ in the Journal of Mammalogy. Four years later, Mendel published a not-quite-identical paper called ‘Use of Hands and Feet of Three-toed Sloths during Climbing and Terrestrial Locomotion’.

A German/Swiss/Panamanian/American team studied slothly sleep. They published a paper in 2008 called ‘Sleeping Outside the Box: Electroencephalographic Measures of Sleep in Sloths Inhabiting a Rainforest’.

Sloths do, now and then, get around. Robert Enders published a paper in 1940 called ‘Observations on Sloths in Captivity at Higher Altitudes in the Tropics and in Pennsylvania’. Enders transported two sloths from their native Panama to his workplace at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where they soon died.

Sloths can shock experts. A 1989 paper called ‘Agonistic Behaviour by Three-toed Sloths’ gives this eyewitness account: ‘A three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus) rapidly ascended a cecropia tree, fought briefly and intensely with another adult male, and descended even more rapidly … The social system, visual abilities, and activity budgets of sloths are probably more complex than previously thought.’

In 2010, University of Helsinki researchers examined sloths’ hair. They found that a variety of green algae grows there, and that other scientists ‘have observed a wide range of animals [there], e.g. moths, beetles, cockroaches and roundworms’.

A German/Peruvian team of scientists published a study in 2011 called ‘Disgusting Appetite: Two-toed Sloths Feeding in Human Latrines’.

‌Evidence: ‘A sloth inside the latrine’

Then there’s always the big question. In 1971, a study titled ‘Why Are Sloths So Slothful?’ investigated whether sloths’ nerves and brain are sloppily slow. Its conclusion: ‘We cannot verify our initial suspicion.’

Nyakatura, John A., and Martin S. Fischer (2010). ‘Three-dimensional Kinematic Analysis of the Pectoral Girdle during Upside-down Locomotion of Two-toed sloths (Choloepus didactylus, Linné 1758).

Rauch, Alan (2007). ‘The Sins of Sloths: The Moral Status of Fossil Megatheria in Victorian Culture’. In Morse, Deborah Denenholz, and Martin A. Danahay (eds). Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing.

Mendel, Frank C. (1981). ‘Use of Hands and Feet of Two-toed Sloths (Choloepus hoffmanni) during Climbing and Terrestrial Locomotion’. Journal of Mammology 62 (2): 413–21.

— (1985). ‘Use of Hands and Feet of Three-toed Sloths (Bradypus variegatus) during Climbing and Terrestrial Locomotion’. Journal of Mammology 66 (2): 359–66.

Rattenborg, Niels C., Bryson Voirin, Alexei L. Vyssotski, Roland W. Kays, Kamiel Spoelstra, Franz Kuemeth, Wolfgang Heidrich and Martin Wikelski (2008). ‘Sleeping Outside the Box: Electroencephalographic Measures of Sleep in Sloths Inhabiting a Rainforest’. Biology Letters 4 (4): 402–5.

Enders, Robert K. (1940). ‘Observations on Sloths in Captivity at Higher Altitudes in the Tropics and in Pennsylvania’, Journal of Mammalogy 21 (1): 5–7.

Green, Harry (1989). ‘Agonistic Behavior of Three-toed Sloths (Bradypus variegatus)’. Biotropica 21 (4): 369–72.

Suutari, Milla, Markus Majaneva, David P. Fewer, Bryson Voirin, Annette Aiello, Thomas Friedl, Adriano G. Chiarello and Jaanika Blomster (2010). ‘Molecular Evidence for a Diverse Green Algal Community Growing in the Hair of Sloths and a Specific Association with Trichophilus welckeri (Chlorophyta, Ulvophyceae)’. BMC Evolutionary Biology 10: 86.

Heymann, Eckhard W., Camilo Flores Amasifuén, Ney Shahuano Tello, Emérita R. Tirado Herrera and Mojca Stojan-Dolar (2011). ‘Disgusting Appetite: Two-toed Sloths Feeding in Human Latrines’, Mammalian Biology 76 (1): 84–6.

Toole, James F. (1971). ‘Why Are Sloths So Slothful?’, Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association 82: 131–5.

Research spotlight

‘The Weight of the Leg in Living Men’

by Robert Bennett Bean (published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1919)

Chair rules

The phrase ‘Tables and chairs on the highway’ has a uniformly accepted meaning in all of England and Wales.

That meaning is legalistic, deriving, we are told, from part VIIA, section 115 (A to K) of the Highways Act 1980, a chunk of parliamentary prose that has the title ‘Provision of Amenities on Certain Highways’. In describing those amenities, though, it makes no mention – none at all – of chairs or tables or any other kind of common furniture. The phrase ‘Tables and chairs on the highway’ appears nowhere – nowhere – in Highways Act 1980.

Nevertheless, many regional and local authorities proclaim that part VIIA, section 115 (A to K) of the Highways Act 1980 – devoid though it is of tables and chairs – gives them authority to regulate all aspects of civic life that are covered by the phrase ‘Tables and chairs on the highway’. And regulate it they do:

• Chelmsford borough council publishes a document called ‘Guidelines for Placing Tables and Chairs on the Highway under Section 115 Part VIIA of the Highways Act 1980’.
• Westminster city council goes with the shorter title, ‘Guidelines for the Placing of Tables and Chairs on the Highway’.
• Eastleigh borough council keeps it terse; they call theirs ‘Tables and Chairs on the Highway’.

What do all the tables and chairs on the highway regulations regulate? Cafes, restaurants, pubs, bars and shops that wish to place tables and chairs outside, on the street.

The regulations mainly deal with safety, trying to ensure ‘that free and safe passage for pedestrians can be maintained’. For some councils – among them Basingstoke, Bath and North-east Somerset, Oxfordshire, and Kensington and Chelsea – that’s about the extent of it.

