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Maybe this year’s Ig Nobels, the spoof prizes for dubious but humorous scientific achievement, should have been renamed the Ick Nobels.
An anthropologist who tested an urban legend by fashioning a knife out of frozen human feces, and a man who found that spiders oddly give scientists who study insects the heebie-jeebies, are among the 2020 winners.
Metin Eren has been fascinated since high school by the story of an Inuit man in Canada who made a knife out of his own excrement. The story has been told and retold, but is it true?
Eren and his colleagues decided to find out.
Eren, an assstant professor of anthropology at Kent State University in Ohio and co-director of the university’s Experimental Archaeology Lab, used real human feces frozen to minus-50 degrees Centigrade and filed to a sharp edge.
He then tried to cut meat with it.
“The poop knives failed miserably,” he said in a telephone interview. “There’s not a lot of basis empirically for this fantastic story.”
The study is a little gross but makes an important point: There are a lot of narratives out there based on phony or unproven science.
“The point of this was to show that evidence and fact checking are vital,” he said.
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Bring it on!