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Continue reading →: Eating meat makes you quantifiably immoral, according to scienceTo some people, eating meat is immoral. That’s a subjective opinion. However, does eating meat make you immoral objectively? Some scientists fed beef to college students and found that afterwards, the students developed quantifiably more immoral opinions of cows. Lu and Tirth discuss this meaty study on S01E05 of the Recreational Science podcast (timecode 13:39): Lu:…
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Continue reading →: Fake alcohol, real confidence: drinking fake booze makes you find yourself more attractiveAfter consuming alcohol, people tend to find others and themselves more attractive. However, do people also find themselves more attractive after drinking fake alcohol? Some scientists tricked a group of people into taste testing fake alcohol and discovered that the participants found themselves to be more attractive afterwards. Lu and…
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Continue reading →: Humans don’t swim slower in syrupIf you replace the water in a swimming pool with syrup and convince some of your colleagues to swim in it, will they swim slower or faster? A swimmer and an engineer filled a swimming pool with syrup and timed several professional and recreational swimmers doing laps. Using rigorous scientific…
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Continue reading →: When you need to drag sheep, choose wooden flooringSheep shearing is hard, especially the step where you drag sheep around. What type of flooring is easiest to drag sheep on? There’s only one way to find out. Some scientists asked sheep shearers to drag sheep 400 times across different types of flooring to determine how best to make…
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Continue reading →: How common is pathological nose picking, or rhinotillexomania?Do teenage boys pick their nose? How often and why? Is it pathological? A couple of psychiatrists investigated how often high school boys engage in nose picking. Lu and Tirth discuss this informative medical survey on S01E02 of the Recreational Science podcast (timecode 22:50): Tirth: The title of this study is, and you may need a…
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Continue reading →: Chickens can be trained to appreciate human beautyHow do humans learn what’s beautiful in a face? Can chickens be trained to find beauty in human faces the way humans do? 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.…
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Continue reading →: Shocking yourself with electricity is not a good way to treat venomous snake bitesWhat do you do if a venomous rattlesnake bites you? Should you try shocking yourself with a car battery? A rattlesnake owner and frequent venomous snake-bite victim convinced his neighbor to shock him with his pickup truck to treat his most recent snake bite. Doctors describe his subsequent hospital stay.…
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Continue reading →: The importance of foreplay in fruit bat copulationFruit bats engage in fellatio, obviously, but does this sexual behavior decrease or increase total copulation time? A group of researchers videotaped and carefully analyzed bat mating behavior and found that fellatio strongly correlated with longer copulation time. Lu and Tirth discuss this incredible study on S01E01 of the Recreational Science…
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Continue reading →: “Water and soap” wash oncogene-containing extra-chromosomal DNA out of cancer cell nucleiMy work on the mitotic inheritance of extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) in cancer is now available as a preprint on bioRxiv (the study has now been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry). In this post, I try to summarize the scientific process and a few of the main points of…
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Continue reading →: Six ways to do innovative researchOne of the most important things about being a great scientific researcher is to do experiments that other people are not doing. Rather than compete with other researchers working on the same thing, great scientists seek unique and innovative questions and ideas. I have found that there are in general…
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