Other councils have larger concerns. They care, deeply, about the furniture. In the royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, the council lets it be known that the ‘type and colours’ of all tables and chairs ‘need approval’.

Similarly, Rushmoor borough council, in Hampshire, says: ‘Upholstered chairs, cushions and similar effects will not normally be considered acceptable … Materials, patterns, colours and style of furniture … must not be too bright, loud or garish (Reason: public and visual amenity) … Variation in design, eg chairs with or without arms, will only be acceptable if from the same design range and of the same general style (Reason: public and visual amenity).’

The almost-neighbouring Eastleigh borough council says: ‘Be a good neighbour! … Only furniture approved by the council may be used … Full details, including metric dimensions, materials and colours, of proposed furniture, ideally accompanied by photographs, illustrations or drawings, will be required as part of the application … The colour of furniture should be attractive but not too bright, garish or overly reflective.’ (Eastleigh borough council also says: ‘The crockery and cutlery used in street cafes should be of good quality and a uniform style.’)

Up in Lambeth, however, the council simply says: ‘The type and style of furniture is your choice.’

These policies are all available, at the time I’m writing this, on the official websites of the various councils. Should one of them disappear from the Net, you would likely be welcome to visit the council office and invite the helpful person there to join you in a local cafe – one that has placed chairs and tables on a highway – for a cup of tea and a civilized chat.

Standardized wok men

‘The Effect of Wok Size and Handle Angle on the Maximum Acceptable Weights of Wok Flipping by Male Cooks’, a report in the journal Industrial Health, does more than its title reveals. It also shows how to standardize an intricate physical test.

Many professional wok-users use a big one. Almost all of those woks have a straight handle. That’s bad, say Swei-Pi Wu and Cheng-Pin Ho at Huafan University, and Chin-Li Yen at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan. ‘[We found that] a small wok [about thirty-six centimetres across] with an ergonomically bent handle is the optimal design, for male cooks, for the purposes of flipping.’

‌Reviewing the effect of five wok angles and three wok sizes on MAWF

Professional wok-weilding cooks are prone to shoulder, neck, lower back/waist and finger/wrist aches and injuries. Wok-flipping brings some glaring risk: ‘The repeated action of swinging the wok up and down, to quickly stir the food in the wok, involves extensive arm and wrist movement, especially dorsi flexion, palmar flexion and wrist radial and ulnar deviation. This non-neutral posture, accompanied by high torque and a high rate of repetition is very apt to cause cumulative trauma disorder injuries in the user’s upper extremity.’

Wu, Ho and Yen had twelve experienced Chinese cooks repeatedly flip woks of three different sizes, with handles at five different angles. The tricky part was standardizing the repetitions for all those people over all those wok-size-and-handle-angle combinations.

Their main tool used was a loudspeaker. They required the cooks to follow a strict protocol. The central part ran like this:

Flip the wok nine times, adding or removing soybeans if the wok feels too light or too heavy.

The loudspeaker says: ‘Adjust the weight, for the last time!’

Flip once more.

The loudspeaker says: ‘Please hold the culinary spatula!’

The loudspeaker says ‘Ready!’, then two seconds later says: ‘Begin!’

Lift the wok and shake it, three times, with the non-dominant hand, lifting the culinary spatula with the dominant hand, ‘to perform the simulated food stir-frying task, first from right to left and then from left to right and from front to back, three times in total’. Then put the wok down. Repeat this cycle eight times.

The loudspeaker says: ‘Please empty soybeans into the container on the left!’

‌The ‘experimental layout’, as viewed from above

Wu is an old hand at creating such tests. In 1995 he and a colleague published a study called ‘Effects of the Handle Diameter and Tip Angle of Chopsticks on the Food-serving Performance of Male Subjects’. He and a different colleague had earlier published a treatise called ‘An Investigation for Determining the Optimum Length Of Chopsticks’.

Those two studies left some gaps in our knowledge of chopstick optimization. A researcher named Tam Chan filled those gaps in 1999 with a paper called ‘A Study for Determining the Optimum Diameter of Chopsticks’.

Wu, Swei-Pi, Cheng-Pin Ho and Chin-Li Yen (2011). ‘The Effect of Wok Size and Handle Angle on the Maximum Acceptable Weights of Wok Flipping by Male Cooks’. Industrial Health 49 (October): 755–64.

Wu, Swei-Pi (1995). ‘Effects of the Handle Diameter and Tip Angle of Chopsticks on the Food-serving Performance of Male Subjects’. Applied Ergonomics 26 (6): 379–85.

— Chan, Tam (1999). ‘An Investigation for Determining the Optimum Length of Chopsticks’. International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics 23 (1/2): 101–5.

May we recommend

‘Collective Motion of Humans in Mosh and Circle Pits at Heavy Metal Concerts’

by Jesse L. Silverberg, Matthew Bierbaum, James P. Sethna and Itai Cohen (published in Physical Review Letters, 2013)

Cold advice: put a sock on it

Socks over shoes surpass shoes over socks for strolling on slippery city slopes, says a study done in New Zealand. In other words – in the words of the study itself – ‘wearing socks over shoes appears to be an effective and inexpensive method to reduce the likelihood of slipping on icy footpaths’.

Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams and Patricia Priest conducted an experiment to test the wisdom of a local winter tradition. The trio, based at the University of Otago in Dunedin, published a report in the New Zealand Medical Journal. They explain: ‘There are anecdotal reports that pedestrians who wear socks over top of their footwear are less likely to slip and fall in icy conditions. Advocates of this practice include our local council (in Dunedin) which advises residents who prefer to walk (rather than drive) in icy conditions to “put a pair of old socks over your shoes to increase grip” ’.

