While some people criticize the efforts put into these prosthetics, particularly in species that are not under threat of extinction, it is important to realize that these developments could help save a critical breeding member of an endangered species one day. Additionally, many of these techniques are brand new and by testing them on animals, researchers are developing useful insights to see if they may one day work on humans. If you end up losing a body part and get a bionic replacement twenty years from now, you might just have a cat or dog to thank for your top-of-the-line prosthetic.

Oscar the Cat

(Video Link)

Oscar lost his two rear legs in an accident with a combine harvester. After losing so much blood, his owners were told to expect the worst, but even after he survived the ordeal, their vet warned that cats rarely live happy lives with only two legs. Fortunately, he referred Oscars owners, Kate Allen and Mike Nolan to a veterinary surgeon who specializes in state-of-the-art animal medicine.

After looking at Oscar’s situation, Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick agreed to take on the new patient, surgically fitting him with implants that can eventually be attached to prosthetic paws. The surgery makes Oscar a notable kitty as he is the first cat to ever have prosthetic paws.

While the process was a success, Oscar’s paws haven’t yet been perfected for outdoor use. He has been made to be a house cat for the rest of his life, but really…that’s not all that bad now is it, especially when you consider how he was injured in the first place.

Storm the Dog

The first animal to receive such treatment though was Storm, a Belgian Sheperd, who lost his paw after it became infected with a tumor. The same vet that would later provide Oscar with his bionic paws, Noel Fitzpatrick, was the first to offer this service to any animal and Storm was the perfect candidate. Fitzpatrick says that he hopes his developments can eventually be used to help soldiers returning from Iraq and victims of the July 7^th bombings in London.

Naki’o the Dog

(Video Link)

Earlier this year, Naki’o became the first dog in the world to be fitted with a full set of bionic paws from Orthopets, a leader in the pet prosthetics industry. Far from just helping him walk easier, the paws are so well attached that he can now run and swim just as he did before the accident. Naki’o lost his paws due to severe frostbite after his previous owners abandoned him to fend for himself throughout the freezing winter in Nebraska. Despite the fact that the poor pup had to crawl on his stomach to move, he still found a loving adoptive family who worked tirelessly to raise the money to get Naki’o the prosthetics he desperately needed. Their efforts paid off as Naki’o is now thrilled to have his bionic paws and is eager to run, jump and fetch with his new family.

Boonie the Goat

(Video Link)

Boonie was a happy little goat, until he got tangled in a rope and broke his leg trying to escape back in 2008. Unfortunately, the break was so bad that his leg had to be amputated. Fortunately, Boonie’s owner cared enough about her little goat to get in touch with Orthopets, the same company that would later help Naki’o. He now happily frolics and forages with his own specially-designed leg.

Coal the Dog

Coal was eight years old in 2008, when his left paw had to be amputated due to cancer. Vets warned that he might have to be put down because his other legs were too weak to carry him. But his loving owner, Reg Walker, refused to accept this fate and instead shelled out more than $15,000 to get Coal his own bionic leg that was completely compatible with Coal’s tissue. The titanium alloy used is specially designed to mimic the dog’s skin so the natural skin and bone will seal with the metal implant without being rejected by the body. Veterinarians involved with the process are hopeful this new technique can be adapted to help bombing victims recover from their traumatic injuries much more quickly and easily.

Fuji the Dolphin

(Video Link)

Fuji was a popular inhabitant at the Okinawa aquarium where she lived…that is, until an unknown disease started eating away at her tail fin. To save her life, veterinarians had to amputate almost all of her tail. Unfortunately, for a dolphin, that is practically a death sentence in itself as it leaves them unable to swim, jump or dive in the water.

Fortunately, the Bridgestone tire company heard about poor Fuji and stepped in with a team of researchers dedicated to helping the little dolphin get back to her old hijinks. They tried design after design, carefully perfecting a prosthetic tail that Fuji would feel comfortable with that would also be strong enough to support her swimming. Eventually, they got it right and now Fuji is back in the limelight where she is most happy, swimming and jumping with a new lease on life.

Winter the Dolphin

Image via crimfants [Flickr]

While Fuji was the first dolphin to receive a prosthetic tail, Winter is certainly the most famous. In fact, after Winter received her prosthetic, a documentary was soon made about her, titled Winter, the Dolphin That Could, and not long after that, Warner Bros made a fictionalized version of the story starring Morgan Freeman, Dolphin Tale.

