In the experiment, a group of men and women (on the younger side, with an average age of 21) were given the opportunity to donate money to a fund, knowing they would get nothing in return other than the pride of their selflessness. Whether they were watched or not, women donated at the same rate. But men, when watched by women, donated at higher rates. They didn’t donate at higher rates when men watched.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sure flabbergasted by this one. Who would have guessed?

Link Via The Jane Dough

E. Robert Schulman

Abstract

In this paper we demonstrate that writing a Ph.D. dissertation can have many benefits. Not only do you obtain extensive typesetting experience, but afterwards you can have your frequent-flyer literature addressed to “Dr. Your Name.”

Chapter I: Introduction

Ph.D. dissertations (e.g., Schulman 1995a; Cox 1995) are commonly believed to be comprehensive compendiums of the original research done by a graduate student in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.² In reality, the Ph.D. thesis is usually a number of disparate chapters whose most important feature is not the thoroughness of the experimental description but rather the width of the margins. In this paper, the second article in a series on scientific writing that began with Schulman (1996a), we will discuss the phenomenon of the Ph.D. thesis.

Chapter II: Preparing to Write

There comes a time in the life of every graduate student when she or he realizes that another two years of graduate school cannot be endured. Even though a year spent writing your thesis will be filled with frustration and angst, it will end up being worth it in order to escape school forever.

Remember the following phrase: “No one will ever read your thesis.” You’ll hear this phrase a number of times as you finish up, and it’s vitally important that you believe it to be true. The phrase is important because without it you would be tempted to work on your thesis until everything is perfect, and you would never finish.

(Image credit: Flickr user lunita lu)

Say “It’s good enough for the thesis” to yourself several times a day. Tell yourself that you’ll correct all the mistakes when you turn the various chapters into independent scientific papers, even though this won’t happen (see Schulman 1996aand references therein).

Chapter III: Your Thesis Committee

Your thesis committee should consist of between four and nine researchers in and outside of your field. Each committee member has a specific duty.

Your thesis advisor has the most important job: to reassure you that you don’t have to do many of the things you’re positive you should do. She or he will likely say, “It’s good enough for the thesis” fairly often.

You also need one committee member who will insist on more mathematical rigor, one who will demand that the thesis be made more concise by getting rid of all that irrelevant math, and two or three to say that you should do all the things your thesis advisor told you didn’t need to be done.

There should also be at least one committee member who will never read the thesis, and who will therefore ask only general questions at your thesis defense. The other graduate students who attend your defense will often bet on which professors read your thesis. Be prepared to determine the winner (note that it is not considered sporting to participate in this game yourself).

Try to set a defense date early so as to give your committee ample time to schedule conferences, vacations, and/or elective surgery for that day.

Chapter IV: Producing the Thesis

Legend has it that doctoral students in ancient times used to produce their dissertations using a device called a “typewriter.” While there is some archeological evidence for typewriter use in the past, many researchers doubt the plausibility of such claims (e.g. Schulman 1995a).

(Image credit: Flickr user urbanmkr)

These days, dissertations are produced using word processing programs such as Word or Word Perfect, or computer typesetting systems such as TeX or LaTeX. The former will give you practice in drawing by hand all the symbols that aren’t supported, while with the latter you have the opportunity to craft new typesetting definitions to satisfy your university’s dissertation policies. For example,

\long\def\printfrontnonchapter{\vfil\eject \rightpage\null\vskip 1in \centerline{{\bf \Uppercase{\frontnonchapterheader}}}\vskip 22pt plus 73pt \relax\bigskip\setwidespacing \frontnonchaptertext\par} (Jerius 1992).

Be sure not to choose the wrong method of producing your thesis.

Chapter V: Writing the Thesis

The Ph.D. thesis usually begins with a pithy quote, after which there will sometimes be a dedication to one’s parents, life partner, and/or pet tapir.

Following this is probably the most important part of the dissertation: the acknowledgments section. This is the only section that everyone who picks up your thesis will read. They will happen upon your dissertation in the library and flip through the first few pages, looking for a juicy acknowledgments section. This is your chance to make obscure references to secret loves, damn various faculty members with faint praise, or be very mysterious by having no acknowledgments section at all so that everyone wonders what you’re hiding.

After the acknowledgments should be the various tables of contents, denoting the page numbers on which the reader may find every section, subsection, subsubsection, figure, table, appendix, footnote, and semicolon in the thesis.

Next comes the first thesis chapter, the introduction, which is judged on the basis of how far back in the past you start. Although the introduction is supposed to enable someone with no knowledge of your field to read and understand your thesis, this is an impossible goal. Instead, simply reference sources such as Rontgen (1896), Galileo (1610), Aristotle (-350), or other similarly ancient researchers. The idea to get across is that your work, being based on the work of great scientists of the past, must be truly worthwhile. Even though these works have little to do with your research, your committee isn’t going to look up the references.

After the introduction come chapters that describe what you did, where you did it, when you did it, why you did it, and how much more work has to be done before you can obtain definitive results. This last point is usually discussed in the concluding chapter.