Their city has some famously hilly sections that grow treacherous come wintertime: ‘Damp weather followed by freezing conditions can transform a quick journey to work into a lengthy and perilous expedition.’ They ‘initially considered recruiting volunteers to walk down a short suburban street (Baldwin Street) which, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is the steepest street in the world’. But legal and other considerations led them instead to send people down two other streets, with merely San Francisco-grade inclinations.

Parkin, Williams and Priest found it simple to recruit volunteers: ‘To be eligible for inclusion in the trial, passing pedestrians simply needed to be travelling in a downhill direction. It was decided a priori that persons already wearing socks over their shoes would not be eligible.’

The research team documented every fall, and wrote comments (such as ‘walked confidently’, ‘clung to fences or parked cars’, ‘crawled’) about the demeanour of each volunteer during their descent.

Not all experiments give clear results. This one did. ‘Wearing socks over footwear significantly reduced the self-reported slipperiness of icy footpaths and a higher proportion of sock-wearers displayed confidence in descending the study slopes. The only falls occurred in people who were not wearing (external) socks.’

‌Sock inside, on ice

But despite the safety advantage, wearing one’s socks over one’s shoes can create or exacerbate a problem. The problem is of a social nature.

In 1989, two researchers extracted gossip from a group of young (aged seven to eleven) American schoolchildren, asking each child to discuss the reputations of each of their classmates. The kids prattled on about behaviours that, to them, were warning signs of weirdness: ‘eats like a pig, bangs head on desk, sounds like a car, fidgety, acts like a monster, wears socks over shoes’.

The what-other-people-will-think problem cropped up in the Dunedin shoes-over-socks study. Parkin, Williams and Priest note that: ‘although participants in the intervention group were told that they could keep their socks, many (who appeared to have image issues) opted to return them to the outcome assessors – including one young man who promptly fell on leaving the assessment area.’

Parkin, Williams and Priest were awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in physics for their work.

Parkin, Lianne, Sheila M. Williams, and Patricia Priest (2009). ‘Preventing Winter Falls: A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Novel Intervention’. New Zealand Medical Journal 122 (1298): 31–8.

Rogosch, Fred A., and Andrew F. Newcomb (1989). ‘Children’s Perceptions of Peer Reputations and Their Social Reputations Among Peers’. Child Development 60 (3): 597–610.

May we recommend

‘A Bayesian Approach to Wiggle-Matching’

by J.A. Christen and C.D. Litton (published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, 1995)

Shifty damage done

Archaeologists know that the ground they examine can be literally rather shifty. The reasons for this shiftiness can be disturbing, beastly and even childish.

For many an archaeologist, the greatest treasures are artifacts – ‘objects produced or shaped by human workmanship’, as the dictionary puts it. The exact location of an artifact can be as important as the thing itself. In a dirt heap, what is next to what – and especially, what is on top of or below what – can impart telling information.

Archaeologists have it tough, though, because things do move around underground. Sometimes this is due to the actions of burrowing animals. Over the years, archaeologists have cautioned each other to beware of ants, termites, earthworms, and, even more famously, rats and other rodents.

A 2003 report from South America points out that: ‘There is, however, one animal that despite its regional ubiquity and notable burrowing behavior has received little attention in the archaeological literature: the armadillo.’

Detail: Araujo and Marcelino’s research questions

Writing in the Geoarchaeology, Astolfo Gomes de Mello Araujo, of the Universidade de São Paulo, and his colleague José Carlos Marcelino go into considerable detail. Living in an age of specialization, they focus on one aspect of the armadillo question: ‘Although it seems clear that armadillos can move archaeological materials upward’, they write, ‘previous studies have not considered whether they also move artifacts downward.’

The scientists conducted an experiment with armadillos in an enclosed underground dirt heap at the São Paulo zoo. They stacked coloured, flaked stones and bits of ceramic into layers, then let the animals have their way.

The armadillos proved to be impressive object-movers. Araujo and Marcelino proudly report: ‘Some of our findings have never been reported in the literature, such as the fact that armadillos can translocate artifacts downward to great depths as well as expel them towards the surface.’

To a naïve non-archaeologist, such concerns may seem like child’s play. But for good archaeologists, child’s play is sometimes a serious problem.

Norman Hammond and the then infant Gawain Hammond illustrated this by doing an experiment. The older Hammond is a professor, now based at Boston University. The Hammonds’ report, ‘Child’s Play: A Distorting Factor in Archaeological Distribution’, appeared in 1981.

The elder Hammond created an artificial trash pile one metre in diameter. He stocked it with wine jars, liquor bottles and twelve mostly-empty beer cans. The younger Hammond was then permitted to play briefly in the pile. The report concludes: ‘The interpolation of “child-play” may profoundly modify the initial archaeological pattern, and transmit it into an arbitrary pattern with an unrelated structure. The causes of this change must be allowed for in investigations of artifact.’

For measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo, Araujo and Marcelino were awarded the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize in archaeology.

Araujo, Astolfo Gomes de Mello, and José Carlos Marcelino (2003). ‘The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach’. Geoarchaeology 18 (4): 433–60.

Hammond, Gawain, and Norman Hammond (1981). ‘Child’s Play: A Distorting Factor in Archaeological Distribution’. American Antiquity 46 (3): 634–6.

In brief

‘The Problem of the Locomotive-God’

by W.S. Taylor and E. Culler (published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1929)

Success at your finger tips

A 2011 Italian study points towards a handy way to identify who might become a top doctor. The method is simple: compare the lengths of a person’s second finger and fourth finger. The technique is disclosed in the monograph ‘The Second-To-Fourth Digit Ratio Correlates with the Rate of Academic Performance in Medical School Students’ and appears in the May-June issue of the journal Molecular Medicine Reports.

