RecSciPod S01E05 full transcript
Timestamps:
- 0:00 Intro
- 0:45 Tirth takes another science trivia quiz
- 13:39 Meat eating study
- 22:52 Beard microbiology study
- 32:11 What did you learn today, outro
Intro
Lu: Sorry, what did you say last time? Say it again.
Tirth: I said truth, nothing but the truth.
Lu: Welcome everyone to another episode of Recreational Science. The podcast where we explore creativity in science by examining some of the funniest, wackiest, and most provocative studies ever done. I’m Lu.
Tirth: And I’m Tirth.
Lu: Listeners, uh, come with us and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination. You like that? You like it?
Tirth: Wow, you switched it up. No boundless, no boundless, no journeys. Wow.
Lu: What I said though, that was pretty inspired, right? It just came to me. I can almost hear it in a song. Beautiful.
Tirth: It was. Yes. You’re keeping me on my toes.
Redemption quiz
Lu: Tirth, have you recovered?
Tirth: Recovered from what?
Lu: Uh from the embarrassment you suffered last week.
Tirth: There’s no embarrassment. What are you talking about?
Lu: You embarrassed yourself on our science quiz last week. And by proxy, you embarrassed me, which I do not forgive you for.
Tirth: I did not. I did no such thing. Let’s be very clear. It was a resounding success. It was a resounding success.
Lu: You embarrassed me, Tirth, by proxy.
Tirth: I did not.
Lu: You failed miserably. It was hard to listen to. It was very hard to listen to.
Tirth: And yet, and yet, our popularity is at an all-time high.
Lu: It was hard for me to listen to because again, the embarrassment I suffered by proxy.
Tirth: Oh, I see. Okay. Can I get a redo?
Lu: Yeah, so I was going to say, actually, I want to give you a chance to redeem yourself, okay? Because again, I think you’re a smart scientist. I think you’re a good scientist. You have expertise in many different fields of science. I want to make sure that you don’t embarrass yourself again and by proxy, me. So I want to give you a second quiz. Okay?
Tirth: Oh, thank you very much. Listen, listen, that’s the thing I want to do the most is to please you, okay? Nothing would please me more than pleasing you.
Lu: Thank you. I appreciate that. Okay, so I’ve assembled another science quiz. This time I got the questions from, again, legitimate scientific sources: The National Academy of Sciences, the NIH, um Reader’s digest. And this time, to help you out – again, because I don’t want you to embarrass yourself or me by proxy – I’m going to help you out.
Tirth: Wow, okay. So it’s like a phone a friend.
Lu: Exactly. I’m going to give you two lifelines. Actually, they’re the same. Free passes. They’re free passes. You’re going to get two free passes. Anytime before like I tell you you got the answer wrong, you can choose to skip a question by using one of your free passes.
Tirth: Uh-huh. Okay. And I only get two for the whole round?
Lu: For the entire round, you only get two. So use them wisely, okay? You might want to save them up for like the harder questions at the end, for instance.
Tirth: Okay, I will. Got it. Just like Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
Lu: Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right, you ready, Tirth?
Tirth: All right, I’m ready. Let’s go.
Lu: Question number one: Name all the elements on the periodic table from highest atomic number to lowest.
Tirth: Do I get partial credit?
Lu: No.
Tirth: Okay, pass.
Lu: Pass? Already, on the first question, you’re using one of your two passes.
Tirth: Yes. I can’t name all…
Lu: Okay, all right. You’re going to – you’re burning through your passes, man. You only got one left, all right?
Tirth: Hey, I don’t want to disappoint you.
Lu: Question number two: name all the prime numbers between 1 million and 1 billion.
Tirth: Hey, what happened to phone a friend or podcast a friend lifeline? That’s not part of this?
Lu: No, no, no, just the free passes. Of which you only have one left.
Tirth: I guess I’m going to blow my free passes. I’m going to pass.
Lu: Wow. Wow, really? Okay, you’re going to use up your second free pass already. Tirth, man. Tirth, I don’t know what to tell you. Looks like you’re gonna raw dog the rest of this quiz, huh?
Tirth: Hey, you can tell me it gets easier.
Lu: We’ll see, we’ll see. Question number three: name all planets in our solar system in order of distance to the sun.
Tirth: Easy, easy. Let’s go. Well, distance as in like shortest to longest?
Lu: Yeah.