Chapter VI: The Thesis Defense

Remember those dreams you used to have about going to class and finding out that there was a big test that day for which you hadn’t studied? The thesis defense is worse, because you find out that although you studied very hard, you didn’t study the right things.

Your committee members aren’t going to waste their time asking you about your research, because you know more about that than anyone else in the world. Instead, they will ask questions that are really about their research or–if they are in a particularly punchy mood–about fundamental mathematics.

The fun part is that at most universities the first part of your defense is open to the public, so that your parents will probably want to come and videotape the event.

(Image credit: Flickr user chnrdu)

Chapter VII: Rewriting

Your thesis defense was tough, but you survived. Your committee members have signed a piece of paper saying that they are satisfied with your dissertation as long as your thesis advisor is happy with the revisions you make. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to make everything perfect! Remember the phrase from Chapter II, “No one will ever read your thesis.”

Once your advisor is happy with the revisions, take one unbound, unperforated, paginated copy of your dissertation, two copies of your abstract, one extra copy of your title page, the signed evaluation forms from your committee members in a sealed, notarized envelope, the receipt proving your payment of the Thesis Publication Fee, your diploma application, and proof of your doctoral candidacy enrollment to the Bureaucratic Office of Records, Education, and Dissertations (your requirements may vary; void where prohibited).

The folks at BORED will take a ruler to every page in your thesis, making sure that all the margins are correct and insisting that you go back and redo them if even one page is wrong.

Chapter VIII: Distributing Your Thesis

You’ve passed the format check, and it’s time to make a hundred copies of your thesis and distribute them to departmental libraries all over the world so that everyone in your field can read it. Your advisor should pay for the photocopying and postage (see Schulman & Cox 1997 for a detailed justification).

Try not to think of all the errors lurking in your thesis as you address the envelopes to Professor Famous or Doctor Influential. You want to publicize your dissertation as much as possible so that prospective employers will at least have heard your name.

Some journals will publish brief summaries of your dissertation (e.g. Schulman 1995b; Schulman 1996b), but be warned that these journals may want you to format your summary quite specifically. The requirements for the mini-Annals of Improbable Research are particularly restrictive; it can be difficult to summarize five years of work in five lines of text.

Chapter IX: Conclusion

(Image credit: Flickr user Mr.Tea)

Congratulations, Doctor! You’ve escaped from graduate school and can now have your frequent-flyer literature addressed to Dr. Your Name, complain when forms only list Mr/Ms/Mrs, and smirk when surgeons whine about all the people with academic doctorates who are making the title meaningless for medical doctors. Go out and make the world a better place.

Bibliography

• Aristotle, -350, On The Heavens, Athens, Greece.
• Cox, C. V. 1995, Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan.
• Galilei, G. 1610, Sidereus Nuncius, Venice, Italy.
• Jerius, D. H. 1992, Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan.
• Kaplan, J. M. 1996, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University.
• Rontgen, W. C. 1896, Nature, 53, 274.
• Schulman, E. R. 1995a, Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan.
• Schulman, E. 1995b, mini-Annals of Improbable Research, 1995-08, 4.
• Schulman, E. R. 1996a, Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 2, No. 5, 8.
• Schulman, E. 1996b, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 108, 460.
• Schulman. E. R. & Cox, C. V. 1997, Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 3, No. 5, 8.

Notes

1. There is no note 1.
2. One does not actually need to include any philosophy in the thesis unless one is getting a Doctorate of Philosophy in philosophy, and even in that case the philosophical component can be minimized (e.g., Kaplan 1996).

__________________________

This article is republished with permission from the September-October 1997 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.

Their key insight, the team says, was to realise “it is biologically plausible to view [cattle] as oscillators … During the first stage (standing/feeding), they stand up to graze but they strongly prefer to lie down and ‘ruminate’ or chew the cud for the second stage (lying/ruminating). They thus oscillate between two stages.”

The researchers “modelled the eating, lying and standing dynamics of a cow using a piecewise linear dynamical system … We chose a form of coupling based on cows having an increased desire to eat if they notice another cow eating and an increased desire to lie down if they notice another cow lying down.” This, they say, led to at least one unexpected discovery: “[We] showed that it is possible for cows to synchronise less when the coupling is increased.”

I’m not sure what implications this has for livestock producers, but this is not the first study of its kind, as you’ll see in an article at The Guardian. Link -via Improbable Research, where you can find the worst version of Deck The Halls ever recorded.

(Image credit: Graham Turner/The Guardian)

Actually, scientists are finding that the ability to detect sarcasm really is useful. For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time they get to kindergarten. An inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease.

Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept.”

Bless their hearts. This article from Smithsonian looks at various studies and what they tell us about how we use, misuse, and abuse sarcasm. Link

What the study found is that the teenagers who were playing games eat, on average, 163 calories more than the teenagers who were doing something else. On top of that, the gamers didn’t actually burn any more calories than the control group, so the increased calorie intake wasn’t replaced by the energy spent on all that thumb movement or anything. There were also no biological indicators of stress in these gamers, so that couldn’t explain it either.