Researchers who spend time studying this finger ratio – the individuals who have found meaning by looking to both sides when someone shows them a middle finger – call it ‘2D:4D’. That’s shorthand for the phrase ‘second-to-fourth digit length ratio’. The big dog, the Einstein of the field, is Professor John Manning of the University of Liverpool, whose work has included how to spot footballing stars of the future by looking at finger length (for more on Manning and other high achievers in the field, see page 131).

The authors of the Italian study, mostly medical researchers from the University of Catania in Sicily, and Kore University in Enna, write: ‘2D:4D has been shown to predict the success of men who play sports and of financial traders.’ But, they claim, their paper is the first to reveal what 2D:4D says about high flyers in a highly competitive university system such as the state-run Italian medical schools.

After measuring the fingers of forty-eight male medical students using callipers accurate to 0.2 millimetres, they concluded that students with a slightly lower 2D:4D ratio of the right hand (although, confusingly, it is not quite clear whether this means the fingers are more similar or different in length) are more likely to be successful. The researchers noted in particular how those who passed their medical school admissions test had a significantly lower 2D:4D ratio of the right than those who failed. Interestingly, however, finger ratios could not predict how those students performed in their exams.

It’s possible that identifying future stars by examining their fingers is even better than choosing people at random (see page 293). But until and unless somebody does the research, no one can say for sure.

Coco, Marinella, Valentina Perciavalle, Tiziana Maci, Ferdinando Nicoletti, Donatella Di Corrado and Vincenzo Perciavalle (2011). ‘The Second-to-Fourth Ratio Correlates with the Rate of Academic Performance in Medical School Students’. Molecular Medicine Reports 4: 471–6.

Manning, John T., and Rogan P. Taylor (2001). ‘Second to Fourth Digit Ratio and Male Ability in Sport: Implications for Sexual Selection in Humans’. Evolution Human Behavior 22 (1): 61–69.

In brief

‘Pointing the Way: The Distribution and Evolution of Some Characters of the Finger Muscles of Frogs’

by Thomas C. Burton (published in American Museum Novitates, 1998)

The meaning of the finger

Most people who have done research on fingers have either measured them or tried to repair them.

Among them was V. Rae Phelps of the University of Texas and Tulane University in New Orleans. In 1952, Phelps compiled a capsule history of early finger findings, waxing nearly poetic about researchers’ many missteps and mistakes. In his influenced monograph ‘Relative Index Finger Length as a Sex-influenced Trait in Man’, published in the American Journal of Genetics, he reports: ‘Ecker (1875) noted that three manifestations of relative finger length may be discerned in the living model: index finger shorter than ring finger; index finger equal in length to ring finger; and index finger longer than ring finger. Many of the earlier workers failed to recognize this variability’.

He went on to name names. ‘Gerdy (1829) stated that the index finger is always shorter than the ring finger, while according to Carus (1853) and Humphry (1861), the index finger exceeds the ring finger in length’, he notes. ‘Langer (1865) declared that the index finger is shorter than or nearly equal to the ring finger. Alix (1867), Grining (1886), Baker (1888), Schultz (1926), and Wood-Jones (1920, 1941) point out that although the index finger is usually shorter than the ring finger, it may in certain circumstances exceed the length of the ring finger’.

Phelps concentrated mostly on the lengths of fingers and the failures of his predecessors, choosing not to speculate on what, if anything, fingers themselves might mean.

Thankfully, we are experiencing a golden age in finger investigations. Some pioneers began to wonder, ‘What do fingers mean?’ Modern finger researchers see profound implications in the relative-finger-length possibilities that Ecker (and Phelps) pointed out, most especially, 2D:4D ratios. Here is the big idea, in a nutshell:

1. The body’s many hormones are involved in many things during foetus-hood, childhood and adolescence. These many things happen at various times and in various ways.
2. Each hormone involved in these things has many different effects. Scientists have noticed some of these effects, and understand a few of them, at least a little bit.
3. Testosterone is one of the hormones that scientists have noticed.
4. Testosterone may somehow, at some time, affect how long fingers grow.
5. The relative lengths of a person’s fingers may say something about how much testosterone was in the body at some point earlier in their life.
6. The amount of testosterone in a person’s body at some point earlier in their life affects lots of other things.

This big idea is often credited to Professor John T. Manning. Thus his status as the large canine, the genius of the field. But fingers are hot in the research world, and Manning is not alone in eyeing them.

Emma Nelson, a researcher and visiting lecturer at the University of Chester who sometimes works with Professor Manning, has her own series of finger-related studies. One examines the 2D:4D ratio of hand outlines stencilled on cave walls. Nelson hopes that 2D:4D will show whether the hands belonged to ancient cave men or to cave women. Another study uses finger-length ratio to better understand the topic ‘testes size and dominance in a Group of Captive Chimpanzees’.

Martin Voracek of the University of Vienna (featured on page 299) takes a manifold interest in fingers. Sometimes, he collaborates with Professor Manning, but he also does research independently.

Drs Voracek and Manning recently reported that, by measuring a man’s 2D:4D, they could predict, to some degree, how many sexual partners the man would have. But, they say, this works for heterosexual men, not for homosexuals. So far, they express confidence only that it applies to Austrian men.

Voracek and Manning also published a report on the perhaps inevitable question of whether the finger length ratio is related to the length of the penis. Yes, they say, it is.

Teaming with other colleagues, Voracek also published a study about how 2D:4D relates to the performance of skilled fencers. (Manning turned his own attention to 2D:4D and surfers.)

S. Marc Breedlove, a professor of neuroscience at Michigan State University, has become a giant of finger research. In 2000, his study called ‘Finger-Length Ratios and Sexual Orientation’ appeared in the journal Nature. It features a handy graph. The reader can see that, on average, gay and straight women have distinctly different finger ratios – and that gay and straight men each have their own distinctly differing ratios. These distinctions, curiously, are true of the right hand or of the left, but not of both.

