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."
Naval fluff... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is really just navel fluff; no military personnel were harmed in the making of this submission. [Insert witty rejoinder here]
Re:Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Some of these might be interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's not THAT bad (Score:3, Insightful)
- "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.
Re:TOO MUCH EINSTEIN! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
I see value in them all (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I see value in them all (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Naval fluff... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like the Starship Troopers film, it's the difference between Infantry and Fleet.
The Air Force and Navy are both responsible for equipment that can end up costing millions - or billions - of dollars. What's the most expensive thing you ever figure a soldier in the Marines or Army ever used? An M1 Abrams tank costs about $6.2 million [globalsecurity.org], and even if you crash a tank [thosefunnypictures.com] it can probably be mostly salvaged. Meanwhile, the F-15 costs $43-55 million [globalsecurity.org], and when one goes down it tends to stay down and be unsalvageable.
Moreover, the Air Force and Navy both have stationary bases. Sure, a destroyer might have relatively cramped quarters, but an airbase is going to have nice accommodations. Invading a foreign country? One of the major tasks is to capture and secure their own airfields for your use.
The infantry, meanwhile, typically get stretched far, far away from the supply chain. When a C-130 brings a planeload of new supplies to the airfield, it has to then be loaded up on a truck and dodge enemy fire and IEDs to make it all the way to the forward base where the grunts are.
When the day comes that we have transporter technology, personal jetpacks, etc. - basically anything that (cheaply) allows for fast deploying and extracting of troops - then the Army and Marines will have more comfortable accommodations. Until then they have to be highly mobile and able to set up camp practically anywhere.
Re:Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier (Score:4, Insightful)
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...