From today's Guardian. Elephant on acid, dog head grafts and a seesaw to revive the dead. Holy mad scientists! Also, breaking: Scientific community rife with zen masters of the obvious.
Top 10 most bizarre experiments (with my comments, where warranted.)
Elephant receives massive dose of LSD to see if it induces temporary madness.
Conclusion: LSD is fatal to elephants
(this is making me snarf my coffee, and it's mean but funny. The idea of an elephant tripping balls is funny, but only in theory or far, far away behind glass.)
Aircraft passengers told they are about to die in crash make more mistakes in written test.
Conclusion: Extreme stress harms cognitive ability
(naaaaah, really? Suprised this didn't cause a heartattack.)
Two-headed dogs created by Soviet surgeon, above, but die within a month.
Conclusion: Tissue rejection makes animals incompatible
(Also, that plan for Cerberus is so totally not happening! Damn.)
Psychologist begins experiments on son to test if laughing is spontaneous when tickled.
Conclusion: Laughing is an innate response to tickling
(And Piaget doesn't know what hit him.)
A room of nail-biting boys is played a recording or spoken announcements to break the habit while they sleep.
Conclusion: Sleep learning is possible. Others prove otherwise.
(Or social embarrassment can also break nasty habits. Gross.)
To test if people can sleep through anything, volunteers have their eyes taped open and bright lights shone in their eyes.
Conclusion: The men dozed off in 12 minutes.
(Typical. Yawn.)
People asked to smell ammonia, put hands in a bucket of frogs and watch porn.
Conclusion: Disgust has no single expression.
(Personally, I find frogs kind of cute...)
Doctor rubs vomit from yellow fever patients into open wounds and drinks it.
Conclusion: Mistakenly claims it is not infectious
(Could have fooled me.)
Animal corpses placed on seesaw to restart circulation and bring them back to life.
Conclusion: Two animals survive with blindness and brain damage
Fake female turkey dismantled limb by limb to find minimum that a male will mate with.
Conclusion: Male turkeys aroused by a head on a stick, but not a headless body
See the full article here.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Weird Science Experiments. OMG.
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2 comments:
I'm betting you know of the Ig Nobel prize, but just in case, it's a summary of the dumbest science, etc. out there. Some good examples:
Entomology, '94: ...for his series of experiments in obtaining ear mites from cats, inserting them into his own ear, and carefully observing and analyzing the results.
Chemistry '99: ....for his involvement with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.
Psycology '00: ...for their modest report, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".
Fluid Dyamics '05: ...for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Poo -- Calculations on Avian Defecation".
Physics '07: ...for their theoretical study of how sheets become wrinkled.
I'm totally winning one of these one day!
Gimpy, from your list at least two of those studies make perfect sense to me.
I've honestly been freaked out by the possibility of cat ear mites evolving into kitty/people ear mites. (Yes, my undergrad majors were lib. arts. How can you tell?)
Also, the way penguins projectile poo is hilarious/fascinating.
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