Breedlove made a more specific discovery two years later. He and several colleagues published a study called ‘Differences in Finger Length Ratios Between Self-identified “Butch” and “Femme” Lesbians’. Their findings are summed up in this sentence: ‘We surveyed individuals from a gay pride street fair and found that lesbians who identified themselves as “butch” had a significantly smaller 2D:4D than did those who identified themselves as “femme”.’

‌One proposed meaning of the finger

There are also finger financialists. Professor Siegfried Dewitte is an applied economist at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Bram van den Bergh trained under Dewitte. Their work, compared to some of their competitors, is less abstruse. For instance, in ‘Second to Fourth Digit Ratio and Cooperative Behavior’, published in Biological Psychology in 2006, they ‘predicted that a low 2D:4D would be associated with high levels of egoism and altruism and low levels of common cooperativeness (i.e. contributing exactly one’s fair share).’ However, they ‘found the exact opposite’.

There are hundreds of other finger celebrities. Dr Mark Brosnan, a psychology researcher at the University of Bath, may be the most notorious. Brosnan studied the fingers of one hundred of his colleagues at the university. He reports that the digit ratio is significantly different for science teachers than for those who teach humanities or social science. No one has tried to dispute this finding.

Phelps, V. Rae (1952). ‘Relative Index Finger Length as a Sex-influenced Trait in Man’. American Journal of Human Genetics 4 (2): 72–89.

Bennett, M., John T. Manning, Christian J. Cook and Liam P. Kilduff (2010). ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) and Performance in Elite Rugby Players’. Journal of Sports Sciences 28 (13): 1415–21.

Manning, John T. (2008). The Finger Book. London: Faber and Faber.

Nelson, Emma, John T. Manning and Anthony G.M. Sinclair (2006). ‘Using the 2nd and 4th Digit Ratio (2D:4D) to Sex Cave Art Hand Stencils: Factors to Consider’. Before Farming 1: n.p.

Nelson, Emma, Christy L. Hoffman, Melissa S. Gerald and Susanne Shultz (2010). ‘Finger Length Ratios (2D:4D) and Dominance Rank in Female Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta)’. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 64: 1001–9.

Nelson, Emma, Campbell Rolian, Lisa Cashmore and Susanne Shultz (2011). ‘Digit Ratios Predict Polygyny in Early Apes, Ardipithecus, Neanderthals and early Modern Humans But Not in Australopithecus’. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 278: 1556–63.

Voracek, Martin, John T. Manning and Ivo Ponocny (2005). ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) in Homosexual and Heterosexual Men from Austria’. Archives of Sexual Behavior 34 (3): 335–40.

Voracek, Martin, and John T. Manning (2003). ‘Length of Fingers and Penis Are Related through Fetal Hox Gene Experession’. Urology 62 (1): 201.

Voracek, Martin, Barbara Reimer, Clara Ertl and Stefan G. Dressler (2006). ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D), Lateral Preferences, and Performance in Fencing’. Perception and Motor Skills 103 (2): 427–46.

Voracek, Martin, Barbara Reimer and Stefan G. Dressler (2010). ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) Predicts Sporting Success among Female Fencers Independent from Physical, Experience, and Personality Factors’. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports 20 (6): 853–60.

Kilduff, Liam P., Christian J. Cook and John T. Manning (2011). ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) and Performance in Male Surfers’. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 25 (11): 3175–80.

Williams, Terrance J., Michelle E. Pepitone, Scott E. Christensen, Bradley M. Cooke, Andrew D. Huberman, Nicholas J. Breedlove, Tessa J. Breedlove, Cynthia L. Jordan and S. Marc Breedlove (2000). ‘Finger-length Ratios and Sexual Orientation’. Nature 404 (30 March): 455–6.

Brown, Windy M., Christopher J. Finn, Bradley M. Cooke, and S. Marc Breedlove (2002). ‘Differences in Finger Length Ratios Between Self-identified “Butch” and “Femme” Lesbians’. Archives of Sexual Behavior 31 (1): 123–7.

Brosnan, Mark J. (2006). ‘Digit Radio and Faculty Membership: Implications for the Relationship between Prenatal Testosterone and Academia’. British Journal of Psychology 97: 455–66.

— (2008). ‘Digit Ratio as an Indicator of Numeracy Relative to Literacy in 7-year-old British Schoolchildren’. British Journal of Psychology 99: 75–85.

—, V. Galllop, N. Iftikhar and E. Keogh (2011). ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D), Academic Performance in Computer Science and Computer-related Anxiety’. Personality and Individual Differences 51 (4): 371–5.

Voracek, Martin, John T. Manning and Stefan G. Dressler (2007). ‘Repeatability and Interobserver Error of Digit Ratio (2D:4D) Measurements Made by Experts’. American Journal of Human Biology 19 (1): 142–6.

Millet, Kobe and Siegfried Dewitte (2006). ‘Second to Fourth Digit Ratio and Cooperative Behavior’. Biological Psychology 71 (1): 111–15.

What am I missing?

Fuelled with curiosity, some scientists exploit – lovingly, proudly – the investigative trick featured in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 story ‘Silver Blaze’. There, a baffled police inspector seeks help from the great autodicact/detective Sherlock Holmes:

• [INSPECTOR GREGORY:] ‘Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’
• [HOLMES:] ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’
• [INSPECTOR GREGORY:] ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’
• ‘That was the curious incident’, remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Science journals feature many papers in which scientists rely on this technique, riding it to, or at least in the direction of, glory. You can see that happening in a report called ‘The Mystery of the Missing Toes: Extreme Levels of Natural Mutilation in Island Lizard Populations’, published in 2009 in the journal Functional Ecology.

