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."
Some of them are probably cases of Corruption (Score:1, Interesting)
Barcelona, the most corrupt spanish region, has published in recent years astonishingly stupid papers (some have even won an Ig nobel prize or two). It has also been reported that various research papers have been faked so that they can justify that the money was "spent in I+D grants" when in reality the money ends in the pockets of some politic. I denounce that "scientific papers" as stupid as these are a malversation of our money, even when the money is [b]really[/b] spend in the study, and that there should exist measures to force "researchers" like those to return the money.
Papers like the infamous one about lack of feminazism in videogames [www.oei.es] (in spanish) look like the job of a bad clown, and someone might even smirk at them, until you realize that some people were paid tens of thousands of euros for writing 400 pages of pretty bad femicommunist propaganda. Stop the corruption in academia! Stop the pork! If someone want to know if insects become confused when listening japanese media reproduced backwards, they can pay the study of their own pocket.
Re:Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier (Score:3, Interesting)
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.