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The 10 Most Absurd Scientific Papers
Lanxon writes "It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research."
...is really just navel fluff; no military personnel were harmed in the making of this submission. [Insert witty rejoinder here]
If I want top ten lists, I'll look at digg.
Anyone who's been in a bar fight knows that whether they are sturdier or not, full ones make much better blunt instruments due to their higher mass.
Best Slashdot Co
... Is a beer bottle actually sufficient to crack a human skull? I want to know!
Swearing as a response to pain. (NeuroReport)
Helping to understand the pain response can help develop treatments for pain. Knowing why someone would swear instead of just saying, "Ow," might provide some insight into the pathways that deal with pain response.
Intermittent access to beer promotes binge-like drinking in adolescent but not adult Wistar rats. (Alcohol)
Rats are often used as models for humans to investigate addiction. Finding out where their addictive patterns differ is important to evaluate other addiction research.
Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull? (Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine)
These kinds of studies are used to help determine insurance rates and in some cases to redesign products or packaging. A new pub glass design in the UK that uses resin to prevent a shattering effect is hoped to decrease the number of dangerous cuts caused by people breaking glasses over someone's head, or breaking and then using the glass as a weapon.
The nature of navel fluff. (Medical Hypotheses)
Some things are just so obviously important that they need no explanation.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
That's what I call flexible.
TFA is pretty short - mostly a list, with a short paragraph above it. The link posted in the summary isn't the original, and they don't have links to the articles, just to the /original/ article, which then has links to more on each paper.
Optimising the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human taste panel. (Journal of Animal Physiology and Animal Nutrition)
Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behaviour. (Journal of Experimental Biology)
Swearing as a response to pain. (NeuroReport)
Pigeons can discriminate "good" and "bad" paintings by children. (Animal Cognition)
The "booty call": a compromise between men's and women's ideal mating strategies. (The Journal of Sex Research)
Intermittent access to beer promotes binge-like drinking in adolescent but not adult Wistar rats. (Alcohol)
Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time. (PLoS One)
More information than you ever wanted: does Facebook bring out the green-eyed monster of jealousy? (Cyberpsychology and Behavior)
Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull? (Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine)
The nature of navel fluff. (Medical Hypotheses)
If any of those look interesting, here's the link that actually links: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/category/ncbi-rofl/
They left out "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed." [Published in "Weatherwise," October 1975, p. 217.]. A paper published by Kurt Vonnegut's esteemed brother Bernard Vonnegut (for which he later won an Ig Nobel award).
Visualize Whirled Peas
Or you could just read the source for these sorts of stories going back twenty years.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
My personal favorite: "A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists" by T. Grim in Oikos From the Abstract: .... I show that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower numbers of papers,
total citations, and citations per paper (a surrogate measure of paper quality) ... leisure time social
activities might influence the quality and quantity of scientific work and may be potential sources of publication and
citation biases.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Sounds a lot like the Ig Nobel Prizes... http://improbable.com/ig/
you must understand the concept of an "icon".
factor 966971: 966971
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v93/i20/e208002
/*No comment*/ #No comment
The Annals of Improbable Research, a published journal, has been doing this since 1995. http://improbable.com/
- Current Subscriber
-- Has been since 1995
---Has every issue published since the start
---- Homemade zygotes. Just like Mom’s. BOX 48.
How about this one? Fire can cause a skyscraper to collapse at free fall speed into it's own footprint. Should be at the top of the list.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You can't think of an icon for science that doesn't involve one man - a socialist and a likely plagiarist?
Quirks and Quarks interviewed the scientist about his paper on "Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior" back in Jan 2009. You can download the interview here, in mp3 or ogg format.
- "Pigeons can discriminate "good" and "bad" paintings by children": does that mean there is such a thing as universal good taste ? Discernible by animals ? Even if not good or bad, do pigeons actually have artistic tastes ? if so, how is it formed ? sounds a somewhat worthwhile study to me... May just be a fluke, though.
- "Swearing as a response to pain": I actually read a summary of that one... swearing makes pain more bearable, funnily enough. I'm holding out for the complementary study: "does taunting make it hurt more ?"
- "Intermittent access to beer promotes binge-like drinking in adolescent but not adult Wistar rats": again, kinda interesting, might be insightful (- suggested mod for my post) for humans too. would alcohol consumption and/or alcohol-binge related problems actually decrease if alcohol was more readily available ? I'm kinda puzzled by the youth alcohol situation in France vs the UK vs the US. It'd be kinda interesting to know which is the best objectively, before ideological pollution. Starting with animals sounds logical.
and so on.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Can you think of an icon for Microsoft that doesn't involve Bill Gates as a Borg?
Fucking get over it.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Whoever got a study funded that allowed them to buy large amounts of bottled beer on someone else's dime was a very smart person indeed.
As others pointed out, some articles don't even require much thinking to see their importance. Others, while causing our inner teens to giggle, not only are still science but also have implications in our lives.
"Bizarre", yes. "Absurd"? Not really.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
This week on MythBusters: 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?'