What do you guys think the reason for the increased caloric intake was? Do you tend to eat more while gaming?

Link Via Geekosystem

Although people say that “a penny’s not going to kill you,” that’s not strictly true. Sometimes a penny will kill you.

There are several cases on record where ingesting a penny has killed a child,1 but, this report deals only with adult misadventures. Children have respect for pennies. Too often, adults do not.

Yen and A Quarter

Pennies are not uniquely a source of danger. There are two notable and curious cases,2,3 which I will not go into here except briefly, of other kinds of coins being involved with death.

Sectional view of the nose, mouth, pharynx, etc.

A 50-yen coin and/or a 100-yen coin can kill you, as researchers at Osaka University Medical School handled discovered. As they describe it:

A 28-year-old male was found dead on a bed in a hotel. He had two electric wires, the ends of which were fastened to each coin (50 and 100 yen); the coins were attached to a left hypochondrial region and a left side of the chest. The other ends of the wires were connected to a time switch, which had been connected to a plug top (100 V, 60 Hz alternating current)…. The cause of death was thus judged to be suicidal electrocution. It seems that suicide was influenced by a “Manual Book of Suicide,” which was found in his bag.

However, it appears that a quarter cannot kill you, at least not if you are already dead. Investigators at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Department made that discovery, which they describe thusly:

A 69-year-old Chinese woman… was found at autopsy to have a quarter in her air passages. Inquiry showed that her family had placed the coin in her mouth at the time of death according to traditional Chinese funeral practices. This practice is apparently not widely known among forensic pathologists.

Other than these two cases, however, the scope of the current investigation is limited to pennies.

Penny Potency

Although I was not able to find a case in which a single penny killed an adult human being, adult death-by-single-penny is not a far-fetched theoretical abstraction. Far from it. The evidence below, coupled with the additional evidence I alluded to in the previous paragraph (see especially footnote 1, referenced in the first sentence of that paragraph, which is the second paragraph of this report) suggests that it could easily, or fairly easily happen, and perhaps already has happened or is about to happen. Maybe it has just happened, but so very recently that there has not been time for me to persuade the editors that they should re-compose this page to include the information, thus publishing a report that is truly up to date rather than almost up to date.

There is no controversy as to whether several pennies, together, can do you in. Pennies in quantity unquestionably can be instruments of death.

Let’s look at the medical record.

Twenty Pennies Can Do It

Vertical section of the larynx and upper part of the trachea.

Twenty pennies can kill you, if you are a hyena. Investigators at the Detroit Zoological Institute explain how they discovered this fact:

An 11-yr-old captive-born female striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena) acutely developed lameness and swelling of the left front foot with anorexia, depression, and lethargy. Hematologic evaluation revealed regenerative anemia, azotemia, and other mild serum electrolyte and mineral abnormalities. Twenty radiographically visible coins and 10 coin fragments were removed by laparotomy and gastrotomy following unsuccessful medical therapy. The animal died during anesthetic recovery…. The case highlights the risk posed by penny ingestion for subsequent zinc toxicosis in captive omnivores.4

Twenty Times Twenty Can

Four hundred sixty-one pennies can kill you. Investigators at the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center claim credit for the discovery. In their words:

This is the first reported case of human fatality associated with zinc intoxication following a massive ingestion of coins. Four hundred and sixty-one coins were removed from the gastrointestinal tract of a schizophrenic patient during the course of hospitalization. Many of the post-1981 pennies, which consist primarily of zinc, showed severe corrosion due to their prolonged contact with acidic gastric juice. The patient presented with clinical manifestations consistent with the local corrosive as well as systemic effects of zinc intoxication and died 40 days after admission with multi-system organ failure.5

Discussion

My preliminary research indicates that most coin-related deaths in adults—at least most of the deaths reported in the official medical literature—involve American coins, and most of those coins are pennies.

What of other coins?

Many nations have coins that cause medical problems. My report about deaths due to those coins will be reported in a series of separate publications. This report, as I have stated several times, deals mostly with pennies.

It may be true that American coins smaller or larger than a penny are seldom involved directly in causing death. One cannot rule out the possibility, though, that people are more careful in how they use these other coins, because each coin is worth more than a humble penny. That is mere speculation, though. Based only on the available evidence, one must conclude that while a penny can do you in, a dime’s not going to kill you.

References

1. See, for example, “Esophagoaortic Perforation by Foreign Body (Coin) Causing Sudden Death in a 3-Year-Old Child,” M. Dahiya and J.S. Denton, American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, vol. 20, no. 2, June 1999, pp. 184–8.

2. For the full report, see “A Suicidal Case of Electrocution With Hypnotic Drug Poisoning: An Autopsy Report” [article in Japanese], M Yamazaki, M Terada et al., Nippon Hoigaku Zasshi [Japanese Journal of Legal Medicine], vol. 52, no. 2, April 1997, pp. 95–101.

3.For the full report, see “A Coin in the Airway,” C. Rogers, B. Chang, and R. Shibuya, American Journal of Forensic Medical Pathology, vol. 15, no. 1, March 1994, pp. 91–2.