Just in case you haven’t seen either of the movies though, it all started when the three-month-old dolphin got tangled up in a crab trap line and ended up losing her tail and two vertebrae in the process. Like Fuji, she was left unable to swim. Fortunately, Hanger Orthopedic Group stepped forward to help provide her with a prosthetic. Eventually Winter learned to swim again and become a star attraction at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium.

Yu Chan the Sea Turtle

Images via Kawamura Gishi

Of course, dolphins aren’t the only critters that rely on their fins to swim. When Yu Chan was discovered without two front flippers, presumably due to a shark attack, the Sea Turtle Association of Japan stepped in to help her out with two prosthetic flippers. Many designs were tested, with the Association hoping to eventually develop fins that could be bionically attached to the animal, as the prosthetics will have to be very sturdy and attached quite tightly if they are to be expected to last throughout the rest of Yu Chan’s life, which could go on another 50 years.

Not only is the rescue a big deal for Yu Chan, but also for sea turtle enthusiasts throughout the world, as only one other sea turtle was ever fitted with a false flipper, but the attempt failed after her stump proved too small to hold the prosthetic.

Beauty the Eagle

Beauty lost her top beak due to a reckless poacher. She had difficulty preening her feathers, drinking and eating had become practically impossible for her until she was taken to a recovery center in Anchorage.

It took a full three years for researchers to develop a working artificial beak that would help her grasp food. Even so, the beak pictured isn’t even a permanent solution. This first model was created to help engineers develop more precise measurements for her second prosthetic. While the final beak will fit better and be designed with tougher materials, there are no plans to release Beauty back into the wild, as the team fears she has spent far too much time relying on humans to survive on her own again.

Motala the Elephant

Motala made headlines in 1999 when the Thai elephant lost her foot after stepping on a landmine. While vets were able to save most of her leg, it still was left shorter than the others. It took researchers six years to develop a prosthetic that would work for the pachyderm. She then had to use a temporary prosthetic made with wood shaving for another eight months until she became strong enough to be fitted with the permanent one made with fiberglass and silicone. That’s because poor Motala became so used to not using that leg that she had to become reaccustomed to walking with it.

Of course, there are plenty more animal prosthetic stories out there. In fact, while this article focuses on the newest and most high-tech versions, I’m sure many of you know an animal that has been fitted with a prosthetic of one kind or another. If you have any of your own stories, feel free to share them in the comments.

The nursery takes in orphan elephants from all over Kenya, many victims of poaching or human-wildlife conflict, and raises them until they are no longer milk dependent. Once healed and stabilized at the nursery, they are moved more than a hundred miles southeast to two holding centers in Tsavo National Park. There, at their own pace, which can be up to eight to ten years, they gradually make the transition back into the wild. The program is a cutting-edge experiment in cross-species empathy that only the worst extremes of human insensitivity could have necessitated.

Be sure to read the whole thing to learn all kinds of fascinating information about the group, the elephants and the amazing people working to improve the lives of these majestic creatures.

Link

Tripping Elephants On Parade

Image via http2007 [Flickr]

While many test animals are killed in the name of research, many of them are at least being used to investigate potentially life-saving drugs. Perhaps the saddest and most spectacular failure of any animal-based experiment occurred in 1962, when Tusko the elephant (not the one pictured) was given LSD simply for the sake of seeing how the magnificent beast would react to such a substance.

Unfortunately, the researchers, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce, had no idea how much LSD it would take to dose an elephant. Rather than erroring on the side of safety, the doctors decided that they didn’t want to have to do the experiment again just because they underdosed the elephant the first time. They ended up deciding to give Tusko 297 milligrams, which is about 3000 times the dosage a human takes, despite the fact that an elephant weighs about 90 times more than the average human.

After being dosed, Tusko immediately started running around in his pen and soon lost control of his movements, eventually collapsing to the ground and going into seizures. To counteract the LSD, the doctors gave the elephant 2,800 milligrams of an antipsychotic. The drug reduced his seizures slightly, but didn’t stop them. After another hours, the doctors decided to give Tusko a barbiturate to calm him down, but it didn’t help. He died a few minutes later.