Tirth: Okay, Mercury.
Lu: Mhm.
Tirth: Venus.
Lu: Mhm.
Tirth: Earth.
Lu: Good.
Tirth: Mars.
Lu: Uh-huh.
Tirth: Um, Jupiter.
Lu: Very good.
Tirth: Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. Pluto doesn’t count anymore. I almost flubbed it.
Lu: Very good. I might have to take a point off for mentioning Pluto.
Tirth: Just for the sake of completeness. When you and I were in school, Pluto was a planet.
Lu: Okay, all right, you got the point.
Tirth: Hey, hey, you want to hear the mnemonic though? When I was in school, the mnemonic I was taught was “my very educated mother just showed us nine planets”.
Lu: Wow. You still remember that. That’s very impressive.
Tirth: Yeah. The power of mnemonics.
Lu: Question number four: what country has the most tornadoes?
Tirth: I’m just going to take a guess. The United States.
Lu: Mhm. That’s correct.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: Next question: What animal did Australia go to war with in 1932?
Tirth: That’s just easy. Emu.
Lu: Nice. And they lost.
Tirth: Yeah. They lost. Yes. Wikipedia even has an infobox as if it’s a real war with casualties and everything listed on it.
Lu: Horribly. Zero emus died and I think 20 soldiers got injured. Ah, terrible.
Tirth: Yeah. No. They gave up.
Lu: Next question: how many bones do sharks have?
Tirth: 538.
Lu: Zero. They don’t have bones.
Tirth: What? Because they’re non-cartilaginous or whatever, right?
Lu: They’re non-bony fish or whatever. I don’t know what sharks are, but they have no bones.
Tirth: Jesus. Oh my god.
Lu: Good guess though, whatever you said.
Tirth: Thank you.
Lu: Next question: what element are diamonds composed of?
Tirth: Oh, carbon. Come on, son. C for come on son and also for carbon.
Lu: Tirth, you’re acting like I’m not on your side. Remember, I’m doing this because I don’t want you to embarrass yourself again, and me by proxy. Okay? I’m on your side.
Tirth: That’s true. I’m sorry. Yes, you’re right. Yeah, you’re absolutely on my side. That’s right.
Lu: Next question: what are the most common elements in the body by mass? You just have to name two of the top four most common elements.
Tirth: Well, so that’s a little, okay, let me clarify this because the body’s mostly water, which would mean that hydrogen and oxygen are the two most common. But hydrogen is also the lightest. So carbon might be on top just by, because it’s heavier.
Lu: Just have to get two out of the top four. What’s your final answer?
Tirth: Okay. All right. Hydrogen and oxygen.
Lu: Okay, good. The top most common element is oxygen, 65%. Carbon is next, 18.5, then hydrogen, 9.5, and then nitrogen 3.3. Doing pretty well.
Tirth: Okay. Very proud of myself.
Lu: What do you call a group of flamingos?
Tirth: Oh, I used to know this…I’m going to give up. I’m just going to say something that’s not, that I know is wrong. A group of owls is called a parliament of owls. So I’m going to say a group of flamingos is a senate of flamingos.
Lu: No, it’s uh a flamboyance. A flamboyance of flamingos.
Tirth: A flamboyance.
Lu: That’s right. Good alliteration. How long does it take for the light to reach the Earth from the Sun?
Tirth: Uh, 8 minutes. I think it’s like 8.33 or something, isn’t it?
Lu: 8 minutes, yeah, exactly. 8 minutes and 20 seconds. What is Brownian motion?
Tirth: Um, in the most general sense, it’s just random motion of molecules in basically non-solids, so gas or even liquids actually.
Lu: Mhm, in a fluid.
Tirth: Yeah, basically a fluid, yeah.
Lu: And what is it due to?
Tirth: Uh it’s the kinetic energy of the particles, isn’t it? And also like just random…
Lu: Yeah, when they collide with the molecules of the fluid. Good. I’ll give you that point.
Tirth: Basically yeah. Yes.
Lu: Last question in this section. What is the photoelectric effect?
Tirth: Um, this is going to be tricky to explain. It’s sort of when a, basically tells you that light comes in quanta called photons and it’s then frequency of the light hitting any particle that matters, not the intensity…that can emit particles. I did a piss poor job.
Lu: Okay, I’ll give it to you. I’ll give it to you. The next section is, again, from ChatGPT.