4. “Zinc Toxicosis in a Captive Striped Hyena (Hyaena hyaena),” D.W. Agnew, R.B. Barbiers, et al., Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine, vol. 30, no. 3, September 1999, pp. 431–4.

5. “Zinc Toxicity Following Massive Coin Ingestion,” D.R. Bennett, et al., The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, vol. 18, no. 2, June 1997, pp. 148–53.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the May-June 2008 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.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.

The 21st annual Ig Nobel Prizes will be awarded on Thursday, September 29th. The tickets to the ceremony at Sanders Theater at Harvard University are sold out, but the presentations will be streamed live at YouTube. Also, if you want to organize a viewing party, the folks at Improbable Research will be glad to help you coordinate it. The theme this year is “CHEMISTRY,” which is why the promo video features chemist Daniel Rosenberg, who will perform at the event. Link

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.

Another patient had a complete remission, and the third had a partial remission. What is surprising about the experimental treatment is that it uses diabled HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS, to carry the new cancer-fighting genes to the patient’s T-cells.

The University of Pennsylvania team seems to have hit all the targets at once. Inside the patients, the T-cells modified by the researchers multiplied to 1,000 to 10,000 times the number infused, wiped out the cancer and then gradually diminished, leaving a population of “memory” cells that can quickly proliferate again if needed.

The researchers remain cautious, because so few patients have been given the treatment, and because the therapy itself can be dangerous. But Mr. Ludwig has gained 40 pounds and a playing golf again. Read how they did it at the New York Times. Link -via Metafilter

If you want to show the world what you’re REALLY made of, guts and all, then your wait is almost over. Thanks to Japanese researchers from RIKEN, biological tissue can be turned transparent via chemical reagent, so you can look like a superhero without the need to have powers or a cool alien back story. Unfortunately, this reagent doesn’t work on living tissue, so you’ll have to wait a while longer for your clear skin makeover. Until then, read on at PopSci and imagine all the creepy possibilities!

Link -image via RIKEN

This issue’s under-publicized scientist is Nicolas Guéguen, who finds significance, or at least fascination, in the goad of small things. He does what might be called voyeuristic microscopy, watching how people react to mundanely noticeable sights and sounds and touching. Many of the experiments involve young female confederates who are shaped or perfumed or who lay a hand upon strangers in particular ways. Generally, the test subjects who respond most vigorously are men.

Based at the University of Bretagne-Sud, France, Professor Guéguen has been pumping out publications since the year 2000. He honors the academic custom of referring to himself, in print, with the royal “we.”

His experiments probe a range of human behavior.

A study called “Women’s Bust Size and Men’s Courtship Solicitation,” ¹ describes how Professor Guéguen tested “the effect of a woman’s breast size on approaches made by males. We hypothesized that an increase in breast size would be associated with an increase in approaches by men.” The study ends with an 827-word assertion that “Our hypothesis was confirmed.”

A related experiment produced a study called “Bust Size and Hitchhiking: A Field Study.”² There Professor Guéguen reports that “1200 male and female French motorists were tested in a hitchhiking situation. A 20-year-old female confederate wore a bra which permitted variation in the size of cup to vary her breast size. She stood by the side of a road frequented by hitchhikers and held out her thumb to catch a ride. Increasing the bra-size of the female hitchhiker was significantly associated with an increase in number of male drivers, but not female drivers, who stopped to offer a ride.”

An earlier study called “The Effect of Touch on Tipping: An Evaluation in a French Bar,”³ aimed to fill a very specific gap in psychologists’ knowledge of human behavior. The study explains: “Although positive effect of touch on restaurant’s tipping has been widely found in the literature, no evaluation was made outside the United States of America and in a bar. An experiment was carried out in a French bar. A waitress briefly touched (or not) the forearm of a patron when asking him/her what he/she want to drink. Results show that touch increases tipping behavior although giving a tip to a waitress in a bar is unusual in France.” Professor Guéguen has pursued related questions, some involving smiles, upon which he reports in additional studies.

“The Effect of Perfume on Prosocial Behavior of Pedestrians”⁴ is representative of several Guéguen investigations of how people respond to the presence and actions of a heavily perfumed woman. In this one, the fragranced woman walks in front of strangers and “drops a packet of paper handkerchiefs or a glove apparently without noticing.”

In these and other forays, Professor Guéguen probes and ponders the human condition.

References

1. “Women’s Bust Size and Men’s Courtship Solicitation,” Nicolas Guéguen, Body Image, vol 4, no. 4, December 2007, pp. 386–90. (Thanks to Charles Oppenheim for bringing this to our attention.)

2. “Bust Size and Hitchhiking: A Field Study,” Nicolas Guéguen, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 105, no. 3, part 2, December 2007, pp. 1294–8. (Thanks to James Randerson for bringing this to our attention.):

3. “The Effect of Touch on Tipping: An Evaluation in a French Bar,” Nicolas Guéguen and Celine Jacob, International Journal of Hospitality Management, vol. 24, no. 2, 2005, pp. 295–9.