Two other elephants were later dosed with the drug and suffered no ill effects. Ultimately, the doctors that dosed Tusko summed up their experiment in Science by saying, simply, “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD.” Even so, it is still unclear whether or not Tusko died from the acid or a combination of the three drugs given to him that day.

The Monster Study

The effects of positive vs. negative reinforcement have fascinated scientists and parents for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, testing on a group of unsuspecting orphans isn’t the best way to find out. In 1939, Doctor Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa and his assistant, Mary Tudor, selected 22 children from an orphanage in Iowa. Ten of the children had stutters and the rest spoke just fine.

The stutterers were put in two groups, group IA that was to use positive reinforcement and other, group IB, that was to receive negative reinforcement. The non-stutterers were also broken into two groups, group IIB, that was told they spoke fine, and group IIA, who were told they were starting to stutter and needed to avoid making mistakes at any cost. The goal was to get those in group IA to stop stuttering and those in group IIA to start stuttering.

The impact on group IIA was exactly what the doctor had hoped for. The entire group started falling behind on their school work. The children started to second-guess their speech abilities and many stopped talking at all. One girl ran away shortly after the experiment ended. While Mary Tudor visited the orphanage three times after the experiment was over, attempting to convince the children that they didn’t have any speech problems, the damage was already done. Although none of the kids became stutterers, many of the children retained speech problems their entire life and most were reluctant to speak. In 2007, six of these children were awarded $925,000 in a lawsuit against the state for the university’s role in the experiment.

The study has since been dubbed “The Monster Study” by the public and scientists alike who were disgusted with the doctor’s methods.

The Baby Born A Chimp

Image via BoingBoing

There have been ample stories of human children being raised by other species and eventually becoming more like that animal than an actual human. If the process could go one way, Winthrop Kellogg was sure that it could also go the other, particularly if the animal involved was one of our closest genetic cousins.

In 1931, Kellogg received a grant for his experiment and the timing couldn’t be better –his wife just had a baby boy, David. This would give them the unique opportunity to raise a baby chimp, named Gua, right along side a human baby. It didn’t take long for the babes to bond and become best friends.

Kellogg and his wife took impeccable notes on their two “children” noting their physical changes, emotions and how they scored on small intelligence tests. The chimp scored notably higher on the intelligence tests due the fact that the species matures faster than human babies.

Gua picked up quite a few human behaviors, such as walking upright and eating with a spoon, but she failed to learn how to speak and learn simple repetition games, like patty cake. Her emotions were also much less predictable and inclined to change at the drop of a hat.

Unfortunately, the experiment really started to go wrong when little David started to become more chimplike than Gua became humanlike. He only learned a few simple words and often took to making chimp howls when he wanted something.

After only nine months, the Kelloggs gave up on Gua, concerned that David would fail to grow up like a normal human child. In the years since this project, plenty of people have adopted chimps as babies, proving beyond a doubt that the animals can never act completely human –even if they are adorable in overalls.

Yellow Fever Fever

Doctor Stubbins Ffirth observed that yellow fever was prominent during the summer, but receded as winter approached and made the mistaken conclusion that this meant the disease was not contagious. The fact that he never caught the disease after constant exposure to patients with the malady further inspired him. In order to prove the disease was non-contagious, Ffirth decided he needed to expose himself to all types of bodily fluids secreted by yellow fever victims. He drank the vomit of the victims, he injected it into his veins, he dripped it into his eyes and he inhaled the fumes from the vomit. Through it all, he never did manage to contract the disease.

Rather than admitting that he made his point or moving on to testing on other people, Ffirth realized there were far more body fluids for him to experiment with. He used blood, urine, saliva and perspiration. Even after all of these tests, his still managed to resist the disease. Unfortunately, Ffirth failed to take into account the different stages of the disease. His samples all came from persons who were in the late stages of the malady, and were, thus, no longer contagious. Had he experimented with samples from people who only recently contracted the disease, his results likely would have been a whole lot different.

As for the observation that the disease disappeared during the winter months? He was right about that, just wrong about the cause. Yellow fever is caused by a RNA virus that is spread by mosquitoes. That’s why it was so much more common during the humid summers on the East Coast. Fortunately, before word of Ffirth’s research spread, locals believed the disease was spreading through the waterways and Philadelphia introduced a closed water system that helped eliminate cisterns and barrels full of water that served as mosquito breeding grounds during the summer.

