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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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, the study on honeybee dance was looking at the effect of dopamine levels in the bee's brain. How do you raise dopamine levels? Cocaine is actually a pretty direct and clean method of doing that. Bee dance is a complex social and communicative behavior that's used for one be to tell others the location of food sources. Looking at it can tell you a lot about what's going on in the central nervous system of the bee.
I hardly think the researcher would've wanted the paperwork, oversight and hassle needed for using a scheduled drug in research just for fun.
But, just to reassure people that this doesn't start a trend, I live about 20 miles from where the research was done. And I've seen no increase in the local bees out on the street corner jonesing for a toot.
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?