Weird News Urinal study wins physics prize

Urinal study wins physics prize

A quest to crack one of the great curses of modern life – the splashback from men’s urinals – has won science’s greatest alternative award, the Ig Nobel prize.

One million litres of pee a day have to be mopped up from the floors of American men’s toilets alone, according to a crack team of researchers from the US, Canada, China and Saudi Arabia. They donned yellow raincoats to pick up the Ig Nobel physics prize in Zurich, with the economics prize going to a study that found rich people are more likely to steal children’s sweets than the rest of us.

Past winners American psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning were also honoured for discovering the ‘Dunning–Kruger effect’, which showed that ignorant and poorly qualified people tend to hugely overestimate their abilities – a breakthrough strangely illustrated with a picture of US President Donald Trump.

Giant tooth discovered in creek

(AP): Brigid Lynch was working along a wooded creek in a mountainous part of the San Francisco Bay Area when something that didn’t look like the rocks she’d been studying caught her eye – it turned out to be the fossilised tooth of a Pacific mastodon.

“I keep joking it wasn’t hard to find,” Lynch, a geomorphologist at Balance Hydrologics, said. “It was just sitting there in the middle of the creek, halfway in, half out of the water.”

Lynch made the discovery earlier this year while working on a habitat restoration project for the threatened California red-legged frog in a Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District preserve in San Mateo County. The public land management agency that preserves over 70,000 acres of land in the Santa Cruz Mountains region announced the find. The fossil has been donated to Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability.

“It’s in great condition,” said Chrissy Garcia, curator and manager of the Doerr School’s specimen collections. “So we’ve got both the crown and the root of the fossil. You can even see root canal. “It’s exciting to have a specimen of this quality, and having it be a local find.”

Garcia said the tooth from the Pacific mastodon, an extinct elephantlike species, is about nine inches (23 centimetres) long.

Ron Tykoski, vice president of science and curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, said mastodon fossils “pop up with some degree of frequency, depending on where you live”. He said there are multiple species of mastodon that roamed for a few million years in North America, up till 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

“The way this was found is actually the way a lot of specimens are found, just somebody who happened to be in the right place,” Tykoski said.

Garcia said that researchers will likely try to determine the exact age of the fossil, and will make a 3D copy to give to the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. The district said it will use the copy for public outreach and education. Ryan McCauley, a spokesperson for the district, said the discovery on land that is being preserved helps show the value of protecting open spaces and habitats.

“That this tooth, that this molar, was found in the context of trying to protect the habitat and save another species from potentially going extinct, I think really just drives home the point of why it’s so important to care for these open spaces and these natural lands,” he said.