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An archive celebrating funny and silly scientific publications, because
- the scientific method is our best way to get at the truth
- scientific progress is nonlinear
- great science thrives on creativity and novelty
The wacky experiments of today might just lead to the great discoveries of tomorrow!
From the Recreational Science podcast. Browse the articles here.
Categories: anatomy, anthropology, animal behavior, chemistry, ethics & society, food & cooking, language & communication, medicine, microbiology, neuroscience, physics, physiology, psychology, sports & entertainment, transportation
Anatomy
- Yes gentlemen, size does matter. A team of scientists (all male, of course) showed female participants computer generated, nude male figures with varying penis sizes, body shape, and height, and asked the women to evaluate the figures on attractiveness. They found that penis size did influence male attractiveness, but in interesting ways. Discussed on S01E10.
Anthropology
- Making turkeys exercise can teach us human history. A few anthropologists wondered whether human leg bone structure reflects how much we exercise. How did they study this? Make turkeys workout on treadmills and analyze their bones, of course. Discussed on S01E17.
- Chimps recognize each other by their butts. Also, humans are pretty good at recognizing butts. A couple of scientists showed college students and chimps images of female human and chimp faces, butts, and feet, to determine how humans and chimpanzees process and recognize these images. Discussed on S01E21.
Animal Behavior
- Chickens can be trained to appreciate human beauty. A group of researchers trained chickens to be attracted to human faces and found that the chickens had the same exact preferences for faces as college students.
- Dogs align their bodies to the earth’s magnetic field while pooping. A team of German scientists recruited dog owners to carefully examine their dogs while they poop and discovered that while pooping, dogs align their bodies along the north-south axis when the earth’s magnetic field is stable. Discussed on S01E08.
- Bat fellatio increases copulation time. A group of researchers videotaped and carefully analyzed bat mating behavior and found that female bats frequently engaged in fellatio, which strongly correlated with longer copulation time.
- Goats may or may not be afraid of air force helicopters. It’s unclear. A group of scientists had the Dutch Air Force fly combat helicopters above goats and looked for changes in behavior, cortisol levels, and heart rate in the goats. Discussed on S01E07.
- Elephants yawn and it might be contagious. Might be. A group of scientists videotaped elephants for 47 nights using an infrared camera to determine whether they yawn. The answer is yes (but not that frequently). Discussed on S01E08.
- Octopuses play catch by themselves when they get bored. A couple of neuroscientists decided to record octopuses housed in a tank for around 93 days and observed that they play with tube caps for fun. Discussed in S01E18.
Chemistry
- Can you unboil a hardboiled egg? A group of biochemists discovered that hardboiled egg whites can actually be quite easily unboiled. Discussed on S01E12.
Ethics & Society
- Eating meat objectively makes you immoral. Scientists fed beef to college students and found that afterwards, the students developed more immoral opinions of cows.
- Kids think bacon is a plant. A team of psychologists interviewed 176 four- to seven-year-olds from an American metropolitan area and found that roughly half of them think that meat come from plants and do not think animals are things we eat. Discussed on S01E09.
- Ethicists may not be all that ethical. Are ethicists ethical? To find out, a philosopher went to academic libraries to see if people who study ethics were more likely to steal books. Discussed on S01E17.
- The presence of Batman makes people more prosocial. A group of psychologists wondered why pregnant women do not often get offered seats by people on the subway. Turns out, it’s the lack of Batman. If the Dark Knight is also on the subway, pregnant women are much more likely to be offered seats. Discussed on S01E18.
Food & Cooking
- Yes, double dipping is unsanitary. Scientists investigated whether double dipping actually contaminates various dips (salsa, chocolate sauce, and cheese dip) with oral bacteria.
- People can’t tell pâté and dog food apart. A team of scientists and food critics wondered if people can tell apart dog food from fancy pâté, liverwurst, and SPAM, so they asked some friends and colleagues to blind taste-test each of these different food items. Turns out, the answer is no: people cannot correctly distinguish dog food from these human dishes. Discussed on S01E20.
Language & Communication
- Manspreading in photos gets you Tinder likes. A team of psychologists and business administrators found that nonverbal displays epitomized by manspreading are beneficial for people on speed dates and dating apps.
- Let’s explain mansplaining. Does mansplaining actually exist, and if so, why? Why do men engage in this heinous act? Two female scientists investigated these questions and looked at whether mansplaining can be explained by the better-than-average effect and the interpretation bias. Discussed on S01E16.
- Bees on cocaine dance more exuberantly. A group of apiologists wondered if bees enjoy cocaine as much as people, so they gave bees some cocaine and monitored their behavior. Well, they found that bees do indeed enjoy cocaine, which causes them to exaggerate more when communicating through dance. Discussed on S01E14.
Medicine
- Teenage boys often pick their nose, and some are ashamed of it. A couple of psychiatrists investigated how often high school boys engage in nose picking using a very comprehensive survey.
- Shocking yourself with electricity is not a good way to treat venomous snake bites. Case report: a rattlesnake owner and frequent venomous snake-bite victim convinced his neighbor to shock him with a car battery to treat his most recent snake bite. His doctors describe his subsequent hospital stay.