The co-authors – Bart Vervust, Stefan Van Dongen and Raoul Van Damme at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and Irena Grbac at the Natural History Museum of Croatia – ‘report on an exceptionally large difference in toe-loss incidence between two populations of Podarcis sicula lizards living on small, neighbouring islands in the Adriatic Sea. We caught 900 lizards and recorded the number and location of missing toes.’ Having gathered that data, the scientists then walked through the logic of ‘five non-mutually exclusive hypotheses concerning differences in bite-force capacity, bone strength …’ and so forth.

Unlike the fictional British detective, this very real Belgian/Croatian research team failed to discover a tidy, satisfying solution to their mystery. Nonetheless, they found reason for cheer, explaining that ‘such tests can reveal how likely each of these explanations is, even if the processes leading to the phenomenon are difficult to observe directly.’

‌Figure: ‘Device for measuring bite force needed for breaking a toe’ from ‘The Mystery of the Missing Toes’

The method sometimes flops. That’s evident in a different study about lizards, published by the Chilean/US team of Fabian Jaksic and Stephen Busack in 1984 in the journal Amphibia-Reptilia. Jaksic and Busack sum things up in their title: ‘Apparent Inadequacy of Tail-loss Figures as Estimates of Predation upon Lizards’.

Some scientists spurn or ignore the method, or find that it does not apply to their particular investigation, however. In 1994, G.J. Adams and K.G. Johnson at Murdoch University in Australia published a study with what appears to be a blatantly, proudly Sherlock Holmesian title. Adams and Johnson called their report ‘Behavioural Responses to Barking and Other Auditory Stimuli during Night-time Sleeping and Waking in the Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris)’. Curiously, Adams and Johnson neither use nor allude to the Sherlock Holmes trick.

They explain that they filmed twelve dogs ‘at night in their usual urban habitats, whilst alert, in quiet sleep and in active sleep’. They subjected each dog to six different audio recordings: ‘a single bark; repeated barking; breaking glass; a motorcycle; a bus; and ‘rowdy young people discussing burglurizing [sic]’. They discovered, they say, that ‘dogs were found to be significantly more responsive to auditory stimuli when alert than when asleep.’

Vervust, Bart, Stefan Van Dongen, Irena Grbac, and Raoul Van Damme (2009). ‘The Mystery of the Missing Toes: Extreme Levels of Natural Mutilation in Island Lizard Populations’. Functional Ecology 23 (5): 996–1003.

Jaksic, Fabian M., and Stephen D. Busack (1984). ‘Apparent Inadequacy of Tail-loss Figures as Estimates of Predation upon Lizards’. Amphibia-Reptilia 5: 177–9.

Adams, G.J., and K.G. Johnson (1994). ‘Behavioural Responses to Barking and Other Auditory Stimuli during Night-time Sleeping and Waking in the Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris)’. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 39 (2): 151–62.

Research spotlight

‘Relationships of Toe-length Ratios to Finger-length Ratios, Foot Preference, and Wearing of Toe Rings’

by Martin Voracek and Stefan G. Dressler (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2010)

On peg-leg coyotes

‘Running Speeds of Crippled Coyotes’ introduced itself in 1976, in a journal called Northwest Science. You’ll find few scientific studies that tell their story so clearly and efficiently. Bruce C. Thompson, of the department of fisheries and wildlife at Oregon State University, wrote everything he had to say in a plain two pages.

It contains little jargon or lingo, and no clever metaphors. When the study speaks of crippled coyotes, it means exactly that: coyotes that are crippled.

Thompson begins with some history, just enough so you learn that other people, in earlier days, spent time thinking about how fast coyotes run. He alludes to decades-old studies, by scientists named Cottam, Sooter and Zimmerman, that ‘reported running speeds of presumably uninjured coyotes being chased by cars’.

Thompson brought something new to the table (so to speak): ‘On 21, 22, and 23 October 1974, I recorded running speeds of three wild-trapped coyotes that had lost the use of one foot due to damage from a steel trap.’

How exactly did Thompson accomplish this? He tells you in just a few sentences: ‘During the tests, the coyotes were released from their cages singly and allowed to run along the perimeter fence of the enclosure. Each day the coyotes were timed with a stop-watch as they ran three measured courses along the perimeter fence. As a coyote approached the starting point of each course, I chased the animal on foot at a distance of 45 meters to 70 meters.’

Thompson also measured the running speed of a coyote that had all its original equipment. On its best run, that animal had a speed of just under thirty-two miles per hour. One of the crippled animals matched that almost exactly, despite lacking a right foot. The other three-footed coyotes attained best speeds of 22.5 miles per hour and 25.4 miles per hour, respectively. (The full-bodied coyotes chased by four-wheeled cars decades earlier, by the way, ran much faster than the one chased in the 1970s by the two-legged Bruce Thompson.)

Thompson also paid attention to style. ‘Although the crippled coyotes occasionally contacted the ground with their damaged appendage’, he wrote, ‘they typically adjusted their stride to prevent contact with the ground. The adjusted stride resulted in a noticeable bouncing movement when the crippled coyotes ran.’

Bruce Thompson’s monograph refers, glancingly, to a 1939 study called ‘Food Habits of Peg-leg Coyotes’, by Charles C. Sperry of the US Biological Survey’s Food Habits Laboratory in Colorado. Sperry, too, knew how to tell a tale. Who could resist this beginning? ‘During the past two years, 164 peg-leg coyote stomachs that contained food remains were obtained and their contents examined in the Denver laboratory.’

I will skip over Sperry’s other good parts, and get right to his thrilling conclusion: ‘It will be noted that two peg-leg coyotes eat as much livestock as three normal coyotes.

Thompson, Bruce C. (1976). ‘Running Speeds of Crippled Coyotes’. Northwest Science 50 (3): 181–2.

Cottam, Clarence (1945). ‘Speed and Endurance of the Coyote’. Journal of Mammalogy 26 (1): 94.

—, and C.S. Williams (1943). ‘Speed of Some Wild Mammals’. Journal of Mammalogy 24 (2): 262–3.