A Baby In A Box

Image via Silly Rabbit [Wikipedia]

This is perhaps the only science experiment in this list that went totally right –up until the idea was released to the public. Doctor Fredric Skinner had a lot of trouble bending down into his baby’s crib to pick her up. When his wife became pregnant with a second child, he worked hard to develop a more comfortable and elegant solution. What he came up with was a “baby box.”

The box was about six feet tall and lifted the baby up about three feet high. The sleeping area was a shallow bin with a safety glass window that allowed it to see the outside world while keeping it safe. The box provided the baby with a heater, humidifier and an air filter so the baby always had fresh, warm air. It was also well-insulated to help keep out loud noises. Parents could lift the baby out of the device without back strain. The baby stayed warm, so it didn’t need clothes or blankets that could get tangled up and become a hazard. Plus, this also meant less laundry for the parents. The mattress was made of a sheet of canvas held in place by two rollers, so when it got dirty, they just had to roll it to reveal a new, clean section. All in all, the device had tons of benefits and the doctor’s baby responded to the device quite well.

Unfortunately, Skinner decided to bypass academic journals and send an announcement of his achievement through Ladies’ Home Journal. While the title of the piece he sent was “Baby Care Can Be Modernized,” editors decided to change it to “Baby In A Box.” This one little change was largely responsible for the public backlash against Skinner’s revolutionary idea. People accused the doctor of caging his child up like an animal, raising a child like a vegetable garden and gaining inspiration for his idea from a grocery freezer case.

While Skinner did want to run formal experiments comparing ten children who were raised with the box and ten children who were raised in a crib to see if either group had any disadvantages long term, the public outrage against his work led him to back off on his project. His own daughter did seem to come out just fine in the end, becoming a successful artist in London. Eventually, Skinner did get a manufacturing deal, selling a few hundred units of “The Air Crib,” but the head of the manufacturing company soon passed away, leaving the idea to die in the process.

Now, obviously, there are far more science projects gone wrong than just these. If you’ve heard any stories, feel free to share them in the comments. Or let us know what you think about the projects. Personally, I think the baby box is a great idea and I would love to have had one when I have a kid.

Sources: Elephants On Acid And Other Bizarre Experiments, Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, Listverse

You’ve gotta love how happy these little babes are in their kiddie pool.

Video link.

Adorable baby elephant is adorable. This scene was shot in Phuket, Thailand.

via Geekosystem | Previously: A Celebration of Elephants

Jed Stoneham of Urlesque gathered pictures from Google Street View that look like they were taken in wilderness areas. Pictured above is a scene from a road inside Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa.

Link | Addo Elephant National Park

1. Play Soccer and Darts

(Image credit: Reuters/Sukree Sukplang)

An annual festival in Surin Province, Thailand celebrates elephants and all that they do. Highlights of the event include a soccer match, battles recreations, and an elephant dart competition!

2. Wash Cars

Elephants at Wildlife Safari in Winston, Oregon will wash your car for just $20, but be warned that the guarantee states they will not get it clean! However, the elephants have fun spraying water everywhere, and the money goes to support the zoo. See a video of the elephants in action.

3. Play Harmonica

(YouTube link)

This baby elephant at Phuket Island in Thailand enchants tourists with her dancing skills and harmonica music! She’s not the only harmonica-playing pachyderm. An elephant named Five at West Midlands Safari Park in England plays the harmonica every chance she gets, and an African elephant named Bubbles plays harmonica at Myrtle Beach Safari in South Carolina.

4. Facilitate Romance

An Asian elephant named Marcella lent a hand, or rather, a trunk when Oliver Thompson proposed to Emma Morgan at the Blackpool Zoo in England. Elephants are Morgan’s favorite animal, so Thompson made arrangements with the zoo staff for the couple to go inside the elephant enclosure as a special treat for her birthday. Morgan was thrilled with the opportunity, but she was ecstatic when Marcella approached her and handed her a ribbon -with an engagement ring attached! The ring was an inexpensive trinket from the gift shop, just in case the elephant wouldn’t part with it, but Thompson was ready with the real one. Oh, she said yes to the proposal.