- Expensive placebos work better than cheap ones. Two independent studies showed that expensive placebo drugs work better than cheap ones in reducing pain from electric shocks and in improving motor symptoms in Parkinson’s Disease patients. A third study showed that Spanish internet users are more willing to believe that more expensive fake drugs work better to treat fake diseases when reviewing fake patient charts. Discussed on S01E11.
- Waber et al., 2008. Commercial features of placebo and therapeutic efficacy. Journal of the American Medical Association.
- Espay et al., 2015. Placebo effect of medication cost in Parkinson disease: a randomized double-blind study. Neurology.
- Diaz-Lago et al., 2023. Expensive seems better: The price of a non-effective drug modulates its perceived efficacy. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.
- Reanimating cadaver arms is a good way to test pumpkin carving safety. Pumpkin carving can lead to serious hand injuries. In this instant Halloween classic study, a few orthopedic surgeons tried to determine the safest knives to use for pumpkin carving. How did they do this? By carving pumpkins using reanimated cadaver arms with various knives, of course. Discussed on S01E15.
- Clowns are really good anxiolytic drugs for kids pre-surgery. A group of anesthesiologists examined whether clowns can help calm kids’ nerves before they underwent surgery. Another group went even further and tested whether clowns are better than anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) drugs at calming kids before surgery. The surgeons and surgical teams, unfortunately, did not appear to enjoy these experiments as much as the kiddos. Discussed on S01E21.
Microbiology
- Beards can be contaminated with bacteria, unless you wash them. A group of microbiologists suspected that their bearded colleagues were a contamination risk due to their facial hair and devised interesting experiments to test this. The experiments involved a lot of chickens, for some reason.
- Are farts sterile? Do they contain bacteria? As told by Dr. Kruszelnicki on his radio show, a surgical nurse asked him whether breaking wind during surgery breaks the sterile field of the operating room. Dr. Kruszelnicki investigated this question with a couple of microbiologists. Discussed on S01E13.
Neuroscience
- Roadkill animals might be dumber. A taxidermist with 3500 dead birds teamed up with a zoologist to determine whether birds killed by cars have smaller brains compared to the other dead birds in their collection. Discussed on S01E10.
- Scratching your left arm can relieve itch in your right arm if you use a mirror. A team of neurologists examined whether they can relieve itch in one arm by scratching the other, with the help of mirrors.
- Dog owners are pretty good at identifying their dogs by smell. Dog owners were asked to distinguish their dog’s odor with that of an unfamiliar dog, and they were surprisingly accurate. Cat owners? Not so much. Discussed on S01E11.
- Pianos taste sweet and brass horns taste bitter. A group of scientists tested whether people’s senses of taste and hearing “cross-streams.” Turns out, they kind of do. Discussed on S01E12.
- Some people dedicate brain cells to recognizing specific celebrities. Some neurosurgeons observed neuron activity in a group of patients when shown images of celebrities and famous structures. Surprisingly, they found that some individuals use a single neuron to recognize Jennifer Aniston and Halle Berry. Discussed on S01E16.
Physics
- When you need to drag sheep, choose wooden flooring. Sheep shearing is hazardous, in particular the sheep dragging step. Some scientists asked sheep shearers to drag sheep 400 times across different types of flooring to determine how best to make sheep dragging easier.
- You don’t swim slower in syrup. A swimmer and an engineer filled a swimming pool with syrup and asked professional and recreational swimmers to swim in it. The methods section is 10/10.
Physiology
- Swallowed Legos take one to three days to pass. Kids often swallow small toys and worried parents always want to know how long it takes for the swallowed object to pass. Inspired by the noble history of self-experimentation in medicine, six dedicated pediatricians took it upon themselves to figure this out and reported the results in this hilariously-written article. Discussed on S01E19.
Psychology
- Drinking fake alcohol makes you find yourself more attractive. Some scientists tricked a group of people into taste testing fake alcohol and discovered that the participants found themselves to be more attractive afterwards.
- Can you predict who uses iPhones and who uses Android phones? Some psychologists wondered whether there are fundamental personality differences between iPhone and Android users, so they conducted a survey. They then took the data and developed a machine learning model to predict who uses what phone. Discussed on S01E14.
- Situations that arouse fear also arouse sexual attraction. A couple of social psychologists asked their attractive female associate to approach single men on bridges. They found that men approached on a scary suspension bridge were much more likely to show their sexual attraction towards the female associate in various ways. Discussed on S01E15.
Sports & Entertainment
- Are bearded men better at fighting? A few evolutionary psychologists wondered if beards provide men with an advantage during fights. They analyzed ten years worth of UFC fights to find out. Another group wondered if beards specifically act as a cushion to lessen the impact of strikes to the face during fights. They meticulously measured the amount of force various mammalian hairs, glued to fake human bones, can absorb. Discussed on S01E19.
- Dixson et al., 2018. Contest competition and men’s facial hair: beards may not provide advantages in combat. Evolution and human behavior.
- Beseris et al., 2020. Impact Protection Potential of Mammalian Hair: Testing the Pugilism Hypothesis for the Evolution of Human Facial Hair. Integrative organismal biology.
Transportation
- Does cannabis use impair your ability to ride a bicycle? A team of scientists wanted to find evidence that marijuana use impairs automobile driving ability, but such an experiment would be unsafe and unethical. So they did the next best thing: recruited chronic cannabis users and asked them to ride bikes through an obstacle course after smoking joints. Discussed on S01E20.
