Ig Nobel given to scientist who ‘follows his curiosity’
David Hu was changing his infant son’s diaper when he got the idea for a study that eventually won him the Ig Nobel prize. No, not the Nobel Prize — the Ig Nobel prize, which bills itself as a reward for “achievements that make people laugh, then think.”
As male infants will do, his son urinated all over the front of Hu’s shirt, for a full 21 seconds. Yes, he counted off the time, because for him curiosity trumps irritation.
That was a long time for a small baby, he thought. How long did it take an adult to empty his bladder? He timed himself. Twenty-three seconds. “Wow, I thought, my son urinates like a real man already.”
He recounts all of this without a trace of embarrassment, in person and in How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls: Animal Movements and the Robotics of the Future, just published, in which he describes both the silliness and profundity of his brand of research.
No one who knows Hu, 39, would be surprised by this story. His family, friends, the animals around him — all inspire research questions.
His wife, Jia Fan, is a marketing researcher and senior data scientist at UPS. When they met, she had a dog, and he became intrigued by how it shook itself dry. So he set out to understand that process.
He also saves earwax and teeth from his children, and lice and lice eggs from the inevitable schoolchild hair infestations. “We have separate vials for lice and lice eggs,” he pointed out.
Hu is a mathematician in the Georgia Tech engineering department who studies animals. His seemingly oddball work has drawn both the ire of grandstanding senators and the fullthroated support of at least one person in charge of awarding grants from that bastion of frivolity, the U.S. Army.
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., put three of Hu’s research projects on a list of the 20 most wasteful federally funded scientific studies.
Naturally, Hu made the attack on his work the basis for a TEDx talk at Emory University, in which he took a bow for being “the country’s most wasteful scientist” and went on to argue that Flake completely misunderstood the nature of basic science.
Hu was tickled to think that one scientist could be responsible for such supposed squandering of the public’s money. Neither he nor his supporters were deterred.
Among those supporters is Samuel C. Stanton, a program manager at the Army Research Office in Durham, N.C., which funded Hu’s research on whether fire ants were a fluid or a solid.
Stanton does not share Hu’s flippant irreverence. He speaks earnestly of the areas of science to which he directs Army money, including “nonequilibrium information physics, embodied learning and control, and nonlinear waves and lattices.”
So he is completely serious when he describes Hu as a scientist of “profound courage and integrity” who “goes where his curiosity leads him.”
Hu’s research may seem like pure fun, but much of it is built on the idea that how animals move and function can provide inspiration for engineers designing human-made objects or systems.
The title of Hu’s book refers to the “robots of the future,” and he emphasizes the way animal motion offers insights that can be applied to engineering.
And what about urination? It didn’t make sense to Hu that a grown man and an infant would have roughly the same urination time.
After he sent out undergraduates, under the guidance of Patricia Yang, a graduate student, to time urination in all the animals at the Atlanta Zoo, the situation became even more puzzling. Most mammals took between 10 and 30 seconds, with an average of 21 seconds. (Small animals do things differently.)
The key was the urethra, essentially a pipe out of the bladder, that enhanced the effect of gravity. Even a small amount of fluid in a narrow pipe can develop high pressure, with astonishing effects.
Water poured through a narrow pipe into a large wooden barrel can split the barrel. Hu said the experiment, known as Pascal’s barrel, can be replicated nowadays with Tupperware.
What is interesting about the urethra biologically is that its proportions, length to diameter, stay roughly the same no matter the size of the animal (as long as it weighs more than about 6½ pounds).
The principle of how to effectively drain a container of fluid could be useful, Hu wrote in the original studies, to designers of “water towers, water backpacks and storage containers.”