4. “The Effect of Perfume on Prosocial Behavior of Pedestrians,” Nicolas Guéguen, Psychological Reports, vol. 88, 2001, pp. 1046-8.

“Hitchhikers’ Smiles and Receipt of Help,” N. Guéguen and J. Fischer-Lokou, Psychological Reports, vol. 94, no. 3, June 2004, pp. 756–60. Investigators at the Universite de Bretagne-Sud, Vannes, France found that:

The positive association of smiling on helping behavior is well established in social psychology. Nevertheless, no study was found for the effect of smiling on hitchhiking success. An experiment was carried out in France where hitchhiking is a legal and common practice. Four confederates, 2 young men and 2 young women, selected for their “average attractiveness” hitchhiked, signaled to 800 (503 men and 297 women) motorists driving along the road on a peninsula. In half of the cases, the confederate smiled at the motorist. Analysis showed that, when hitchhiking women were smiling, motorists stopped more frequently but not when hitchhikers were men. Also, in all conditions, motorists who stopped were male.

Professor Guéguen’s fine-grained investigation of men’s response to particular aspects of women’s appearance and behavior also includes “The Effects of Women’s Cosmetics on Men’s Courtship Behavior,” N. Guéguen, North American Journal of Psychology, vol. 10, no. 1, 2008, pp. 221–8.

Professor Guéguen’s several tipping-related studies includes “The Effect of a Joke on Tipping When It Is Delivered at the Same Time as the Bill,” N. Guéguen, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 32, 2002, pp. 1955–63.

Early in his career, Professor Guéguen mounted this multi-disciplinary look at tipping: “Effect on Tipping of Barman Drawing a Sun on the Bottom of Customers’ Checks,” Nicolas Guéguen and Patrick Legoherel, Psychological Reports, vol. 87, no. 1, August 2000, pp. 223-6. The authors explain that they:

Investigated whether a drawing of the sun on a restaurant bill increases the number of tips left by clients. The experiment was carried out in bars and involved 177 clients who had ordered an espresso coffee. Analysis shows that the drawing of the sun led clients to leave a tip more frequently than when this drawing was not present. The size of the tip left was also higher. The hypothesis of the creation of a positive frame of mind by this stimulus is discussed.

Professor Guéguen’s fine-grained investigation of men’s response to particular aspects of women’s appearance and behavior include “Women’s Eye Contact and Men’s Later Interest: Two Field Experiments,” N. Guéguen, J. Fischer-Lokou, L. Lefebvre, and L. Lamy, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 106, 2008, pp. 63–6.

Professor Guéguen also researches the effects of ambient music on how much people drink, He has received considerable attention for this study: “Sound Level of Environmental Music and Drinking Behavior: A Field Experiment with Beer Drinkers,” N. Guéguen, C. Jacob, T. Morineau. H. Le Guellec, and M. Lourel, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, vol. 32, no. 10, October 2008, pp. 1795–8.

Professor Guéguen’s “Sound Level of Environmental Music and Drinking Behavior: A Field Experiment with Beer Drinkers “is a follow-up, in some ways, to this earlier study: “Sound Level of Background Music and Alcohol Consumption: An Empirical Evaluation,” N. Guéguen, H. Le Guellec, and C. Jacob, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 99, no. 1, August 2004, pp. 34–8.

Professor Guéguen’s music-and-alcohol studies are by no means his only angle of attack on the general subject of ambient music’s effect on behavior. He was also the driving force behind this study: “Cartoon Music in a Candy Store: A Field Experiment,” H. Le Guellec, N. Guéguen, C. Jacob, and A. Pascual, Psychological Reports, vol. 100, 2007, pp. 1255–8.

(Image captioning via Speechable)

__________________________

This article is republished with permission from the March-April 2009 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.

Link Via Geekosystem

Link

(Video Link)

Science videos have never looked so cool, thanks to the introduction of 3d visual effects and simulations that make the scientific process geeky fun to watch. Whether you understand what’s happening in each short film or not, the visuals are mind blowing and quite beautiful to watch. You can see all 10 videos over at Wired.

-via Wired

by Robert E. Pyatt Ph.D.
Assistant Laboratory Director
Nationwide Children’s Hospital
Columbus, Ohio

This is a comparison of classic films and science articles that share the same name.

The movie facts come from the Internet Movie Database. Information about the science articles comes from the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

Starring Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef. Directed by Sergio Leone.

Spaghetti Western set against the backdrop of the Civil War where 3 men, the good (Eastwood), the bad (Van Cleef), and the ugly (Wallach), race to uncover a hidden stash of Confederate gold.

“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (with Apologies to Sergio Leone)”

M.V. Connelly, Facial Plastic Surgery Clinics of North America, vol. 16, no. 2, May 2008 pp. 179–82.

Tales of a plastic surgery practice set in a small city including the good (well informed patients who follow all pre and post-op instructions and are “thoroughly pleased with the postoperative results”), the bad (patients who “bring you grief and perhaps damage your reputation”), and the ugly (“disparaging remarks from another surgeon in your area”).

