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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
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