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It's funny. Laugh. Science

Science's Limits Are Only Self-Imposed 53

Posted by michael from the there-is-no-spoon dept.
Tristfardd writes "The Independent has a fine article on ridiculous experiments, some of which really are ridiculous, while others have interesting ramifications. If only the article gave links for viewing the rotating frog or the film on self-trepanation."
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Science's Limits Are Only Self-Imposed More

Science's Limits Are Only Self-Imposed

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  • As for the 'soul' experiment... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by floW enoL ( 312121 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @03:10PM (#10790529)
    The article forgot to mention that there was indeed a plausible explanation for the 21 grams lost after each person died. No matter how much one exhales, there is always air left in one's body. However, when you die, your lungs relax and thus expel that final bit of air, hence making your corpse a little bit lighter.
    • 21 grams' worth? Take a deep breath, really deep. Air is 1.029 Kg/m**3 (at 70F). For 21 grams, that's .0204 cubic metres, or 20,408 cubic centimetres, or about 10 1992 Honda Accord engines' displacement worth.
    • Air weighs, give or take depending on the gasses, about 1.2 milligrams per cubic centimeter. To drop 21 grams, you would need to exhale over 25,000 cubic centimeters of gas.
    • Air has a density at STP of 0.0013 g/cm^3. A pair of large, adult human lungs can hold as much as 6000 cm^3 of air. That's only 7.8 grams assuming the lungs TOTALLY collapse.

      Not that I actually believe the results of the experiment, but this explaination alone seems inadequate.
      =Smidge=

    • Re:As for the 'soul' experiment... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I believe someone named Archimedes might have an objection to that statement.
    • And why should exhaling air change the weight of the corpse at all?

    • Re:As for the 'soul' experiment... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @05:01PM (#10791846) Journal
      The article forgot to mention that there was indeed a plausible explanation for the 21 grams lost after each person died.

      I'm going with the plausible explanation of

      his instruments weren't very precise;

      he saw a loss in weight in only four of the six patients--the others gained weight; and

      he had a result in mind that he wanted to see.

      Also, the air explanation doesn't...er...hold water. Other posters have noted that the mass of air that will fit even in fully inflated lungs is only about (off the top of my head, now) about two or three grams. Plus, as an AC astutely noted, Archimedes would have a problem with this explanation. The air in the lungs won't have any effect on the measured weight of the person, because it's displacing an equal mass of air around the body.

      • Re:As for the 'soul' experiment... (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        he saw a loss in weight in only four of the six patients--the others gained weight

        Obviously, the scientific explanation is that two of the six patients absorbed the souls of the other four.

    • for the 21 grams lost after each person died

      I would suspect that this is the weight of the superstition and beliefs that disappear once the dead person discovers that there is no afterlife...

  • I've been a science fair judge for a few years here in Brevard County. One of the projects I saw (but didn't get to judge), was finding the effects of yohimbe on clams. The student had done a very good job, one variable and she even had a control group (don't get me started on the quality of most science fair projects!).

    The results: feeding yohimbe to clams made them reproduce faster!

  • Frog levitation... (Score:5, Informative)

    by wanerious ( 712877 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @03:26PM (#10790682) Homepage
    I'll pimp myself out --- here's the link to the project:

    Floating Frogs [sci.kun.nl]

    • In the movies it almost looks like the frog is in a liquid rather than floating in air. Perhaps the camera should move back and forth a bit and/or up and down to offer more perspective (paralax).

    • Re:Frog levitation... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      From the floating frogs page:

      "The small frog looked comfortable inside the magnet and, afterwards, happily joined its fellow frogs in a biology department."

      I'm fairly sure that if anyone had actually asked the frog's opinion, they'd find it may not have been too happy about the "biology department" part...
  • The sorting issue as defined in the Brazil nut experiment came up recently while I was on a field survey of some land in Nevada. It was a mapping project and we kept coming across areas known as "Desert pavement". This area of the desert experiences the same sorting activity when water or wind is added to the mix.

