This is Improbable Too

by Marc Abrahams

  A year earlier, W. Neuhauser had gone into even more depth, in his study entitled ‘Example of Potentiation of Genetic Traits Due to Inbreeding: The Habsburg Chin, Burgundian Lip, Spanish Insanity’. But because it was published in the German journal Zahnärztliche Mitteilungen, Neuhauser’s work is little-read in English-speaking countries.

  A neurologist of my acquaintance recently moved to east Texas, where he discovered a most unexpected source of research material. He reports that, thanks to many generations of inbreeding, the region is full of genetically based neurological phenomena that he had seen only in medical books. What he had thought to be rare curiosities turn out to be commonplace in Texas. Inbreeding can, indeed, produce offspring with unusual characteristics.

  The royal families of Europe and the hoi polloi of east Texas are both there, quietly waiting for scientists to come study and make sense of them.

  Dimond, Frances (1994). ‘Face Values: Inherited Features’. The Genealogists’ Magazine 24 (10): 893–908.

  Thompson, E.M., and R.M. Winter (1988). ‘Another Family with the “Habsburg Jaw” ’. Journal of Medical Genetics 25 (12): 838–42.

  Neuhauser, W. (1977). ‘Example of Potentiation of Genetic Traits Due to Inbreeding: The Habsburg Chin, Burgundian Lip, Spanish Insanity’. Zahnärztliche Mitteilungen 67 (15): 914–6.

  In brief

  ‘Broken Hand or Broken Nose: A Case Report’

  by B.P. Shravat and S.N. Harrop (published in the Journal of Accident and Emergency Medicine, 1995)

  ‌On everyone’s lips

  They are on everyone’s lips always, and sometimes on a shred of evidence in a murder trial, and occasionally in the title of a scientific report (as in the recently published ‘Morphologic Patterns of Lip Prints in a Portuguese Population: A Preliminary Analysis’).

  Lip prints – lip patterns – have become the subject of formal study. That formal study has a formal name: cheiloscopy.

  Basic questions still nag at cheiloscopists.

  The Portuguese population lip print patterns paper, written by Virgínia Costa and Inês Caldas of the Universidad do Porto, appears in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Costa and Caldas show how scientists have worked hard to classify the universe of lip patterns into a set of standard categories. They slightly lament the existence of competing standards, the field being too new for its experts to settle on a single taxonomy.

  ‌‘Suzuki and Tsushihashi’s classification’ scheme for prints

  They also worry at the how-do-the-lips-change-after-death conundrum. Criminal investigators find themselves haunted by a scarcity problem with both before-and-after patterns. ‘Very few’ corpses arrive with a companion set of pre- and postmortem lip prints, Costa and Caldes say, ‘which obviously impairs a comparative study’.

  Does each of the seven billion or so people on earth (and each of their ancestors) have a unique set of lip prints? Jerzy Kasprzak of the Military Police School in Minisk Mazowiecki, Poland, addressed that in 1990, in an article called ‘Possibilities of Cheiloscopy’, in the journal Forensic Science International. ‘Cheiloscopy deals with the examination of systems of furrows on the red part of human lips’, he specified, then explaining that Yasuo Tsuchihashi and Tazuo Suzuki at Tokyo University had examined the lips of 1,364 persons. Thanks to those 1,364 sets of lips, Kasprzak said, Tsuchihashi and Suzuki ‘established that the arrangement of lines on the red part of human lips is individual and unique for each human being’.

  According to the paper, ‘After applying the lipstick on ten volunteers and waiting the recommended five minutes for the lipstick to fix, lip impressions were made on tissue paper and white cotton fabric using sustained pressure for three seconds. The samples were exposed to ambient conditions.’

  Do women’s lips have identifiably different patterns from men’s? In 2009, a team at Subharti Dental College in Meerut, India, attacked the question, using ‘lipstick, bond paper, cellophane tape, a brush for applying the lipstick, and a magnifying lens’. Their resulting treatise, ‘Cheiloscopy: The Study of Lip Prints in Sex Identification’, reports success in identifying the gender of eighteen of twenty women and seventeen of twenty men.

