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Science's Limits Are Only Self-Imposed
Tristfardd writes "The Independent has a fine article on ridiculous experiments, some of which really are ridiculous, while others have interesting ramifications. If only the article gave links for viewing the rotating frog or the film on self-trepanation."
Floating Frogs
Here in my department at FSU we are fortunate enough to have the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which develops the stongest magnets on the planet. Couple this with a professor with a sense of humor and you get .... That right! A Frog floating in a magnetic field! Along with golf balls, dice, and other things. When we asked him why he says, because you can. :) Check out the movies:
http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/science/levitation/
"Engineers do the work of man, Physicists do the work of God"
The soul experiment was terribly bad science, and from it we can only conclude that the man who performed it believed in a soul, and hence found that.
a sp
Details can be found here:
http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.
Some of the short points are:
* small sample size of 4 cases
* the results varied widely
* deciding upon the exact time of death is no easy task
All in all, the experiment proves nothing.
I'm going with the plausible explanation of
his instruments weren't very precise;
he saw a loss in weight in only four of the six patients--the others gained weight; and
he had a result in mind that he wanted to see.
Also, the air explanation doesn't...er...hold water. Other posters have noted that the mass of air that will fit even in fully inflated lungs is only about (off the top of my head, now) about two or three grams. Plus, as an AC astutely noted, Archimedes would have a problem with this explanation. The air in the lungs won't have any effect on the measured weight of the person, because it's displacing an equal mass of air around the body.
~Idarubicin
The brazil nut experiment reminded me of this fascinating result. If you shake a container of granular material, the granular material spontaneously collects together in one place.
The same page also has a cool video of granular eruption.
We really found a significant amount of methane and it depended a lot on what feed had been given to the cows. Since methane is one of the most significant green house gasses (much more potent per gram than CO2, just less of it), we could make recommendations for feed to help lessen the outgassing.
The other big source of methane is rotting vegetation in swamps. Often a swamp will have little flames rising over it as the methane burns, creating a lot of legends of ghosts and swamp monsters. Because you get a lot of rotting vegetation in the lakes created by large dams, big hydro projects create almost as much a greenhouse effect as fossil fuel plans creating the same amount of electricty, although this diminishes over time, unlike with fossil fuels.