jack ryan πŸ™ Profile picture
Sep 18, 2020 β€’ 13 tweets β€’ 4 min read β€’ Read on X
So, the IgNobel prizes were announced today. One of the winners?

Knives manufactured from frozen human πŸ’© "do not work"

Let's talk about frozen shit knives.
The impetus for this study comes from an account of an Inuit man who refused to move from his settlement, deciding to stay on the ice. His family took all his tools away to compel him to leave. But he didn't.
According to the account, the Inuit man went outside, dropped his pants and defecated on the ice.

The research introduction says "he honed the feces into a frozen blade which he sharpened with a spray of saliva."
He also apparently killed a dog with this knife. A little bit much, but if you're alone on the ice, I get it.

Tools made from poo are, apparently, not unprecedented in the record. But there is no evidence this story is true...

...so the scientists performed an experiment.
One of the researchers went on "a diet with high protein and fatty acids consistent with the arctic diet, for 8 days" to... and the paper says this

PRODUCE THE NECESSARY RAW MATERIALS FOR KNIFE PRODUCTION. πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚
They collected poop from day 4 onwards and did so for 5 days, before shaping them in knife molds. Here is an image of the knife mold from the paper: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
They also made some with their own hands.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a Shit Knife.
To test the blades they got some pig muscle and tendons and started taking to them with the knife. Neither the molds or the hand-shaped knives were able to cut through the muscle :(

But was that enough for these absolute legends? NO.
"We repeated the experiment using the fecal samples of another team member"

They did it again. With someone else's poo. These poo knives also did not cut through the pig hide.
And, just... end me now because this is from the conclusion.

"future experiments may introduce the prospect of different diets [but] it is unlikely that this would have a significant impact."

πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚

Bravo.
The full paper is here, from researchers at @KentState and @goCMNH.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

and definitely grab the supplementary data for wonderful images like this.
I will note, the team seemingly did not produce the knife in the same way the Inuit man reportedly did -- by using saliva -- but this is still a comprehensive study of shit knives and deserving #IgNobel winner.

Thank you for listening.
The Shit Knife story wrap is here: cnet.com/news/no-knives…

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More from @dctrjack

Apr 9, 2021
Now that we've monkeyed around... Let's go over this @IGN tweet, as a good example of how nonsense spreads. Curtain pulled back stuff πŸͺ„

On Saturday, co-founder/pres of @neuralink, @max_hodak tweeted the exact words IGN quote in this tweet. He started his sentence with "we"...
Hodak is the president of Neuralink so, some assume "we" is referring to his business, I guess. But the job isn't to just rehash some dude's tweet -- it's to actually ask the Q.

The story popped up in a few places early, like Futurism.
futurism.com/the-byte/neura…
Futurism's article is from Tuesday and it's short/sweet. Doesn't have anything to do with Neuralink's tech.

But on Wednesday, the New York Post wrote about this story, as did other tabloids like The Sun. They just went and assumed Hodak was talking about the company though??
Read 11 tweets
Feb 22, 2021
Dominic Dwyer, an Australian researcher on the WHO's coronavirus origins team, published a short piece in the Conversation today. Not much we can glean from it but a couple of interesting points!

theconversation.com/i-was-the-aust…
Dwyer categorically rules out Huanan Seafood Market as a starting location and says "we need to look elsewhere for the viral origins."

Another passage suggests genetic evidence generated *during* the mission suggests a transmission cluster. New genomic data?
This passage, in particular, will not ease the calls for independent investigation into a potential lab leak. "we spoke to" and "we heard that" isn't going to convince many.
Read 6 tweets

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