An Oxford University don has won one of this year’s spoof Ig Nobel prizes.
The annual spoof awards for wacky science are supposed to “make us laugh but then make us think”.
The prize is awarded annually by the science humour magazine the Annals of Improbable Research.
Winners receive a 10 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe alongside a trophy.
Dr Saul Justin Newman, a fellow at Oxford University’s Institute for Population Ageing, discovered some people with the longest lives hailed from places that had poor recordkeeping.
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Dr Newman said he became interested in investigating data on humans who live longer than most after debunking two scientific papers about extreme human ageing.
He said: “I found that extreme age records appear to be dominantly errors.
“These errors are apparent from unusual patterns in individual cases, scientific studies and entire populations.
“For example, the world’s oldest man, Jiroemon Kimura, has an extraordinary number of biographical anomalies and has three reported birthdays: one that seems to have been forged, one that was a typographic error inserted by demographers, and one that is supposedly real.”
Dr Newman said these anomalies are even larger when analysed across populations.
He said: “Reaching extreme ages is predicted by higher rates of poverty, higher rates of old-age poverty, not having a birth certificate, and amazingly, by having fewer 90-plus year olds in a region, that is, the more 90 year-olds there are in a region, the fewer 105-year-olds.”
Dr Newman said many of these people live in regions known as “blue zones” such as Okinawa in Japan, Sardinia in Italy and Loma Linda in California, where it is claimed that people live longer and healthier lives than the average person."
These theories gained wider attention through the Netflix documentary Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones.
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Dr Newman said: “These regions called blue zones, including Okinawa, seem to have been exploited to sell cookbooks and culturally appropriated lifestyle advice that is contradicted by independent data.”
He said Okinawa was promoted as a region that largely eats vegetables and sweet potato but added “none of the lifestyle claims seems to hold up”.
Australian-born Dr Newman told The Sunday Times "in the spirit of anti-ageing" he would invest his "ten trillion dollars in Calico shares or buy into Altos Labs" - two biotech firms.
"Let's see if I can't make 10 trillion dollars be worth even less," he said.
A “smart” toilet that can identify a person from their “analprint” which was developed by experts at Stanford University in the US was another winner.
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