A Night at the Opera

A Night at the Opera (1935)

Starring the Marx Brothers and Kitty Carlisle. Directed by Sam Wood.

The Marx Brothers take on high society as the boys help two opera singers find fame and true love.

“A Night at the Opera”

[no author listed] Mental Health Today,October 2005, pp. 10-1. Touching and comedic tale of “Streetwise Opera,” a company which designs, stages, and performs operas with a combination of professional performers and homeless people.

Bambi Meets Godzilla

(YouTube link)

Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969)

Written and directed by Marv Newland.

Animated short featuring the first silver screen pairing of two of Hollywood’s most memorable creatures with the expected tragic consequences.

“Psychotherapy Research Evidence and Reimbursement Decisions: Bambi Meets Godzilla”

M.B. Parloff, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 139, no. 6, June 1986, pp.718–27.

Like a tender doe standing in a sunny forest glen, “policy guiding reimbursement issues for mental health care” faces off against the gargantuan “research evidence of psychotherapy outcome”. Eerily similar ending to its big screen counterpart.

Saturday Night Fever

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

Starring John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney. Directed by John Badham.

“The tribal rites of the new Saturday night.” Two New Yorkers, Tony (Travolta) and Stephanie (Gorney), discover passion, maturity, and themselves as they disco dance across Manhattan.

“Saturday Night Fever: A Common Source Outbreak of Rubella Among Adults in Hawaii”

J.S. Marks, M.K. Serdula, N.A. Halsey, M.V. Gunaratne, R.B. Craven, K.A. Murphy, G.Y. Kobayashi and N.H. Wiebenga, American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 114,
no. 4, October 1981, pp. 574–83.

It’s a whole other kind of fever on this Saturday night as a rubella outbreak infects young adults, with the common place of exposure being a discotheque. Evidence suggests that the virus source was a piano player/singer at the club and that transmission was airborne, rather than person to person, and occurred during his singing.

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The article above is from the September-October 2008 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.

Duesberg, a molecular and cell biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues believe that carcinogenesis—the generation of cancer—is just another form of speciation, the evolution of new species.

“Cancer is comparable to a bacterial level of complexity, but still autonomous, that is, it doesn’t depend on other cells for survival; it doesn’t follow orders like other cells in the body, and it can grow where, when and how it likes,” said Duesberg in a UC Berkeley press release. “That’s what species are all about…Once a cell has crossed that barrier of autonomy, it’s a new species.”

Researchers are hopeful that if this is true, the species might be defeated if we continue to force them to rapidly evolve through the use of increasingly powerful medicines. What do you think, is it a parasitic species or a disease?

Link

In 1995, Gross and Levenson published the results of their test screenings. They came up with a list of 16 short film clips able to elicit a single emotion, such as anger, fear or surprise. Their recommendation for inducing disgust was a short film showing an amputation. Their top-rated film clip for amusement was the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. And then there’s the two-minute, 51-second clip of Schroder weeping over his father’s dead body in The Champ, which Levenson and Gross found produced more sadness in laboratory subjects than the death of Bambi’s mom.

“I still feel sad when I see that boy crying his heart out,” Gross says.

Cue the argument for Old Yeller. Excuse me, I think I need a handkerchief. Link -via Metafilter

Link to the specific scene from The Champ.

Women Prefer Men Who Look Badass

What’s that you say? Chicks dig the swagger? We like the dark, broody type? Yes, we know. But, in case there was doubt, a study published in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion indicates that women find men who look powerful or moody more sexually attractive than smiling men. Conversely, men in the same study find smiling women most attractive, and are least likely to find powerful- or confident-looking women appealing.

Theories about why this is true rely on data from other studies, which report that male expressions of pride accentuate masculine features that women find most drool-worthy, whereas men find amiable, happy women most enticing, aligning with the traditional role of women as “submissive and vulnerable.” It seems feminism and gender equality haven’t been around long enough to change the way our brains work. It also explains why Don Draper is dead sexy even though he’s such a jerk.

Gossip Changes the Way We See People

If people are talking smack about you, chances are they probably see you differently than they see others. I mean, duh, right?  Think about it: you probably see between dozens and hundreds of people in a given day, but you don’t notice them all. If, however, a person is preceded by a bit of bad gossip, your brain will pick him or her out of a crowd. But why? To determine whether someone is a friend or foe, according to Science Now.

To test this, researchers showed different images to each subject’s left and right eye at the same time, effectively pitting them against each other in a contest for the brain’s attention. The viewer has to register one image before the other; the winner is the picture with priority granted by the brain. Every picture (all of people) was given a bit of information: “threw a chair at a classmate” or “helped an elderly woman with her groceries,” or similarly negative/positive statements. The negatively noted face reached the subjects’ consciousness about half a second faster than the nice person’s face, essentially spotting a foe or rival with

So, in short: if you think a person might be worth avoiding, you can spot them in a crowd pretty quickly. This sounds pretty much like high school to me, but it’s nice that it’s been confirmed.