Sooter, C.A. (1943). ‘Speed of Predator and Prey’. Journal of Mammalogy 24 (1): 102–3.

Zimmerman, R.S. (1943). ‘A Coyote’s Speed and Endurance’. Journal of Mammalogy 24 (3): 400.

Sperry, Charles C. (1939). ‘Food Habits of Peg-leg Coyotes’. Journal of Mammalogy 20 (2): 190–4.

Young, S.P., and H.H.T. Jackson (1951). The Clever Coyote. Harrisburg, PA, and Washington, DC: Stackpole Co. and Wildlife Management Institute.

An improbable innovation

‘Animal Track Footwear Soles’

a/k/a shoes for laying stimulated animal tracks ‘for either educational purposes or mere amusement’, by Philip E. McMorrow (US patent no. 3,402,485, granted 1968)

‌The patented animal track footwear soles, compared to Kodiak bear cub tracks

Pumpkin harvest

The knifing of pumpkins, an innocent-seeming yet carefully planned act of mutilation, sometimes results (accidentally or otherwise) in sprays, bits and smatterings of human, as well as vegetable, gore. In such cases, blood – human blood – flows, drips and coagulates.

A hands-on experiment, or rather an experiment on hands, in 2004, tried to determine the level of medical danger an amateur can and should expect when using a pumpkin-carving tool.

Alexander M. Marcus, Jason K. Green and Frederick W. Werner at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse published a study, called ‘The Safety of Pumpkin-Carving Tools’, in the journal Preventive Medicine. ‘Pumpkin-carving accidents’, they inform their peers who read the report, ‘may leave people with compromised hand function’.

There are several kinds of lacerations and puncture wounds that can lead to this hand-compromisation. Lacerations occur ‘when the knife blade travels across the surface of the hand’ or ‘when the knife is accidentally pushed too far forward and cuts the opposite hand stabilising the pumpkin’, or ‘when the cutting hand slips forward off the handle and on to the blade’, in which case ‘injury occurs across zone 2 of the volar surface [the palm] of the hand, while the flexor tendons are taut from gripping the knife’.

Marcus, Green and Werner take pains to educate those among their fellow physicians who may lack experience in recognizing and treating puncture wounds. ‘Puncture wounds’, they write, ‘occur when the point of the knife contacts the hand while traveling perpendicular to it.’

Their experiments compared two commercially offered pumpkin-cutting knives (the Pumpkin Kutter versus the Pumpkin Masters’ Medium Saw) and two ordinary kitchen knives, one serrated, one plain-edged.

They measured how much force was required to make a cut.

The first experiment used a machine to plunge each knife into a pumpkin, an actuator driving the weapon downward at a rate of three millimetres per second, each knife being inserted at four different penetration sites on each of three pumpkins, testing with the blade being oriented along the grooves of the pumpkin, and separately with it perpendicular to those grooves. One of the doctors also tested what happened when he, not a machine, attacked the pumpkins with a sawing motion. The pumpkin knives required ‘statistically’ less force than the kitchen knives to cut pumpkins.

In keeping with the festive theme of the activity, the physicians used ‘a cadaver model’ in their second experiment. They obtained ‘six cadaver forearms … harvested at the elbow’. The report includes photographs showing how this played out.

The results: First, it took less force to cut a person than a pumpkin. Second, the kitchen knives required statistically less force to penetrate cadaver skin, and ‘caused more skin lacerations that would require suturing than either pumpkin knife’.

‌‘Experimental setup to cause tendon laceration in cadaver hands’

Marcus, Alexander M., Jason K. Green and Frederick W. Werner (2004). ‘The Safety of Pumpkin Carving Tools’. Preventive Medicine 28 (6): 799–803.

In brief

‘Panti-Girdle Syndrome’

by T.K. Davidson (published in the British Medical Journal, 1972)

‘The Tight-Girdle Syndrome’

by P.D. White (published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 1973)

‘Panty Hose-Pants Disease’

by M. Turner (published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1991)

‘Tight Pants Syndrome: A New Title for an Old Problem and Often Encountered Medical Problem’

by Octavio Bessa Jr (published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 1993)

Cutting-edge engineering

Through the clever use of cheese in 2004, researchers at the University of Reading claimed to have solved one of life’s great little mysteries. ‘Why is it relatively difficult, even with a sharp knife, to cut when simply “pressing down”, but much easier to cut as soon as some sideways sawing or slicing action is introduced?’

The scientists, A.G. (‘Tony’) Atkins, George Jeronimidis and X. Xu, published a monograph called ‘Cutting, by “Pressing and Slicing” of Thin Floppy Slices of Materials Illustrated by Experiments on Cheddar Cheese and Salami’. It was the highlight of that April’s issue of the Journal of Materials Science.

The team experimented on a piece of cheese that they identified only as ‘commercial Cheddar cheese’.

They were equally cagey about the nature of the meat. The report employs the phrase ‘a commercial pepper salami’. Some salami experts understand that those four words, when huddled together, cover a multitude of possibilities: delicious or not, cheering or horrifying, mushy, stiff or adamantine. They and we learn nothing about this particular salami, save that thin slices of it become ‘floppy’. But that’s all right, because floppiness is the key thing here.

Atkins, Jeronimidis and Xu write in fairly stiff, technical language. But they loosen up a bit when talking about floppiness. Then they use language suitable to the casual reader who might, say, peruse an issue of the Journal of Materials Science while lounging in a dentist’s waiting room: ‘Further examples of the sort of globally-elastic cutting considered in this paper’, say the scientists, ‘are to be found in the slicing of meat by the butcher … lawnmowing, hair cutting, the cutting of fabrics by the dressmaker, surgery and so on. These cases are characterised by the offcuts [the individual slices] being elastically very floppy (ie, have negligible bending resistance and are not permanently deformed).’