Cut to shots of a sprint-loaded arm smashing bottles on the head of poor Buster. Quick cut to reaction shot of Cary and Grant.
Later in the show... Adam and Jamie get to the bottom of our navel fluff mystery.
Eh, Einstein really was a pretty damn great scientist though and made a bunch of critical contributions to our understanding of the world (from the quantum nature of light/photoelectric effect, to special relativity, to general relativity, to founding condensed matter physics). If you want something to get up in arms about, the worshipfulness of Stephen Hawking is probably more annoying since his contributions to physics are really fairly minor compared to his media portrayal. Not to say they are totally insignificant, just that he is breathlessly referred to as the greatest living scientist today in programs on the Discovery channel, when in reality, he's a good scientist who just happens to be physically disabled and a good popular science writer. The public fascination is more related to the latter two facts than the former.
Scientific studies performed without a reason have historically produced results that we can apply to practical applications. This doesnt' always happen and then someone comes around saying "but why are we wasting money on X worthless study"....but what if that study gave us some new piece of knowledge that helped us in some way? What if that study will help someone five, ten, fifteen, one-hundreed years from now?
So studies that seem worthless today may be great tomorrow. The studies may return immediate useful results. Then there is always - because we are curious and satisfying our curiousity and feeding our brains (we are explorers) is a good thing.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
It's a funny looking picture. How many famous scientists put out a picture like that? He is also one of the most recognizable faces in the science community. Yes there are more famous people - but do we know what they look like? How many of these scientists have multiple movies based on their lives? It's more then his political agenda.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
I built a model of a nuclear power plant for my science fair project in 7th grade. I would have won (aside from the fact that it wasn't really an experiment), except that the nuns decided I COULDN'T have done it myself and my Dad had to have helped, so I was DQ'd. Fine. Whatever.
Next year comes around, and my teachers asks me what I'm doing for the science fair. "Nothing - I'm not doing it."
"Yes, you are."
"But it's voluntary!"
"Not for you it isn't."
So I decided to fuck with the teacher and titled my experiment "The Aerodynamics of Paper Airplanes". I made 2 types, and tested them using a gravity drop and a rubber band launcher. I wound up coming in second place, and got an award from NASA at the county event. I can't help but think the nuns were feeling some mixed emotions.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
How about Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, discoverer of the ring-structure of benzene?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Barcelona, the most corrupt spanish region, has published in recent years astonishingly stupid papers (some have even won an Ig nobel prize or two). It has also been reported that various research papers have been faked so that they can justify that the money was "spent in I+D grants" when in reality the money ends in the pockets of some politic. I denounce that "scientific papers" as stupid as these are a malversation of our money, even when the money is [b]really[/b] spend in the study, and that there should exist measures to force "researchers" like those to return the money.
Papers like the infamous one about lack of feminazism in videogames (in spanish) look like the job of a bad clown, and someone might even smirk at them, until you realize that some people were paid tens of thousands of euros for writing 400 pages of pretty bad femicommunist propaganda. Stop the corruption in academia! Stop the pork! If someone want to know if insects become confused when listening japanese media reproduced backwards, they can pay the study of their own pocket.
This is a PhD thesis in Germany. Has a German wikipedia link:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penisverletzungen_bei_Masturbation_mit_Staubsaugern
sounds like good mythbuster stuff to test!
"Towards the simulation of E-commerce"
http://www.tektalk.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/herbert_schlangemann_towards_the_simulation_of_e_commerce.pdf
"PlusPug: A Methodology for the Improvement of Local-Area Networks"
https://sites.google.com/site/herbertschlangemann/Home/Herbert_Schlangemann_PlusPugAMethodologyfortheImprovementofLocal-AreaNetworks.pdf?attredirects=0
New Economic Perspectives
who mock what they can't understand...almost undermines my faith in democracy, but then palindrones are only ~22% of the u.s. population:-}
Its easy for the ignorant to mock, but I can see merit in all of these papers:
1. Optimising the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human taste panel. (Journal of Animal Physiology and Animal Nutrition)
Cats can't talk. Humans can. If humans and cats have at all similar reactions to stimuli, then why not use the species that can give you verbal feedback?
2. Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behaviour. (Journal of Experimental Biology)
How do you find out exactly how cocaine affects the nervous system? Keep the cocaine the same, try it on different nervous systems...
3. Swearing as a response to pain. (NeuroReport)
Why would pain cause a person to choose a socially frowned upon word to yell out, even if nobody is even there? The parts of the brain that deal with physical pain and those that deal with speech are physically separate, so its quite interesting to ask how they can be connected.
4. Pigeons can discriminate "good" and "bad" paintings by children. (Animal Cognition)
It should be clear that examining how animals view art can give clues to its origin in humans.
5. The "booty call": a compromise between men's and women's ideal mating strategies. (The Journal of Sex Research)
This sounds like game theory; a few citations down the line the conclusions in this paper could be informing international diplomacy.
6. Intermittent access to beer promotes binge-like drinking in adolescent but not adult Wistar rats. (Alcohol)
Yeah, those dumb scientists. Why the hell would anybody want to investigate the causes of binge drinking?
7. Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time. (PLoS One)
Bats suck each other off? But you were told at school animals only had sex for procreation weren't you?
8. More information than you ever wanted: does Facebook bring out the green-eyed monster of jealousy? (Cyberpsychology and Behavior)
More game theory. This one has even more direct applications (ever had facebook drama kick off in a workplace?)
9. Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull? (Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine)
I suspect people in the law enforcement and medical professions might find this of use.
10. The nature of navel fluff. (Medical Hypotheses)
This fluff accumulates right next to peoples skins, so its probably a good idea we know what it is.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
There's actually a "Journal of Sex Research"?!? Now I really know I'm in the wrong line of work! "But officer, I wasn't cruising for hookers, I was just recruiting test subjects!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I know it's a typo, but for some reason I immediately thought of submarines farting underwater.
"Mechanosensitivity of mouse tracheal ciliary beat frequency" WTF?
They missed Paul Heckbert's classic SIGGRAPH 88 paper, "Ray Tracing Jell-O brand Gelatin".
Yeah, I feel much better now that I've seen a typical huckster website hawking human remains, with pictures of a pile of assorted bones (are they all from the same person at least?) overflowing what appears to be some kind of pirate-style treasure box.
Some things are better off not not knowing.
"Sex Researchers: Taking the fun out of the last thing we hadn't already since 1962."
"Sex researchers do it rigorously and with copious bookkeeping."
"Sex researchers do it in double blind studies."
"Official sex researcher. Spread your legs for SCIENCE!"
The enemies of Democracy are
the "Climategate" models are indeed broken, because they have failed to accurately predict the weather in the last eight years.
Climate and weather are different things. It would help your arguments if you sounded much like you knew the difference.
You also display an ignorance of statistics, I'm afraid. 8 years is too short a time to talk about a high confidence level. The much vaunted "cooling trend" is actually perfectly reasonable within a warming model. But to discuss it requires something called "statistics," which I detect will overwhelm you. LOL
I recommend this page
Currently hooked on AMP
No, you post AC because you know your "science" is not valid. The bulk of the "critical" response to climate science is built on shaky evidence and the attempts to discredit the models used by climate scientists to make their predictions. Big swooping claims about how the ice cores show that (apparently) CO2 lags behind temperature on the graphs must mean that the connection is reversed - it gets warm so more CO2 is trapped, when more than a casual glance at the science shows you how the CO2 readings have an offset, and an uncertainty in time accuracy that puts them right on top of the temperature line. The sceptics handily ignore this (which is pointed out in the real science), hoping that people will just look at the graph and not how it is plotted. There are dozens of instances like this.
The fact that you don;t really know the difference between weather and climate suggests a reason you posted AC: you don;t know what you're talking about.
Scientists are more than willing to listen to genuine claims against them, and will adjust and test their models and evidence as they needs to. Just because they easily discredit the bulk of the sceptics through non-science and faulty reasoning doesn't mean they refuse to listen to any criticism. The arguments need to have actual merit.
It's the sort of disconnect that network TV considers a "fair coverage" issue if they put a scientist on the "pro-warming" side, and a businessman/politician/lobbyist on the "con" side for a debate on the subject. Their arguments do not have equal merit.
Christman’s previous research found mixed-handedness is not uncommon among string players, who must tightly synchronize the actions of their two hands while performing. He writes that in Hendrix’s case, this trait allowed the guitarist to simultaneously use “his right hand to fret the strings, and his left hand to pluck the strings and manipulate the pickup selector and tone, volume and tremolo (i.e. ‘whammy bar’) controls on the body of his instruments.” In this way, Hendrix managed to “generate otherworldly howls, shrieks and siren-like sounds on the guitar,” most famously on his irreverent rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner recorded at the Woodstock Festival.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/the-brain-that-gave-us-purple-haze-9680/
I'm surprised that no-one has yet mentioned Kees Moeliker's paper "The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/09/gay_duck_honour/
'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers...
It may sound quite funny, and I am sure most scientists can see the humour; in fact, they probably made those titles for that reason. That is not to say that the research undertaken is not valid or serves a useful purpose; all branches of science are littered with humour - just take concepts like quarks and their names, QCD, "The eight-fold path" etc; the many scientific names in biology that translate into something witty (or sometimes insulting).
I suspect when people make fun of this kind of things, it is often because they don't understand what science and research are about. They use it to argue that "we shouldn't waste money on studying ..." - as if we could a priori determine which subjects are going to give us the answers we need when we need them to solve an urgent problem. My favourite, stupid comment is one about why we waste state-funding on researching whether "cows' burping and farting changes climate" - considering that methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and the fact that almost all methane occurring in our atmosphere is of a biological origin, it is actually a very relevant thing to study whether an average ruminant such as the cow produces it in sufficient quantities to have an effect.
To an objective, scientific researcher there can be no preconceived opinions; isn't that the very thing the so-called climate-skeptics are blaming climate researchers for - that they are prejudiced against alternative explanations for global warming?
"The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline"
for those who never heard of it from 1946 by the good Doctor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline