Scientists sometimes have an experiment in mind that would be unethical, or more likely too dangerous, to ask volunteers to submit to. If the scientist wants to know the answer badly enough, he (these six are all men) may just use himself as the experimental subject, no matter what the danger. You’d have to be pretty curious to inject yourself with a deadly disease like cholera.
Pettenkofer was a late 19th century medical researcher and public health advocate who developed the very first large-scale pure-water system in Munich, Germany. And even though that’s probably very impressive, from now until the day you die, if you remember anything about Pettenkofer, it will be this: Max Josef von Pettenkofer drank a steaming cup of cholera bacteria that he cultured from a patient’s diarrhea bombs.
Yeah, he got sick. But he didn’t get sick enough to die, and Pettenkofer considered that proof of his theory that the cholera bacterium needed a victim who practiced poor sanitation. Of course, one could argue that without poor sanitation, the bacterium wouldn’t be spread, outside of scientists who ingested it on purpose. Anyway, read about Pettenkofer and five other scientists at Cracked. Link
New Scientist produced a new One-Minute Physics animation to explain the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment in a hurry. As if you could explain “collapsed realities” in one minute. Still, it’s a cute cartoon. Link
Medieval knighthood sounds like a romantic career in fiction. What a life of chivalry was really like doesn’t seem all that great. A team of scientists tried to replicate the work of a knight clad in up to 110 pounds of metal by dressing up volunteer historical re-enactors from the Royal Armories in London, and putting them on treadmills. Even though they were used to wearing armor, you better believe they worked up a sweat!
Sure enough, the researchers found, armor was exhausting. The men used 2.3 times as much energy to walk while wearing the armor than without it, and 1.9 times as much to run. Being outfitted for battle turned out to be even more tiring than hauling around a backpack of the same weight would’ve been. As it turns out, covering your legs with enormous, heavy metal plates makes moving around a lot harder.
Want an edge over the average person playing rock-paper-scissors? Try playing blindfolded! An experiment by Richard Cook at University College in London shows that when players can see their opponent, there is a slight tendency to copy them.
Cook asked 45 people to face off against each other in several rounds of rock-paper-scissors, in exchange for real money. In every game, either one or both players were blindfolded.
Cook found that the players drew with each other more often when one of them could see (36.3% of the matches) than when both were blindfolded (33.3% of them). The latter figure was exactly the proportion of draws you’d expect if the players were choosing randomly; the former was significantly higher than chance.
Cook devised this study because he was interested in the idea that we all automatically and unconsciously imitate one another. There’s plenty of evidence that we do indeed copy one another, from obvious gestures like touching our face to subtle movements like tensing our muscles. But it’s not clear whether these actions are truly involuntary in the way that the knee-jerk reflex is. To find out, Cook wanted to see if people can stop themselves from performing these acts of mimicry.
That’s why he turned to rock-paper-scissors. Here is a game where you have to avoid imitating your opponent in order to win – the rules implicitly encourage people to avoid copying what their adversaries do. The results of Cook’s face-offs suggest that the sighted player has a slight tendency to imitate the blindfolded one – that’s why a blindfolded player will draw more often against a sighted one than another blindfolded opponent. And indeed, players were particularly likely to imitate rocks and scissors.
If that’s not an option in your game, Ed Yong offers a list of tips for a beginning player. Link
In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo began an experiment that became known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Students were randomly assigned to be “guards” or “prisoners” in an imaginary prison scenario. It shocked the academic world and led to new standards for ethics in psychology studies.
Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable—and notorious—research projects ever carried out at the University. For six days, half the study’s participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times, they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets. Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair. As the situation descended into chaos, the researchers stood by and watched—until one of their colleagues finally spoke out.
The public’s fascination with the SPE and its implications—the notion, as Zimbardo says, “that these ordinary college students could do such terrible things when caught in that situation” —brought Zimbardo international renown. It also provoked criticism from other researchers, who questioned the ethics of subjecting student volunteers to such extreme emotional trauma. The study had been approved by Stanford’s Human Subjects Research Committee, and Zimbardo says that “neither they nor we could have imagined” that the guards would treat the prisoners so inhumanely.
Stanford Magazine interviewed some of the participants in the experiment, both faculty and students. They tell their side of the story in the latest issue. Link -via Metafilter
Robb Posch undertook an experiment in which he ate nothing but candy for a week. Oh, the things we do in the name of science! …or blogging, as the case may be.
Since I am apparently going to eat peanut butter candy every day, I went with Reese’s Peanut Butter Bells. Then after snacking on Nestle Crunch Bells, Gobstopper Snowballs, Christmas SweeTarts, and gummy reindeer, by night time it was becoming somewhat clear: candy isn’t very filling.
It’s filling enough to ruin your appetite for a meal, but it doesn’t work that well as a meal replacement. I’m thinking the key is just to eat more of it. So I ate a giant plastic candy cane filled with Reese’s Pieces. It was only about two hours later that I realized I had already eaten Reese’s Pieces for breakfast. Maybe the candy was starting to affect my brain.
And that was only day three! By day seven Posch was afraid his brain was starving. But he still likes candy -about half as much as he did before the experiment. You can read each day’s entry at Zug. Link -via J-Walk Blog
by Frederic N. Firestone, Ph.D., J.D.
Virginia Beach, Virginia
[EDITOR'S NOTE: On May 24, 2001, two years after this article was published, a research report and accompanying editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine claimed that the placebo effect does not exist. Clearly, the New England Journal authors did not read Frederic Firestone's classic report on double-strength placebos.]
Too often, good research about new medicines—research that shows unusually clear-cut results—goes unpublished, and thus unseen. The reason? Journal editors distrust any study in which the placebo effect is “too small.” The problem has a simple solution: re-run the experiment, but instead of giving standard placebos to the control group, instead give them double-strength placebos (DSPs).
The placebo effect is the response that a so-called “control group” of patients shows when those patients are treated with placebos—innocuous “pretend” medicine—rather than with real medicine.
Prior Research on Placebos
Scientists have studied a wide variety of placebo issues, and published reports about what they found.[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] Yet prior to this investigation, no one has published a report on the problem of minimal placebo response.
The Need to Study Double-Strength Placebos
While certain problems are associated with the use of the double-strength placebo, overall it offers promises to be a powerful research tool.
Approval of the DSP by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must of course precede its use. Since its efficacy must be demonstrated in a proper study, the immediate problem is the choice of a placebo to give the control group of that study. There is no documentation of the dif-fering strengths of the placebos that are currently available, so it would be appropriate to first determine these strengths, and then select a control placebo that has median effect.
Patient Sensitivity and Safety
There is a more serious problem in studying the efficacy of double-strength placebos. As with any new drug, we must confront the possibility of deleterious effects upon individuals who may exhibit a high level of sensitivity to placebos.[8] Most important, of course, is to find a safe, practical way to identify patients who are acutely allergic to placebos. The public will to tolerate a rash of placebo deaths, nor should it have to.
The expense of safety-testing the placebos can be mitigated by a research setting suggested here.
Special Observation Facility
The subjects of the double-strength placebo study should have the DSPs administered in a specially prepared room, one equipped not with the traditional “one-way mirror,” but instead with a large, clear glass window. This is a necessity, because any subjects who noticed a large mirrored opening in a wall would understand that they were being observed, and that might lead to skewed results.
The large glass window should have an ordinary venetian blind on the observers’ side of the glass, with the slats arranged at an angle permitting optimal light transmission. On the other side of the glass, there should be a blind of vertical slats, of the type commonly used on sliding glass patio doors, with the slats arranged at a suitable angle. For the subjects, this provides a reassuringly familiar home-like setting. The main advantage of this arrangement, though, is that with minimal effort and expense, it ensures a double-blind experiment.
When the study results are submitted to the Food and Drug Administration, it is essential to emphasize that approval of double-strength placebos will be of value only if no required warning label is required. The reason for this is simple. Even a statement worded in the most approving way (e.g., “The Surgeon General has determined that this placebo is harmless despite its potency”) may limit the usefulness of the product.
Technical Note
The molecular structure of the DSP being a merely technical matter, it is beneath the scope of this article.
1. “Placebos: relative merits of H2O and H2SO4,” A. Amoamasamat, Journal of Patheohomic Medicine, vol. 2, 1989, pp. 6-14.
2. “Polished gravel as a placebo: some technical problems,” A. Amoamasamat, Western Medical Repository, vol. 8, 1990, pp. 46-47.
3. “Why diabetics react strangely to many placebos,” A. Amoamasamat, Molasses and Sugar Quarterly, vol. 23, 1991, pp. 56-60.
4. “LSD: a reason to avoid its use as a placebo,” A. Amoamasamat, Cactus Times, vol. 1, pp. 1-84.
5. “When the placebo suppository is more effective than the therapeutic agent: a suggestion to practitioners,” A. Amoamasamat, Tips for Managed Care, vol. 3, 1993, pp. 8-9.
6. “Patients who are displeased by placebos: a terminological mystery,” A. Amoamasamat, Journal of Medical Linguistics, vol. 88, 1994, pp. 5-22.
7. “Forged prescriptions for placebos: a crime with mitigating circumstances? in A. Miss, ed., The Wrong is Ended But the Felony Lingers On, A. Amoamasamat, New York, Paris, and Casablanca: Who’s Publishing, 1996.