  Lips being often associated with romance, cheiloscopy smacks occasionally of glamour. Ana Castelló, Mercedes Alvarezu, Fernando Verdú of the University of Valancia, Spain, noticed that advanced developments in the fashion industry had forced crime-fighters to come up with their own, countervailing technological leaps. In 2002, they and colleague Marcos Miquel published a study called ‘Long-lasting Lipsticks and Latent Prints’, in which they complained that ‘the cosmetics industry has developed long-lasting lipsticks that often do not leave visible prints’.

  ‌Evidence: ‘Latent lip print on cotton fabric developed using Oil Red O (powder) after 30 days’

  The Valencia team experimented with chemicals – especially a dye called Nile red – that helped reveal nearly invisible prints left by such lipsticks. That led them, three years later, to publish one of the most romantically titled reports in the history of forensics: ‘Luminous Lip-prints as Criminal Evidence’.

  Costa, Virgínia A., and Inês M. Caldas (2012). ‘Morphologic Patterns of Lip Prints in a Portuguese Population: A Preliminary Analysis’. Journal of Forensic Sciences 57 (5): 1318–22.

  Kasprzak, Jerzy (1990). ‘Possibilities of Cheiloscopy’. Forensic Science International 46 (1/2): 145–51.

  Sharma, Preeti, Susmita Saxena and Vanita Rathod (2009). ‘Cheiloscopy: The Study of Lip Prints in Sex Identification’. Journal of Forensic Dental Sciences 1 (1): 24–7.

  Castelló, Ana, Mercedes Alvarez, Marcos Miquel and Fernando Verdú (2002). ‘Long-lasting Lipsticks and Latent Prints’. Forensic Science Communications 4 (2): n.p.

  Castelló, Ana, Mercedes Alvarez-Seguí and Fernando Verdú (2005). ‘Luminous Lip-prints as Criminal Evidence’. Forensic Science International 155 (2/3): 185–7.

  A snack with bite

  There once was a man who swallowed some ants.

  ’Twas done with intent, not merely from chance.

  The ants were alive,

  But did not survive.

  The research was done without government grants.

  The man in verse was and is Volker Sommer, professor of evolutionary anthropology at University College London. He and his colleagues Oliver Allon and Alejandra Pascual-Garrido travelled to Nigeria’s Gashaka Gumti national park. There, chimpanzees and army ants and sticks are plentiful – the former use the latter to dip into nests for presumably delicious helpings of fresh, lively army ants of the species Dorylus rubellus. As the scientists describe it: ‘Army ants respond to predatory chimpanzees in a particular way by streaming to the surface to defend their colony through painful bites. In response, chimpanzees typically harvest army ants with stick tools, thereby minimizing the bites they receive.’

  The team craved more knowledge about this chimp/ant give-and-take. So they ‘mimicked the predatory behaviour of tool-using chimpanzees at army ant nests to study the insects’ response’.

  How? They used discarded chimp-manufactured ‘dipping wands’.

  Some things were fairly easy to measure: how fast ants run up a dipping wand; how many ants one can expect to harvest in a single dip; the typical weight of those ants.

  The most demanding part of the research is described in the report section headlined: ‘Ant remains in chimpanzee faeces and self-experiments’.

  The goal was to estimate the numerical relationship between (a) ants that go into a chimp and (b) discernible ant parts that come out.

  Anyone can wander through the park, collect chimp faeces and try to count its ant content. The pure measurement aspect is straightforward, if one utilizes simple accounting techniques. Here’s a technique mentioned in the report: ‘Counts of broken ant heads (usually only those of large workers could still be identified as such) were divided by two and added to the number of complete heads.’

  Detail of methods in Allon, Pascual-Garrido and Sommer
(2012)

  But measuring how many ants go into a chimp requires an expensively high degree of controlled, intimate access to the animal. Sommer, Allon and Pascual-Garrido suggest that some day this might be done: ‘Controlled experiments in which captive chimpanzees are fed known numbers of army ants followed by faecal inspections could clarify this issue further.’

