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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]
For a forensic pathologist this actually seems like a somewhat valuable piece of information to have. I'd say that's the one paper on that list with some amount of value.
Um, I've been in many bar fights.
Never once has there been a full beer anywhere nearby.
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.
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/
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
Sounds a lot like the Ig Nobel Prizes... http://improbable.com/ig/
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.
And yet, if you had taken the time to find the cited article, you would have learned that EMPTY bottles are significantly sturdier. The reasons why are left as an exercise to the reader. Being sturdy has an impact (pun intended) on their utility in blunt-force attacks (again, intended), but mass is arguably more important. Both empty and full bottles were found to have breaking thresholds higher than the human cranium, and so could be used to cause serious injury.
It's actually not that absurd a scientific question, given that the answer has important legal and forensic implications. And no, Virginia, the bottles you see used in Hollywood movie bar fights are not actually made of glass.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
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.
Answer: Empty bottles are sturdier, but full bottles have more mass. Both can exert enough force to crack a human skull.
Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B8CY1-4TVY5PW-1&_user=10&_coverDate=04%2F30%2F2009&_rdoc=8&_fmt=high&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%2340101%232009%23999839996%23941076%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=40101&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=16&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=63643bee356bcb486ed2d2213a3895e2
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
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.
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?
They missed Paul Heckbert's classic SIGGRAPH 88 paper, "Ray Tracing Jell-O brand Gelatin".
You may have been thinking about this... Submarine flatulence along the Hikurangi margin of New Zealand: Linking geochemical methane anomalies in the water column with hydroacoustic evidence of bubble transport, Geophysical Research Abstracts,Vol. 10, EGU2008-A-04390, 2008SRef-ID: 1607-7962/gra/EGU2008-A-04390 EGU General Assembly 2008 Author(s) 2008 K. Faure et al.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Both empty and full bottles were found to have breaking thresholds higher than the human cranium..."
Being a homebrewer, I know there's a hell of a lot of different beer bottles out there. But they're also wrong. In grad school I had a roommate who lost a bet with a friend: he bet that he could break a beer bottle over his own head, which he successfully did, and not bleed. He lost the nickel bet and had to have a third graduate student stitch up his scalp.
Also reminds me of "The pot game." Inspired by a Simpsons episode, two grad students put pots on their heads and run head first at each other. Loser is the one who falls down, bleeds, or breaks something.
Grad students drink heavily. Very heavily.
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.
There's probably some real value in most of these. Take one of the most ridiculous sounding - the bat fellatio paper:
If there's a natural selection based reason why some bats reproduce better if the males can last longer, that's evidence for sex based selection being able to possibly produce complex secondary behaviors that may not be fully explainable by 'regular' natural selection. The ongoing argument about whether only sexually based selection can account for the rapid increase in pre-human/human brain size is a genuinely significant research area, and this could help craft new studies on that question. Maybe it just looks significant because human sex matters more to most humans than bat sex, but then, that argument fits most biological science.
Or maybe the bats are exhibiting a learned behavior, found only in some populations of the species. I'd say it's valuable information that creatures with such small brains might have non-instinctive sexual behaviors, and ones that suggest they are motivated by enjoyment rather than reproductive instincts.
Of course, the study is flawed in that it apparently hasn't addressed the known interspecies Bat-fellatio dynamics involving robins...
Who is John Cabal?
"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