Tirth: I was not a fan of the last one, so we’ll see.
Lu: Question number one: what happens when it rains on Uranus?
Tirth: Oh. What? Hold up, hold up. Rules. Do I still get two passes?
Lu: No, no, no, no. You already used up both of your passes. No, no, no, no.
Tirth: Oh, no passes here. I see. What happens when it rains on Uranus?
Lu: Uh-huh.
Tirth: I mean, you get clean, I don’t know.
Lu: What gets clean?
Tirth: Your bum.
Lu: No, incorrect.
Tirth: No. What’s the correct answer?
Lu: When it rains on Uranus, carbon in the atmosphere crystallizes into diamonds, and it actually rains diamonds on Uranus. That’s true. I don’t know what answer you were giving.
Tirth: Wow. Okay.
Lu: Next question: how fast can a human fart travel? This is all from ChatGPT.
Tirth: I mean is it the gas or the sound?
Lu: Uh, the gas. Good question. The gas. Give me in terms of miles per hour, please.
Tirth: Um, 3 miles per hour.
Lu: Mm, no, 7. 7 miles per hour.
Tirth: Okay, fine.
Lu: And ChatGPT adds, “and if it’s hot and humid, the smell can cling longer. You’re welcome.”
Tirth: That’s just so gross. Okay.
Lu: ChatGPT says, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was colder than dry ice and your ex’s heart. What is it?
Tirth: Heart. Um, -84.
Lu: What Celsius or Fahrenheit?
Tirth: Oh, Celsius.
Lu: -84, it’s very close, but incorrect. It’s -98 Celsius. In Antarctica.
Tirth: Do I get pity points? Do I get pity points? Close to the…
Lu: ChatGPT…No. No, please. No. ChatGPT adds, do not try this at home.
Tirth: Okay, okay.
Lu: If you could fold a piece of paper more than 7 times, remember last time we talked about how you can only fold a piece of paper 7 times, but if you can fold it more than 7 times, how many folds would it take to reach the moon from Earth? I’ll make this easier for you. Just get it within 5 of the actual answer.
Tirth: Uh-huh. Yes. Um, 23.
Lu: Close, 42. Actually, not close at all.
Tirth: Wow.
Lu: Next question: why did the mushroom get invited to the party?
Tirth: Oh, because he’s a fun guy.
Lu: Yeah. Good, good.
Tirth: Yeah. I actually made this joke. I don’t know if you remember Lu because you were at this wedding also, almost 10 years ago now.
Lu: Yeah, at Jimmy’s wedding. I gave you the joke, remember? I gave it to you and then you made it.
Tirth: Yeah. Yes. I forgot that. I conveniently remembered I thought it was mine. I’m sorry.
Lu: Ah. No, no, no, please, give me credit.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: What did the tectonic plate say when it bumped into another?
Tirth: Let me slide right past you.
Lu: Incorrect. Sorry, my fault.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: Why do chemists love nitrates so much?
Tirth: I have no idea.
Lu: Nitrates are cheaper than day rates.
Tirth: Oh my god, that’s so stupid. Oh my god.
Lu: Once again, Tirth, you’re doing very poorly on this section. Very poorly. Why did the physicist break up with the biologist?
Tirth: Positive feelings of the heart? I don’t know.
Lu: Because there was no chemistry. Why doesn’t the sun go to college?
Tirth: Cuz it’s bright already.
Lu: That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. I’ll give you half a point. Um because it already has a million degrees.
Tirth: Yes. Okay.
Lu: Last question: why don’t skeletons fight each other? This is an anatomy question.
Tirth: They don’t have a fighting bone in their body.
Lu: No, because they don’t have the guts.
Tirth: Oh my god! I actually like that one. That’s a good joke.
Lu: Once again, Tirth, you’ve embarrassed me. Uh I’m just guessing based on how that went. But let me tally up the score real quick, okay?
Tirth: I’m sorry.
Lu: So, in the first section, you got 8 out of 10. On the second section, you only got 1.5 out of 10 for a total score of 9.5 out of 20, which is 45%.
Tirth: Objectively a failing grade.
Lu: You’ve embarrassed both of us. Yeah.
Tirth: I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry. I’ll do my best next time.
Lu: Will you? Will you really? Will you try?
Tirth: I will try my best.
Lu: Okay, well, let’s move on, shall we? We don’t need to linger on…
Tirth: Yes.
Morality of meat
Lu: But Tirth, you probably don’t know this, but I grew up deep in the heart of Texas.
Tirth: Oh, yes, of course. You may have mentioned it once or twice.
Lu: Have I? Okay well, I didn’t think you knew. I grew up on a 50 acre ranch and went to school on a 100 acre ranch. On the school ranch, we had 200 heads of cattle.
Tirth: Yes, yes.
Lu: And now what happened to their bodies, I have no idea.
Tirth: It’s just the heads. Of course, right.
Lu: Uh-huh. Just the…yeah, exactly. Uh now we had a rival school, a cross-town rival high school. They were built on a corn farm and they really hated us. They would always pickett us. So we had this thing, we had this thing every Wednesday, we will slaughter some cows. We called it Slaughter Wednesdays. This rival high school always came and picketted us on Slaughter Wednesdays. They will also come and pickett us on Meat Processing Thursdays, okay?
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: But on Barbecue Fridays, they would show up with forks in hand ready to eat. just to come and enjoy the merriment of Barbecue Fridays. But I always found this weird, right? Why would they pickett our Slaughter Wednesdays, Meat Processing Thursdays, but enjoy our Barbecue Fridays? Didn’t understand that.
Tirth: Just to steal your food. They’re enjoying the fruits of your labor.
Lu: Exactly. So I’ve been confused about this behavior of theirs until I found the paper that I’m going to talk about today.
Tirth: Okay. What better to explain human behavior than science?
Lu: Exactly. Especially when the study is conducted by psychologists.
Tirth: The best scientists.
Lu: The best scientists. I actually mean that. I know you think it’s a joke. but I believe this 100%.
Tirth: No, no, I don’t. I’ve been reading more psychology papers as part of this podcast and I’m very impressed by the methodologies.
Lu: Well, I think you will be very impressed by this group’s methodology as well.
Tirth: All right, let’s hear it.
Lu: The title of the paper is “The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals”.
Tirth: Mhm. A lot of alliteration.
Lu: This was published in 2010 in the journal Appetite, which is a fantastic journal.
Tirth: Which I assume is a great journal.
Lu: Fantastic journal, yeah. This is by a group from the University of Kent in the UK.
Tirth: Mhm, great place.
Lu: So I have a question for you, Tirth. Do you enjoy eating meat?
Tirth: Yes, I do.
Lu: And do you enjoy harming or killing sentient creatures?
Tirth: Uh, no, I don’t.
Lu: Ah, well according to the authors, you’re in the majority of people. You love the taste of meat, but you don’t want to kill animals to get the meat. So, what can you do?
Tirth: Mhm. Right.
Lu: So there are three options. Option number one is to stop eating animals. Option number two is fail to recognize that animals are killed to produce meat. And then option number three is to suppress your moral concern for the animals when you eat meat.
Tirth: Right.
Lu: So, they wanted to test if this option, option number three, is true. To conduct the study, they recruited 108 students. And their question again is they want to give students meat to eat or like a non-meat control, and then they want to see how that affects how the participants feel about animals and whether or not they think animals deserve like moral treatment. But you can’t just give the participants meat, right? And then ask them, hey, how do you feel about, you know, pigs or cows or whatever? Because they will know something’s up. So here’s where the genius comes into the study. So the students they recruited to participate in the study, they were presumably all students in a psychology class, and as part of the class, they needed to participate in a study to receive class credit. And they had to participate in a 30-minute study. So the authors told the students, the participants, that this is a study of food preferences, which just means that they’re going to get food to taste, but that’s only going to take 5 minutes of their time. So, to fill up the remainder of the 30 minutes they needed to receive full class credit, they’re going to be given an unrelated questionnaire, just to fill up time and cheat the system for credit. Okay?
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: But, as you might have guessed, in reality – and this is a direct quote from the paper – “the food tasting task was the experimental manipulation, and the additional questionnaire is the dependent variable.” So in the food task, the participants were randomly assigned to taste either beef jerky or cashew. And then they were asked to rate, you know, how much you like this food. The unrelated questionnaire is a questionnaire for them to rate animals.
Tirth: Okay.