5. Covert Theft

Just this year, and elephant was found to be the cause of the mysteriously disappearing hot tub water at the Etali Safari Lodge in South Africa. The tub was drained for days before a guest caught an elephant drinking it! The lodger snapped a photograph, which enabled staff to identify the elephant as one they knew named Troublesome. The solution to the problem was as easy as providing Troublesome with her own drinking water.

6. Talk

An elephant in Yongin, Korea named Kosik made worldwide headlines a few years ago when zookeepers announce the 16-year-old elephant had learned to talk! Kosik was not deliberatley trained to speak, but keepers heard recognizable words coming from his enclosure. The elephant was heard uttering the words “yes,” “no,” “lie down,” “sit down,” (in Korean) and some other phrases his handler had used. It is doubtful that Kosik understands the meaning of the words, but reproducing the sounds in itself is quite an accomplishment. See a Korean news report on Kosik. Another pachyderm who was reported to speak was Batyr, an elephant at the Karaganda Zoo in Kazakhstan, who was said to have had a vocabulary of about 20 Russian words. Batyr spent his entire life at the zoo without the companionship of any other elephant. He died in 1993 of an accidental drug overdose.

7. Get Hitched

This elephant wedding was staged by the Cole Brothers Circus on September 23rd, 1936. Little did they know that the date just before would someday be designated as Elephant Appreciation Day! See more pictures of the elephant wedding at SideShow World.

8. Play Basketball

(Image credit: Flickr user Alex Twose)

Elephants at the Island Safari Centre on Koh Samui, Thailand are taught to play basketball! The activity is purportedly to stimulate the elephants and keep them healthy, but it doesn’t hurt that elephant basketball games are a big hit with tourists. It takes only two or three months to train an elephant in ball-handling skills. The stars of the basketball program are nine-year-old Toktok and six-year-old Malie. No matter how good the elephants are at the slam-dunk, it is still up to their handlers to keep score.

9. Water Ski

(YouTube link)

If you visited Ponce DeLeon Springs Park in Florida in 1959 or 1960, you might have seen Queenie, the water-skiing elephant! Liz Dane adopted Queenie in 1953 and they grew up together. Read more about Queenie in this interview with Dane.

10. Paint

A group of elephants at the Maetaman Elephant Camp in Thailand have learned to paint. The amazing thing is that these are not abstract paintings, as most animals produce, but representative images! Sure, they are trained to do it, but whether they memorize a sequence of lines or paint what they see, it’s an amazing accomplishment. The elephant pictured is named Hong; you can see some of her works on her personal page. See video clips of Paya, Sela, Lucky, Boon Rod, Ging Gaow, and Lakshmi painting pictures at the Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project. You can also see an extended video of the entire process in this post. Sales of elephant paintings support the elephant refuge.

Slathering them in white watercolour paint, the keepers at the Ayutthaya Elephant Kraal then paraded the five elephants before schoolchildren in an effort to remind Thailand that its elephants have needs, too.

The furore was sparked after the nation became fascinated with the birth of a female panda cub to pandas Lin Hui and Xuang Xuang at Chiang Mai zoo.

The Bangkok Post also reported that a 20 million baht (£355,800) snow house was being built for the panda family at the zoo.

Link -via Unique Daily

Sex, Drugs and Science

If this first group of studies show us anything, it’s that scientists are as drugged up and crazy as the junkies up the street from me.

Elephants on Acid:

If you were going to see the effects of LSD on an elephant, wouldn’t you start with smaller doses and progressively increase the dosage until there was a noticeable change in their behavior? I sure would. But the researchers on this one aren’t like you and me.

Instead the researchers working on this one started off by injecting the poor beast with 3000 times the dosage needed for an average human, despite the fact that elephants weigh around 50 times what the average human weighs. Within two hours, the animal died. The scientists defended their actions by saying they had used LSD plenty of times and were sure it was safe. They then concluded, “elephants are highly sensitive to LSD.”

Apparently another scientist found their results to be suspicious, so he gave elephants LSD in their water. In his study, the elephants acted a little funny, but were totally fine.

Source

Turkey Arousal:

We’ve all heard stories detailing how stupid turkeys are -like the one that says they’ll drown if you leave them in the rain. Well, some of those turkey stories may be bogus, but two Penn State researchers discovered that turkeys are so stupid they can be trained to be aroused by little more than sticks.