8. “Overly sensitive users of placebos: a statistical analysis of post-mortem examinations,” A. Amoamasamat, unpublished, 1997. Was available from the author prior to his recent replication of the study. The author’s widow does not respond to requests for copies.
Notes
i. The author completed this article at the fishing facility of Virginia Beach, where it was immediately subjected to pier review.
ii. The problems involved in using two-way mirrors, three-way mirrors, etc., will be addressed in a separate publication, as will the problems related to using zero-way mirrors.
This article is republished with permission from the March-April 1999 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Adam Savage of the TV show Mythbusters explains an experiment that the Discovery Channel rejected. Did your mother ever say “The box is more nutritious!” when you asked for sugary cereal? Adam and Jamie set up a test to find out if that’s true, which turned out completely different from anything they expected. This is an excerpt from Savage’s speech at Maker Faire. Subject matter may be disturbing to some viewers. You can watch the entire speech at FORA.tv. Link -via Digg
The brains of people who perform complex tasks such as shooting a gun or a basketball -and do it very well- are different from the average brain. While participating in their chosen sport, an athlete must constantly predict movement, analyze feedback, and make adjustments to maximize performance. A series of experiments by different scientists find that athletes’ brains emit stronger alpha waves, which indicate a restful state. Also, the different parts of the athletes’ brains communicate with each other better than non-athletes. The best part is that training affects the brain’s anatomy!
As soon as someone starts to practice a new sport, his brain begins to change, and the changes continue for years. Scientists at the University of Regensburg in Germany documented the process by scanning people as they learned how to juggle. After a week, the jugglers were already developing extra gray matter in some brain areas. Their brains continued to change for months, the scientists found.
So there may be hope for us non-athletes after all! Link
Neil Fraser wondered if a lava lamp would still work in the higher gravity environment of Jupiter. How such a question ever occurs to anyone is a matter of wonder in itself, but Fraser went ahead and built a ten-foot wide centrifuge in his living room to conduct the experiment to answer his question.
The centrifuge is a genuinely terrifying device. The lights dim when it is switched on. A strong wind is produced as the centrifuge induces a cyclone in the room. The smell of boiling insulation emanates from the overloaded 25 amp cables. If not perfectly adjusted and lubricated, it will shred the teeth off solid brass gears in under a second. Runs were conducted from the relative safety of the next room while peeking through a crack in the door.
Highlight this text for a spoiler: Yes, the lava lamp worked in 3G.Link -via Digg
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York are cooking up a recipe that may reach seven trillion degrees Celsius at its peak! It’s called the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX. The heat is produced by slamming particles of gold together at close to the speed of light. The result is a glop of subatomic particles they call plasma.
Particle physicists, cosmologists, and even string theorists are all trying to understand why quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons (which in turn build atoms), behave this way at such high temperatures. Why doesn’t the mixture turn into a gas, like water turns to steam at 100 degrees Celsius? How hot would it have to be to vaporize? And if the universe was filled with this liquid goop shortly after the Big Bang, how did it eventually turn into stars, planets, and people?
“We get giant discussions and even some vociferous arguments,” says Jacak. “The big question for us is what is going on inside [this substance] and how does it work. On the experimental side we’re trying to measure its properties, and one of the first properties you could measure is its temperature.”
The subatomic substance only exists for a tiny fraction of a second at a time,so it must be done over and over again. Link -via Digg
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera recently revealed fascinating shots of a dune sea of sorts in a crater of the Hellas impact basin. What has officials at NASA excited about the dunes is their symmetric nature.
The dunes here are linear, thought to be due to shifting wind directions. In places, each dune is remarkably similar to adjacent dunes, including a reddish (or dust-colored) band on northeast-facing slopes. Large angular boulders litter the floor between dunes.
The most extensive linear dune fields known in the solar system are on Saturn’s large moon Titan. Titan has a very different environment and composition, so at meter-scale resolution they probably are very different from Martian dunes.
This surprised me. What happens when you connect two balloons, one blown up much bigger than the other? I thought for sure they would equalize. Doesn’t air rush out harder from a fully-inflated balloon than from a partially-inflated balloon? Even the explanation puzzles me. Are there any scientists around who could explain more thoroughly? -via Dark Roasted Blend
Last year, the state of Utah mandated a four-day work week for state employees. The salaries and number of hours each worker put in remained the same as the workday became longer, but offices were closed on Fridays.
After 12 months, Utah’s experiment has been deemed so successful that a new acronym could catch on: TGIT (thank God it’s Thursday). The state found that its compressed workweek resulted in a 13% reduction in energy use and estimated that employees saved as much as $6 million in gasoline costs. Altogether, the initiative will cut the state’s greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 12,000 metric tons a year. And perhaps not surprisingly, 82% of state workers say they want to keep the new schedule.