Lu: Now, to increase the believability that this unrelated questionnaire is actually unrelated to the study, they had the participants re-enter their demographics with this new questionnaire, and then also they changed the font and the color scheme of the questionnaire. So that it doesn’t match the prior food survey. All right. So for this unrelated questionnaire, the participants were presented with 27 non-human animals and were asked to indicate which animals they felt morally obligated to show concern for. Then they were told that one of the 27 animals will be randomly chosen for them to give a more detailed response. But in reality, the randomly chosen animal was always a cow. So they showed them an image of a cow in a paddock and then asked them two questions: 1) how much does this cow deserve moral treatment? And 2) how unpleasant would it be to harm this cow? And then they asked the participants to rate the cow’s sensual and cognitive abilities, including their ability to see, hear, taste, feel pain, hunger, pleasure, fear, happiness, and rage, and then also their ability to think, imagine, wish, need, desire, intend, plan, choose, and reason.
Tirth: Mhm.
Lu: Any problem with their methods?
Tirth: Wow. No, no, it’s all very sound. No complaints.
Lu: Bulletproof study. So here are the results. In terms of the first task, which is selecting which of the 27 animals the participants will feel moral concern for, participants who ate the beef jerky beforehand selected 13.5 animals on average. whereas participants who ate the cashew beforehand selected 17.3 animals. Four more animals.
Tirth: Mhm. Okay. 4 animals more.
Lu: Yeah, it’s pretty good. That’s like 30% roughly more. And in terms of the question, does a cow deserve moral treatment? The beef jerky participants rated the cow as less deserving of moral treatment. They rated the cow as, on a scale of 1 to 7, a 5.57. The cashew participants rate of the cow a 6.08, so slightly higher.
Tirth: Mhm, slightly higher.
Lu: On a scale of 1 to 7, yeah. 5.5 versus 6.1 basically. However, on the third task, which is rate the cow’s sensual and cognitive abilities, there was no difference. But I would argue that’s a pretty ridiculous task to begin with.
Tirth: Yeah. I don’t know how you would…yeah.
Lu: But I have a question.
Tirth: Yes, go ahead.
Lu: Is this a problem?
Tirth: Right.
Lu: I would argue this is not necessarily a bad thing. Because if you’re going to eat meat, you know, you want to make sure you don’t feel bad afterwards. Right?
Tirth: Right I mean, from an appetite standpoint.
Lu: Or you know what you can do instead of eating cows is eat more chicken. Yeah. You hear that Chick-fil-A? You want to give us a sponsorship? That was a freebie but you know…
Tirth: Eat more chicken. Yeah. Give us money. I actually have one question before I go into my own paper. Where do you draw the line? Most people agree that trees are alive – I have some doubts about it, but that’s a different story, but we don’t have to get into it today – but we eat a lot of plant material, right? We use it for everything. I wonder if they extended the survey to…do you feel moral concern?
Lu: I see where you’re getting at. I see where you’re getting at. So if you were given a task of rating your moral concern for the abilities of trees to to feel and think, would that be higher or lower than the ability of cows to feel and think?
Tirth: Oh, lower, no question, man.
Lu: But you’re asking where do we draw the line?
Tirth: Well, I guess you wouldn’t because you don’t even think this was a problem.
Lu: No, not a problem. No, no. Eat whatever. Yeah eat whales. So the criticism actually, I have a criticism for this paper. I’m not actually convinced they tricked any of the participants into thinking that the unrelated questionnaire is actually unrelated, right?
Tirth: I mean they are psychology students after all.
Lu: They are psychology students. They know to expect this sort of trickery, and I think they were well aware.
Tirth: So wait, wait, wait, actually that’s interesting. Do you think though then the people who ate jerky, they’re like, you know what? They’re testing me. So let me just rate the cow higher than I think…
Lu: Yeah, it could be it could be explicit like that or it could be like an implicit thing that they would change their responses without knowing, without actually knowing.
Tirth: Yeah, because you know, 5.5 out of 7 isn’t too bad. So maybe they’re thinking like a 4, but they’re like, you know what? This is going to look bad, I just ate some meat. Let me just bump it up.
Lu: That’s what makes psychology so hard to study. All right, any further thoughts?
Tirth: No.
Lu: All right, take over, Tirth.
Beards as petri dishes
Tirth: Okay, so, you know, and I think it was the last episode where my magnificent beard was brought up. Listen, I put a lot of effort in this. I’m very proud of this. This is well known, you know. So, I found this study that I have some beef with, so to speak. These people have a vendetta. Let me read the title and you’ll see immediately where the vendetta is. Okay, here’s the title “Microbiological laboratory hazard of bearded men”.