  In the meantime, Sommer offered himself as a substitute for a chimp: ‘Correlations between numbers of ingested ants and remains detectable in faeces were assessed via [three] self-experiments by VS. For each of these, 100 large Dorylus workers were immobilized in whisky, ingested, masticated with 12 chewing motions and swallowed. Remains detectable in subsequent excreta were counted.’

  Sommer produced some interesting results. The study lists summary data for the ‘number of detectable heads’; the number of ‘other fragments’; and the ‘interval (in hours) between ingestion and excretion’. Calculations suggest that one can ‘assume that 10.1% of ingested insects are detectable in excreta produced during the subsequent three days’.

  Allon, Oliver, Alejandra Pascual-Garrido and Volker Sommer (2012). ‘Army Ant Defensive Behaviour and Chimpanzee Predation Success: Field Experiments in Nigeria’. Journal of Zoology 288 (4): 237–44.

  An improbable innovation

  ‘Automated Surveillance Monitor of Non-humans in Real Time’

  a/k/a a pet-mounted noise-sensing alarm, by David Shemesh and Dan Forman (US patent no. 6,782,847, granted 2004)

  ‌Fig 18. from US patent no. 6,782,847

  The highs and lows of the musical eyebrow

  When singers sing high notes, their eyebrows go higher than when they sing low notes. While that may not be an absolute physiological rule, a team of Danish and American researchers discovered that it happens pretty consistently. They lay out the evidence, and explain what it may mean, in a study called ‘Facial Expression and Vocal Pitch Height: Evidence of an Intermodal Association’, published in the journal Empirical Musicology Review.

  When scientists tackle a new question, they begin with the knowledge that finding the answer – if there is an answer – might entail lengthy, slogging effort. Some questions take years to settle. Some take decades. The eyebrow/high-note evidence comes from ‘an experiment lasting less than one minute’.

  Sofia Dahl, at Aalborg University Copenhagen, and David Huron and Randolph Johnson, at Ohio State University, ran their experiment forty-four times, each with a different volunteer. They asked each person to sing, but intentionally did not solicit any information as to whether anyone had musical training.

  The one thing each person did have was an ice-cream bar. The study says that each volunteer received one, as inducement to sing, and that it was free.

  The experiment was simple, as well as quick. To prompt each volunteer to sing, Dahl, Huron or Johnson used this script: ‘I want you to sing a comfortable pitch and sustain it while we take your picture. Sing whatever vowel you like. Now hold the note … [Take picture]. Now I want you to sing a higher [lower] pitch – the highest [lowest] pitch you can. Good. Now hold it. [Take picture]’.

  The research team then showed the photographs to judges who had not been present during the vocalization. The judging yielded results that were, on the face of them, stark. The report says the ‘independent judges selected the high-pitch faces as more friendly than the low-pitch faces. When photographs were cropped to show only the eye region, judges still rated the high-pitch faces friendlier than the low-pitch faces.’

  Building on a mound of earlier research that is documented in the scientific literature, Dahl, Huron and Johnson assessed the brow/pitch behaviour they saw and heard. Their data, they conclude, is ‘consistent with the role of eyebrows in signaling aggression and appeasement’.

  The prior work by others gathered evidence about the role or roles eyebrows play in expressing human emotion. This new study mentions a discovery in 1978 that ‘raised or arched eyebrows are indicative of appeasement or friendliness’, a 1979 finding that ‘when angry, the eyebrows are lowered, resulting in a more pronounced brow ridge’, and a 1981 treatise explaining that in many cultures lowered eyebrows are ‘interpreted as displays of greater dominance or aggression’.

  Having, this once, focused on a notably fleeting musical phenomenon – the brow-arched single note – Johnson eventually moved to a new institution and towards an opposite extreme. Ensconced at Oklahoma Baptist University, he presented a paper called ‘The Fullness of God’s Time in Brahms’s Requiem’.

  Huron, David, Sofia Dahl and Randolph Johnson (2009). ‘Facial Expression and Vocal Pitch Height: Evidence of an Intermodal Association’. Empirical Musicology Review 4 (3): 93–100.