Crying Women Turn Guys Off

Huh. Really. This is one of the least surprising no-brainers in this list, I think, for no other reason than I can’t imagine a situation in which the opposite (or anything like it) might be true. But it’s not the snotty nose or hiccuping wail that makes men hightail it for the door–it’s the smell of your tears, woman.

Even if the scent isn’t detectable on a conscious level, the chemical signal of weepy eyes will temporarily send testosterone plummeting in nearby men. You can blame pheromones for this one; tears produced as a result of emotional turmoil are chemically different than, say, eyelash-in-the-eye tears. And the worst part may be that men who sniffed a woman’s sad tears were not only not attracted to her, they were also less empathetic. Yeesh.

The study’s reverse–testing the female reaction to the emotional tears of men–hasn’t been conducted yet. It seems getting men to cry voluntarily, even for science, is not an easy task

People Find Scientific Conclusions Obvious

That’s right. Scientists know that people will find their conclusions a matter of common sense. Hindsight bias is a bit like the Guess Which Number I’m Thinking Of game; you have no idea which number I’m thinking of, but when I say “42!” you think, “Ugh, I knew that!”

The brain is a place that likes to keep its contents organized. So when you learn new information, you tend to lose previous contradictory ideas that would muddy-up the works. You thought I was thinking of 17, then maybe 4, then maybe 291. But when I tell you I’ve been thinking of 42 the entire time, you toss out your old ideas about it and replace those ideas with memories graced with hindsight. You know now what I was thinking, so you knew then, too. Or so you tell yourself. You Are Not So Smart explains it like this:

You are always looking back at the person you used to be, always reconstructing the story of your life to better match the person you are today. You have needed to keep a tidy mind to navigate the world ever since you lived in jungles and on savannas. Cluttered minds got bogged down, and the bodies they controlled got eaten. Once you learn from your mistakes, or replace bad info with good, there isn’t much use in retaining the garbage, so you delete it.  This deletion of your old incorrect assumptions de-clutters your mind. Sure, you are lying to yourself, but it’s for a good cause.

If hindsight bias holds true, everything on this list was news to me when I read it the first time, and in looking back, I’m replacing my previous ideas about what women like and how men react to emotional outbursts with what I know now.

But I knew that already, of course. It’s so obvious.

Image credits: g4r37h, AMC, iStockphoto, 0-26Survivor

The objective, says Olwell, is to see if advertising can make brown capuchins change their behaviour. The team will create two brands of food – the team is considering making two colours of jello – specifically targeted at brown capuchins, one supported by an ad campaign and the other not.

How do you advertise to monkeys? Easy: create a billboard campaign that hangs outside the monkeys’ enclosure.

“The foods will be novel to them and are equally delicious,” Olwell says. Brand A will be advertised and brand B will not. After a period of exposure to the campaign, the monkeys will be offered a choice of both brands.

Santos plans to kick off the experimental campaign in the coming weeks. “If they tend toward one and not the other we’ll be witnessing preference shifting due to our advertising,” Olwell says.

But what kind of advertising might a capuchin–without language, pop culture, or an appreciation for human aesthetics–find appealing? The answer is simple, if wholly unrelated to the food in question:

One billboard shows a graphic shot of a female monkey with her genitals exposed, alongside the brand A logo. The other shows the alpha male of the capuchin troop associated with brand A.

Olwell expects brand A to be the capuchins’ favoured product. “Monkeys have been shown in previous studies to really love photographs of alpha males and shots of genitals, and we think this will drive their purchasing habits.”

Link | Image

It’s not going to be beating anyone at Jeopardy any time soon, but scientists have created an artificial brain derived from rat cells. The brain is capable of 12 second short term memory and will be used to study how neural networks store data.

Developed by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, the brain was created in an attempt to artificially nurture a working brain into existence so that researchers could study neural networks and how our brains transmit electrical signals and store data so efficiently. The did so by attaching a layer of proteins to a silicon disk and adding brain cells from embryonic rats that attached themselves to the proteins and grew to connect with one another in the ring seen above.

Link

The research team compared the Milky Way to similar galaxies in terms of luminosity–a measure of how much light is emitted–and distance to other bright galaxies. They found galaxies that have two satellites that are as bright and close by as the Milky Way’s two closest satellites, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, are rare.

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

In one of the more remarkable feats of modern geoscience, researchers have pinpointed the date, hour and size of the cataclysm that killed these cedars. In Japan, officials had recorded an “orphan” tsunami—unconnected with any felt earthquake— with waves up to ten feet high along 600 miles of the Honshu coast at midnight, January 27, 1700. Several years ago, Japanese researchers, by estimating the tsunami’s speed, path and other properties, concluded that it was triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake that warped the seafloor off the Washington coast at 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 26, 1700. To confirm it, U.S. researchers found a few old trees of known age that had survived the earthquake and compared their tree rings with the rings of the ghost forest cedars. The trees had indeed died just before the growing season of 1700.