Even those who do not work for the state have benefitted since offices are open later Monday through Thursday. Other states and businesses are looking at the results and may possibly try the schedule out. Link -via Digg
Popular Mechanics bought eight science kits for kids, reviewed them, and found instructions on the ‘net for replicating the same experiments with materials many people have on hand.
…homemade experiments can be just as complex and educational (while costing up to $100 less), so we found alternatives to each of the boxed kits that teach similar lessons just as well. Bottom line: Whether preassembled or drawn from kitchen cupboards, science kits can be educational and fun.
Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbots experiment is less about robots and more about human nature. She designed small cardboard robots with smiling faces that will move only forward. Kinzer then would set a robot down in an area of New York City with a flag that indicated its destination. The only way it could get “home” was with the help of passers-by. People really came through! Over several months and many missions, each time a robot got stuck or headed in the wrong direction, someone would set it straight or otherwise helped it along its way. My question is: would people have helped a robot that wasn’t so cute? Link -via Gizmodo
Out-of-body experiences and even the sense of switching bodies with another person can be induced by tricking the mind with sensory illusions!
In a study presented Tuesday, neuroscientists at Stockholm’s renowned Karolinska Institute show how they got volunteers wearing virtual reality goggles to experience the illusion of swapping bodies with a mannequin and a real person.
“We were interested in a classical question that philosophers and psychologists have discussed for centuries: why we feel that the self is in our bodies,” project leader Henrik Ehrsson said. “To study this scientifically we’ve used tricks, perceptual illusions.”
70-80% of the test subjects experienced the illusion “very strongly”. How weird that feeling must be! Link -Thanks, Geekazoid!
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Scientists sometimes have an experiment in mind that would be unethical, or more likely too dangerous, to ask volunteers to submit to. If the scientist wants to know the answer badly enough, he (these six are all men) may just use himself as the experimental subject, no matter what the danger. You’d have to be pretty curious to inject yourself with a deadly disease like cholera.
Medieval knighthood sounds like a romantic career in fiction. What a life of chivalry was really like doesn’t seem all that great. A team of scientists tried to replicate the work of a knight clad in up to 110 pounds of metal by dressing up volunteer historical re-enactors from the Royal Armories in London, and putting them on treadmills. Even though they were used to wearing armor, you better believe they worked up a sweat!
Want an edge over the average person playing rock-paper-scissors? Try playing blindfolded! An experiment by Richard Cook at University College in London shows that when players can see their opponent, there is a slight tendency to copy them.
In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo began an experiment that became known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Students were randomly assigned to be “guards” or “prisoners” in an imaginary prison scenario. It shocked the academic world and led to new standards for ethics in psychology studies.
Robb Posch undertook an experiment in which he ate nothing but candy for a week. Oh, the things we do in the name of science! …or blogging, as the case may be.
Too often, good research about new medicines—research that shows unusually clear-cut results—goes unpublished, and thus unseen. The reason? Journal editors distrust any study in which the placebo effect is “too small.” The problem has a simple solution: re-run the experiment, but instead of giving standard placebos to the control group, instead give them double-strength placebos (DSPs).
The large glass window should have an ordinary venetian blind on the observers’ side of the glass, with the slats arranged at an angle permitting optimal light transmission. On the other side of the glass, there should be a blind of vertical slats, of the type commonly used on sliding glass patio doors, with the slats arranged at a suitable angle. For the subjects, this provides a reassuringly familiar home-like setting. The main advantage of this arrangement, though, is that with minimal effort and expense, it ensures a double-blind experiment.
This article is republished with permission from the March-April 1999 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Stacy Conradt makes cupcakes, and is planning to experiment with new styles and flavors.
The brains of people who perform complex tasks such as shooting a gun or a basketball -and do it very well- are different from the average brain. While participating in their chosen sport, an athlete must constantly predict movement, analyze feedback, and make adjustments to maximize performance. A series of experiments by different scientists find that athletes’ brains emit stronger alpha waves, which indicate a restful state. Also, the different parts of the athletes’ brains communicate with each other better than non-athletes. The best part is that training affects the brain’s anatomy!
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York are cooking up a recipe that may reach seven trillion degrees Celsius at its peak! It’s called the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX. The heat is produced by slamming particles of gold together at close to the speed of light. The result is a glop of subatomic particles they call plasma.
Last year, the state of Utah mandated a four-day work week for state employees. The salaries and number of hours each worker put in remained the same as the workday became longer, but offices were closed on Fridays.
Popular Mechanics bought eight science kits for kids, reviewed them, and found instructions on the ‘net for replicating the same experiments with materials many people have on hand. 
Out-of-body experiences and even the sense of switching bodies with another person can be induced by tricking the mind with sensory illusions!