Lu: Tirth this sounds like a serious question. I’m also very concerned about this.
Tirth: This was yeah, and they treated this with the utmost seriousness and as you’ll see very shortly when I described the methods, the great lengths they went to, so to speak, okay? This paper was published actually all the way back in 1967 in the Journal of Applied Microbiology, which I assume is a great journal.
Lu: Good journal. Very good journal.
Tirth: Good journal. Okay. And these people are all at the industrial health and safety office at Fort Detrick, Frederick Maryland. I think this is an army base. So, you know, the main questions these authors are concerned with is that they’ve noticed that often times people who work in microbiological laboratories can sometimes unwittingly end up being carriers of disease, infectious disease. So they ask themselves the question, well, is there something about beards? And the other thing they note very clearly – and I’m going to quote them because this is interesting. They said, “After many years of absence from the laboratory scene, beards are now being worn by some persons working with pathogenic microorganisms”. Remember this is 1967, okay?
Lu: Hippie culture. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Tirth: This is like the height of uh, like the hippies and beards and exactly…
Lu: Everybody had beards and long hair.
Tirth: So the people are now growing like the long sideburns and all of that, okay? So these people are concerned. They’re like, “hey there’s people wearing beards and you know, is there a situation where the beard can retain or hold onto more microorganisms?”
Lu: I see, I see. What I’m hearing is that some very square scientists who’ve never been offered a joint in their life said one day, let’s get them hippies. Let’s kick those hippies out of our lab. Because they’re spreading germs with their beards. Got it. Okay, continue, please.
Tirth: Yes. And as I mentioned, they said we’re going to test two separate questions, two related questions. The first question is, does washing the beard make a difference? So if you’re a bearded man, you come in and work in the lab, it’s fine, but if you wash it off, can you wash off most of the bacteria in your beard? And then they do the test with shaved men. The second question is, can you actually make animals sick from this? And to test this, they actually took a mannequin, put a fake beard on it, inoculated it with the virus or the botulinum toxin, took some…
Lu: Oh I see. This is of course to make sure that they’re following Koch’s postulate. The criteria of Koch’s postulate, which is once you’ve identified an organism, make sure it can infect other things before deeming it a pathogenic organism.
Tirth: Exactly. Except they use different pathogens here. But then they took chickens and they rub the chickens on the fake beards. There’s actually pictures here too that I can show you and share with you for Youtube. So then they have the chickens live for 10 days or whatever, then they kill them all. They had like 9 plus chickens or something and then they like harvest their lungs, their brains, their trachea and they measure how many bacteria and viruses they can recover from it.
Lu: So they ran out of Petri dishes to grow bacteria. They’re like, hey, we have some chickens lying around. Let’s see if we can culture bacteria in the chicken.
Tirth: Yes, yes. They don’t stop at chickens. There’s a second part where they took guinea pigs and then they rub the guinea pigs on the fake beard.
Lu: Guinea pigs as test subjects. But we never really use guinea pigs. but they did.
Tirth: Yes, yes. They actually use guinea pigs, like sixty of them.
Lu: These sound like again, square scientists who maybe learned how to do science from movies, but I’ll let you describe the study more before I make my judgment.
Tirth: Okay. So let me just get into the methods very quickly, okay? So, as I mentioned, one of their goals is to take bearded men, they had two of them wash their beards and two of them didn’t wash their beards.
Lu: And 4 total.
Tirth: And there’s two separate methods. They actually have pictures in the… shirtless men showering in this paper.
Lu: Oh, okay. Seems important to include. Uh-huh.
Tirth: Then they added a fifth guy. So there’s five guys and then they had them shave their beards. There’s actually pictures of them shaving too and they’re like smiling. Do you want to see any of these, by the way?
Lu: Wow. So this is a paired study. They didn’t get people without beards. They made people shave their beards.
Tirth: No, it’s the same people I think that they shaved.
Lu: Ah, okay, that’s pretty good. Good, good study.
