The 10 Most Absurd Scientific Papers 127
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."
TFA (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [discovermagazine.com]
Re:TFA (Score:3, Informative)
More accurately, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/03/10/ncbi-rofl-top-10-absurd-papers-from-2009/ [discovermagazine.com]
You could RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Ig Nobel Prizes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Wired is 15 years late..... (Score:5, Informative)
The Annals of Improbable Research, a published journal, has been doing this since 1995. http://improbable.com/ [improbable.com]
- Current Subscriber
-- Has been since 1995
---Has every issue published since the start
---- Homemade zygotes. Just like Mom’s. BOX 48.
Interview about bees on cocaine (Score:3, Informative)
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 [www.cbc.ca], in mp3 or ogg format.
Re:So.... (Score:3, Informative)
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 [sciencedirect.com]
Ray Tracing Jell-O (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Naval fluff? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why aren't.. (Score:3, Informative)
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 [skepticalscience.com]
Re:Why aren't.. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Hendrix used both hands to play guitar (Score:1, Informative)
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/
Thiotimoline (Score:3, Informative)
"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 [wikipedia.org]