Their experiment consisted of creating a model female turkey that could be progressively deconstructed. The scientists would then gauge the turkey’s interest in the “female” and then remove some parts of her body and try again. They were expecting the birds would lose interest after is was stripped down enough. Surprisingly, the turkeys were aroused even when the model became little more than a stick with a head. I guess this not only shows how stupid turkeys are, but how perverse they are too.

Source | Photo Via Vicki’s Nature [Flickr]

Semen As an Anti-depressant?

I always thought scientists were supposed to be unbiased. I mean, if you’re hoping for certain results, might that affect your research? Obviously these researchers bypassed that concept, by attempting to prove that semen works as an antidepressant. They decided to study this theory by interviewing college women who were sexually active. Their conclusions proved that women who had sex without condoms were less depressed than women who used them.

Of course, their research was extremely preliminary and they didn’t even bother to take into account additional factors, like the fact that women not using condoms are more likely to be in serious

relationships. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that this might play into someone’s relative level of happiness. But like I said, this study was about as unbiased as all those tobacco company ones that couldn’t connect smoking with cancer.

Source | Photo Via Zen [Flickr]

Paging Dr. Obvious

The rest of these studies are amazing -in that someone actually bothered to research things so obvious:

Head Banging is Bad For You:

Who would have ever thought that aggressively and repeatedly throwing your head up and down would be bad for you? Gee, I never would have imagined that spinal damage and brain trauma could have resulted from head banging. Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. After years of dating a metal head, I can assure you that head banging can certainly make you retarded…or at least, it doesn’t help your intelligence at all.

The only good thing researchers found was that head banging is unlikely to leave you unconscious. What is really funny is the researcher’s suggestions for the metal genre. They suggest metal bands play more

mellow tunes and less “beat oriented” music. They also urged label to place anti-head banging warnings on their cds. Oh, and listeners were advised to start listening to “adult-oriented rock” instead of heavy metal. Yeah, that’s gonna happen real soon.

Source | Photo Via Cayusa [Flickr]

Male science nerds likely to be virgins:

Hmmm, who is most likely to be a virgin, a party-girl, a jock, or a nerd? Think about it. No surprise here; male science nerds between 16 and 25 are the most likely to not have had sex.

At least the study provided some legitimate reasons for this statistic, rather than the typical “nerds are pimply and boring” theories of popular media. The study reasoned that these nerds were the population segment least likely to be in situations where they would meet potential lovers. Apparently, doing homework and going to the library doesn’t help you meet chicks. Hey, at least they’re being productive. Interestingly, female art students were the most sexually active.

Source | Photo Via Miss604 [Flickr]

Bullies Like Seeing Pain:

If bullies were compassionate they would sit around crying whenever they picked on people. The fact that they don’t do so might just indicate that they are mean. Why did anyone need to set up a study to confirm that bullies enjoy seeing other people in pain?

An interesting thing about this study is that it was the first time anyone used fMRI to evaluate how respondents reacted to different emotions. Instead of being empathetic like the brain of a normal person, bullies mind’s activate their reward centers when they see videos of other people being picked on.

Source | Photo Via ZZClef [Flickr]

Television Viewers Are Unhappy:

It’s common knowledge that television and other forms of entertainment are a way for people to escape their problems. If you run home to watch tv instead rather than hanging out with friends, you might be unhappy. Did we really need a scientist to tell us that people who socialize are generally more happy than people who sit at home watching tv all day? What’s more crazy is that they needed over 30 years of data to back up their claims. The only unique thing the study discovered was that many viewers are actually addicted. (Marx was right about television, is this evidence that the scientists are commies?):

“Addictive activities produce momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret,” said Steven Martin, co-author of the study. “People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged. For this kind of person, TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It’s habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.”

Funny, I’ve was using the audio/visual equivalent of heroin the whole time I was researching this. I swear I could quit any time.

Source

Now that I’ve written this, I think I’ve got a couple of ideas I could get funded. For example, are people happier when they’re warm at home or cold in the middle of nowhere? Or maybe I could find out if donkeys really die when they take a bunch of cocaine and other drugs at a bachelor party. Do you guys have any ideas for awesome studies?