Cutting into non-floppy material can be a different game. Atkins, Jeronimidis and Xu explicitly leave that for others to investigate.

They chose cheese, they say, because ‘the cutting of cheese is notoriously affected by friction (hence the use of wire to cut cheese)’. They do not explain why they selected salami.

The team did their cutting not with a wire, but with a delicatessen-style ‘bacon’ slicer. Its whirling blade can, depending on the substance and on the angle of the cut, fall prey to varying amounts of friction. To keep things from getting too, too floppy, they chilled the cheese before slicing it, and ditto the salami.

They quantified, in unprecedentedly technical detail, what good butchers, lawnmowers, hair cutters, dressmakers and surgeons have always intuited. The faster the whirl of the blade (or the horizontal drawing of the knife), the less force is needed to drive the blade down, down, down into the material. But, because of friction – the rubbing of blade against substance – there’s a limit to how easy that downward slicing can get. Cutting-edge stuff.

Atkins, A.G. (‘Tony’), X. Xu and George Jeronimidis (2004). ‘Cutting, by “Pressing and Slicing” of Thin Floppy Slices of Materials Illustrated by Experiments on Cheddar Cheese and Salami’. Journal of Materials Science 39 (8): 2761–6.

In brief

‘ “Your Feet’s Too Big”: An Inquiry into Psychological and Symbolic Meanings of the Foot’

by K.J. Zerbe (published in Psychoanalytic Review, 1985)

The secret wealth in a cockroach leg

Biscuits, rubbish and bugs in Texas raise hopes that Britain will grow a lucrative new technology-based empire soon, rather than just eventually. This is all about getting usable amounts of graphene – the two-dimensional form of carbon. An American experiment, so goofy-sounding that it has drawn little attention, points towards a cheap way of obtaining what is now a scarily expensive substance.

Scientists had long known that graphene exists, and that it is common. The grey stuff in pencils is made of multitudinous layers of graphene, sticking to each other. When you scribble, a gob of layers slides away, clinging thereafter to your sheet of paper. A few years ago, physicists Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, at the University of Manchester, used cleverness, a pencil and sticky tape to separate out some single layers of graphene. They obtained only tiny amounts – but that was staggeringly more than anyone else had managed.

For doing that, and for then using their graphene to discover a multitude of physical properties and likely industrial uses, Geim and Novoselov were given a Nobel Prize in 2010, and knighthoods in the 2012 New Year Honours. Later that year the British government announced it would spend £38 million to establish a Geim/Novoselov-centric National Graphene Institute at Manchester University, aimed at ‘taking this research through to commercial success’.

But there is a big problem. Even tiny amounts of graphene still cost far more than industry can dream of affording.

Enter the North Americans.

In 2011, just three years after some Mexican scientists converted tequila into diamonds – which are just an expensive form of carbon – chemists in Texas quietly mucked around with some cookies, cockroaches and disgusting biological waste products. The Texans produced graphene, a form of carbon dearer – much dearer – than diamonds.

The tequila-into-diamonds physicists, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, published their story in a monograph called ‘Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila’. Co-author Javier Morales said they later made diamonds using the cheapest tequila on the market, to demonstrate their technique’s power.

That same spirit is evident in the Texas experiment, performed by James M. Tour, Gedeng Ruan, Zhengzong Sun and Zhiwei Peng at Rice University in Houston, and documented in a study called ‘Growth of Graphene from Food, Insects, and Waste’.

Others, elsewhere, had devised ways to grow graphene. Those other methods begin with costly, highly purified carbon-containing chemical feedstocks. Tour and his Rice colleagues write that ‘much less expensive carbon sources, such as food, insects and waste, can be used without purification to grow high-quality monolayer graphene’.

They explain how they produced graphene from (at different times) Girl Scout cookies, chocolate, grass, a plastic dish, a cockroach leg and faeces from a dachshund. Their tools: copper foil, argon gas and a 1050-degree Celsius tube furnace.

‌Analysing graphene derived from a Girl Scout cookie, chocolate, dog faeces and a cockroach

By their estimate, one box of Girl Scout cookies could theoretically, at then-current prices, be converted to about $15 billion worth of graphene.

Morales, Apátiga and Casataño were awarded the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry for creating their tequila-derived diamonds.

Novoselov, Kostya, S., Andre K. Geim, Sergey V. Morozov, Da Jiang, Yuanbo Zhang, Sergey V. Dubonos, Irina V. Grigorieva and Anatoly A. Firsov (2004). ‘Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films’. Science 306 (5696): 666–9.

Novoselov, Kostya, S., Da Jiang, Frederick Schedin, Tim J. Booth, V.V., Khotkevich, Sergey V. Morozov and Andre K. Geim (2005). ‘Two-dimensional Atomic Crystals’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 102 (30): 10451–3.

Morales, Javier, Miguel Apátiga and Victor M. Casataño (2009). ‘Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila’. Reviews on Advanced Materials Science 22 (1): 134–8.

Ruan, Gedeng, Zhengzong Sun, Zhiwei Peng and James M. Tour (2011). ‘Growth of Graphene from Food, Insects, and Waste’. ACS Nano 5 (9): 7601–7.

In brief

‘Testing the Validity of the Danish Urban Myth that Alcohol Can Be Absorbed Through Feet: Open Labelled Self Experimental Study’

by Christian Stevns Hansen, Louise Holmsgaard Faerch and Peter Lommer Kristensen (published in the British Medical Journal, 2010)

The authors, at Hillerod Hospital, Hillerod, Denmark, explain: ‘Objective: To determine the validity of the Danish urban myth that it is possible to get drunk by submerging feet in alcohol. Participants: Three adults, median age 32 (range 31-35) … Conclusion: Our results suggest that feet are impenetrable to the alcohol component of vodka.’