  Johnson, R. (2011). ‘The Fullness of God’s Time in Brahms’s Requiem’. Paper presented at the Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, 19 March.

  Heat over hotness

  To drink really hot coffee (or hot tea) is to swallow a paradox of pleasure and pain. Hye-Seong Lee, Earl Carstens, and Michael O’Mahony, at the University of California, Davis, solved the puzzle, more or less. They explain it in a study that, for the sake of clarity and directness, they call: ‘Drinking Hot Coffee: Why Doesn’t It Burn the Mouth?’

  Industries acquire standards. The various industries that make and serve hot beverages have acquired standard notions of how hot people expect a good cuppa to be.

  ‘Drinking Hot Coffee Why Doesn’t It Burn the Mouth?’: Abstract

  Meticulous researchers showed that these industries think that people like their coffee to be really, really hot – between 80 and 85 degrees Celsius (175 and 185 degrees Fahrenheit). An authoritative source for this kind of information is a paper entitled ‘Consumer Preferred Hot Beverage Temperatures’, published in 1999 by Carl P. Borchgrevink and John M. Tarras of Michigan State University and Alex M. Susskind of Cornell University in New York. Other studies, by other scholars, hint that the industry has a little problem with precision, and that hot beverages are often professionally served a few degrees hotter or cooler than that ideal.

  No matter. Several other experimenters discovered that anything even nearly that hot, if placed in the mouth, tends to hurt. And it hurts in both senses: pain and damage.

  Lee, Carstens and O’Mahony describe the pain studies in some detail. They speak of a Dr Yamada, who ‘mapped the mouth for spots sensitive to pain, using Miller’s dental broach’, and of a Dr Svensson, who ‘mapped pain thresholds in the mouth using argon laser stimulation’. They say that for thermal pain, a Dr Green ‘measured mean thresholds in the dorsal surface of the tongue (47.8 degrees C [118.04F]) and the inner wall of the lower lip (47.5 degrees C [117.5F]) with an ascending series method’. They also describe the damage studies, which can be boiled down to a single word: burns.

  ‘Thus’, they write, ‘it would seem that for a substantial number of people, the preferred temperatures for drinking were not only above reported pain thresholds, but also above possible damage thresholds in the mouth.’

  Lee, Carstens and O’Mahony answered the ‘why don’t people burn their mouths?’ question by sticking electronic sensors inside people’s mouths. They used thermocouples to measure the temperatures at four locations inside the mouths of eighteen coffee-drinkers while those coffee-drinkers drank hot coffee. One thermocouple was placed on the anterior dorsal surface of the tongue, near the tip. The others were situated to measure the bolus – the roiling slurp – of coffee as it passed through the mouth.

  After all the measuring and analysing, they concluded that, probably, ‘during drinking, the bolus of hot coffee is not held in the mouth long enough to heat the epithelial surfaces sufficiently to cause pain or tissue damage’.

  O’Mahoney proudly says the study has been quoted in several legal cases that arose from coffee-burn incidents, ‘sometimes by both sides!’

  Lee, Hye-Seong, Earl Carstens, and Michael O’Mahony (2003). ‘Drinking Hot Coffee: Why Doesn’t It Burn the Mouth?’. Journal of Se
nsory Studies 18 (1): 19–32.

  Borchgrevink, Carl P., Alex M. Susskind, and John M. Tarras (1999). ‘Consumer Preferred Hot Beverage Temperatures’. Food Quality and Preference 10 (2): 117–21.

  Smells like Holy Spirit

  Did early Christians smell inspiration? Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s book Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination assures us that yes, they did. The book might, metaphorically, help other academics wake up and smell the stale coffee: here is a pungent research topic that researchers have, until now, hardly bothered to sniff at.

  Harvey is a professor of religious studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Her 442-page tome explores (1) the most compelling odours, and (2) what and how early Christians thought about those odours.

  The table of contents offers topics to tempt even a casual bookstore browser. Read these seven items aloud to a friend or loved one, and you’ll see:

  The Olfactory Context: Smelling the Early Christian World

  A Martyr’s Scent

  Olfaction and Christian Knowing