    Though this seems a bit trivial, it has very serious implications for later rain events. This sorting makes the soil mostly impervious to water and contributes to some of the deadly flood event
    • The result is only one of a number of odd things in granular flow studies. It's still a very poorly understood set of physics, but with a lot of applications. Mixing products, including drugs, often requires understanding granular flows, for example.

  • Trepanation Howto (Score:2, Interesting)

    by HavokDevNull ( 99801 )

    http://www.bmezine.com/news/people/A10101/trepan/ [bmezine.com]

    With pictures as well :)

  • Trenpnashun (Score:5, Funny)

    by furry_marmot ( 515771 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @03:54PM (#10791043) Homepage
    I non't recomnednd self-treepinashin. 'cuz ow.

  • Floating Frogs? Sure, we've got those. (Score:5, Informative)

    by IpsissimusMarr ( 672940 ) * on Thursday November 11, 2004 @03:58PM (#10791105) Journal
    Here in my department at FSU [fsu.edu] we are fortunate enough to have the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory [fsu.edu], which develops the stongest magnets on the planet. Couple this with a professor with a sense of humor and you get .... That right! A Frog floating in a magnetic field! Along with golf balls, dice, and other things. When we asked him why he says, because you can. :) Check out the movies:

    http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/science/levitation/ [fsu.edu]
    • I saw this on tv a couple times, I think. Fun, and yet very weird. Scientists need to have more fun, it would be good for creativity, and creativity brings new ideas (instead of support for current ones).
  • Check out www.trepan.com. They have a movie about their organization, which unfortuately does not show a trepanation.

  • Soul experiment was bad science (Score:5, Insightful)

    by merdark ( 550117 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @04:23PM (#10791421)
    The soul experiment was terribly bad science, and from it we can only conclude that the man who performed it believed in a soul, and hence found that.

    Details can be found here:
    http://www.snopes.com/religion/soulweight.a sp

    Some of the short points are:
    * small sample size of 4 cases
    * the results varied widely
    * deciding upon the exact time of death is no easy task

    All in all, the experiment proves nothing.
  • I saw the video of the magnetically levitated frog a few years ago. Though high magnetic foelds might have adverse affects on the bogy, the frog was there floating in an enclosure.

    I'll try to dig it up and post on mac.com later unless someone beats me to it.

  • More fun with grains (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blether ( 817276 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @05:07PM (#10791898)

    The brazil nut experiment reminded me of this fascinating result [utwente.nl]. If you shake a container of granular material, the granular material spontaneously collects together in one place.

    The same page also has a cool video of granular eruption.

  • the film on self-trepanation.

    Chances are it'll feature on the Darwin Awards soon enough for everyone.

    -Adam
  • Anything that a scientist can calculate, he or she will. Einstein calculated in his youth that putting his socks on in the morning and taking them off again at night would occupy him some hundreds of hours during the course of his life, and thereafter went sockless.

    Yes, but did he calculate the time wasted dating new girls from scratch due to his foot oder?

  • Got Napkins? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )
    If you have a sensitive disposition, you would be wise to skip straight to the next topic. Trepanation (cutting a hole in the skull to relieve pressure) was practised by the ancient Egyptians. In the 1960s, Joey Mellen and Amanda Feilding decided to try it in the hope that it would "expand their consciousness". Unable to find any doctors willing to perform the operation, they each did it on themselves...

    Yeah, "expand" all over the floor.

  • Bravo! I love this kind of article, and wish there were far more of them.

    We in the sciences need to fight our tendency to suppress the embarrassing history of mistaken scoffing; where new discoveries are rejected because if they were real, they'd make the scientific community look like fools. Suppress? Yes. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And it may not be conscious suppression, but the effects are the same. If we take a detailed look at the history of science, it's quite f

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