Tirth: And then they had, you know, they inoculated their face and they had them wash it. Again, there’s pictures included with the study which we’ll share on Instagram. Let’s dive into the results, okay? So the first batch of experiments where they try to recover bacteria from beards that were washed or unwashed. What they actually found though is that washed beards basically nothing grew.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: The unwashed beard, 3 out of the 4 guys had something growing in their beards.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: And then the second group, remember, they had the same guys, they added a guy, they had him shave all their beards. This time, the unwashed face had quite a few bacteria in it.
Lu: Wait, sorry, sorry. The fifth guy they added was a bearded gentleman who they made shave his beard. They couldn’t have just gotten an unbearded gentleman to begin with, since he wasn’t in the bearded experiment?
Tirth: So it’s possible that the fifth guy was unbearded to begin with. They don’t mention it. And the picture of the guys shaving themselves…
Lu: For control purposes, they should have gotten a bearded gentleman who wasn’t part of the bearded experiment, but made him shave.
Tirth: They should have. Yes. I agree. Uh, what they found is that even the unwashed clean shaven face had bacteria in it.
Lu: Okay, after they inoculated.
Tirth: Correct.
Lu: How did they do that, by the way?
Tirth: How do you inoculate the face?
Lu: Inoculate, yeah.
Tirth: They use uh, like a spray bottle.
Lu: Of bacteria and just sprayed it onto the guy’s face. Wow.
Tirth: Yes. They calculated the concentrations that they wanted to inoculate.
Lu: And okay. Wow. I don’t know if I’d be up for participating in this study.
Tirth: They’re making the claim that the two bacteria they use are not really pathogenic. Anyway, but they found that the washed face basically nothing grew out of the washed face.
Lu: Okay, so if you don’t wash the face, you still get positive cultures. If you wash, nothing happens. Okay, how does that compare to the bearded situation though? Because that’s their question, right? Do beards grow bacteria? So did they compare unwashed beard versus unwashed, clean shaven face?
Tirth: Not directly. There’s absolute numbers listed here, but they don’t do actual like statistics.
Lu: Even though that’s their central question. Okay, good study…
Tirth: And then the next thing, and they sound disappointed about this, about the chickens and the guinea pigs. Basically, they’re making the argument that first of all, because they did two different titers for the chickens. So at the lower titer, the chickens didn’t really get sick. They weren’t able to recover the virus from the chickens.
Lu: Titer meaning like the concentration of bacteria they sprayed on…
Tirth: Of virus in this case, virus on the beard, yes, on the fake beard.
Lu: So they sprayed two different concentrations of viruses onto mannequin beards and then either washed or did not wash them before rubbing chickens into them. And the results were what?
Tirth: Uh, what they found is that when they washed the beard after spraying with two different concentrations of viruses, essentially nothing grew in most of the chickens. I think one of the chickens had some growth. However, when they did not wash the beard after inoculating with two concentrations, most of the chickens had some growth in a dose dependent fashion. So the higher the titer they used, the more they recovered.
Lu: Okay. And this is surprising to them?
Tirth: Well, it’s surprising to them how much they had to use for the chickens to actually get it. Remember because they’re rubbing the chickens in the beards.
Lu: Okay.
Tirth: And the results, they actually don’t even report the results with the guinea pigs. I mean they like reported it in the writing, but there’s no tables. By the way, I forgot to mention, they actually list the initials of the volunteers they used for the study, the bearded men, and I tried seeing if any of those match the authors, but it doesn’t.
Lu: Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Of course not, because all the authors were clean shaven.
Tirth: Right, clean shaven squares.
Lu: Yeah, exactly. So what was their conclusion?
Tirth: Their conclusion was that number one, this is a little unpredictable, but number two, they do acknowledge that beards might be okay as long as the people wash them and they’re careful with them.
Lu: Okay. Very good.
Tirth: What did you learn today, Lu?
Lu: Wait, wait, wait, we haven’t gone there yet.
Tirth: Sorry.
What did you learn today?
Lu: Okay. Well, I guess that’s the end of this episode of recreational science. Tirth, what’d you learn today?
Tirth: I learned today that uh, conducting psychological experiments on psychology students may actually be a confounder in and of itself.
Lu: Very insightful.
Tirth: What did you learn today?
Lu: I learned that if some of your colleagues have beards that you don’t like, you can make up a study and get them to shave their beards for the study. A very effective way of getting people.
Tirth: Indeed, indeed.
Lu: Hey Tirth you want to participate in a study? Okay guys, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoy this episode and we will see you in the next episode.
Tirth: Take care guys.