Although earthquakes still cannot be predicted accurately, the body of data is growing that may lead to better forecasts. Link

(Image credit: Brian Smale)

A team of researchers taught macaques how to maneuver a joystick to indicate whether the pixel density on a screen was sparse or dense. Given a pixel scenario, the monkeys would maneuver a joystick to a letter S (for sparse) or D (for dense). They were given a treat when they selected the correct answer, but when they were wrong, the game paused for a couple seconds. A third possible answer, though, allowed the monkeys to select a question mark, and thereby forgo the pause (and potentially get more treats).

And as John David Smith, a researcher at SUNY Buffalo, and Michael Beran, a researcher at Georgia State University, announced at the AAAS meeting this weekend, the macaques selected the question mark just as humans do when they encounter a mind-stumping question. As Smith told the BBC, “Monkeys apparently appreciate when they are likely to make an error…. They seem to know when they don’t know.”

The same experiment with capuchin monkeys returned different results: they didn’t use the question mark button. Link -via J-Walk Blog

Anyone interested in fostering or adopting a lab beagle should be aware of the challenges these dogs have. They will not be accustomed to life in a home and will not have experience with children, cats, or other dogs. They will not be house-trained and accidents will happen, although they learn quickly. Many have gone directly from a commercial breeder to the lab, and have never felt grass under their feet or even seen the sun. They will have been fed a special diet formulated for lab animals and may be difficult to adjust to new foods. They will be unfamiliar with treats, toys, bedding and may never have walked on a leash. They will have lived in cages with steel wire floors and may have inflamed or infected paws from the pressure. They may be fearful of people initially and may have phobias from a lifetime in confinement or from being restrained. They are likely to have been surgically de-barked by the breeder and have an ID number tattooed in their ear. Please also be aware that although these beagles are considered healthy, you will be given very little information about the beagle’s medical history, and you will not be told its origins or what kind of testing they may have been used for.

The video of Freedom and Bigsby is at the home page of the organization. Link -via Nag on the Lake

As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”

Why does this matter? It has to do with how attention works. In conversation, people have to track what’s being talked about, and they often do this visually. This is particularly so if they’re trying to make sense of whatever it is someone is going on about. Indeed, should I start blathering about “the old mumpsimus in the corner” you’re apt to begin discretely looking around for the mystery person or object.

Kids do the exact same thing, only more avidly, because they have much, much more to learn about. That means that when you stick the noun before the color word, you can successfully narrow their focus to whatever it is you’re talking about before you hit them with the color. Say “the balloon is red,” for example, and you will have helped to narrow “red-ness” to being an attribute of the balloon, and not some general property of the world at large. This helps kids discern what about the balloon makes it red.

When the researchers switched the color and noun, they found a significant improvement in performance over the children’s baseline performances, compared to the children who received prenominal training. Link -via TYWKIWBI

(Image credit: Flickr user wine me up)

A feline subject reacts to a photograph of a man with a full dark semicircular beard.

Abstract

Cats were exposed to photographs of bearded men. The beards were of various sizes, shapes, and styles. The cats’ responses were recorded and analyzed.

Findings of Prior Investigators

Boone (1958) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to clean-shaven men. O’Connor and Brynner (1990) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to shaven heads. Quant (1965) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to bangs. Seuss (1955) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to hats. Ciccone (1986) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to hairy legs. Other related studies (Smith/Brothers 1972, Conroy 1987, Schwartzenegger 1983) have since been retracted because the investigators were not able to reproduce their results.

Norquist (1988) performed a series of experiments in which cats were exposed to photographs of Robert Bork[1] (not pictured here), a man whose beard is confined largely to the underside of the jaw. After viewing the Bork photograph, 26% of the cats exhibited paralysis of the legs and body, including the neck. An additional 31% of the cats exposed to the Bork photograph showed other types of severe neurological and/or pulmocardial distress and/or exhibited extremely violent behavior. Because of this, we did not include a photograph of this type of bearded man in our study.

Materials

Five photographs were used in the study. The photographs, reproduced here, display a range of different types of bearded men. (As noted above, one type of bearded man was, however, excluded from use in this study.)

The test subjects were female cats, all between the ages of four and six. 214 cats participated in the study. Three cats died during the study, due to causes unrelated to the bearded men. Fifteen cats gave birth while viewing the photographs.[2]

Methods

Each cat was exposed to the photographs. One photograph was shown at a time. Each photograph was visible for a span of twenty seconds. The photographs were presented in the same order to each cat.

While each cat was viewing the photographs, it was held by a laboratory assistant. To ensure that the cats were not influenced by stroking or other unconscious cues from the assistant, the assistant was anesthetized prior to each session. The cats’ reactions were assessed for changes in pulse rate, respiration, eye dilation, fur shed rate, and qualitative behavior.

Results

The results are presented in Table 1. The quantitative results are average values calculated over the entire feline subject population. The qualitative results are broken out by percentages of the subject population.

Table 1

Pulse Rate:

Runkel:         +42%

Crafts:        unchanged

Despradelle:   +87%

Pritchett:     +2%

Wiener:        unchanged

Respiration:

Runkel:        +186%

Crafts:        unchanged

Despradelle:   +317%

Pritchett:     + 3%

Wiener:        unchanged

Eye Dilation:

Runkel:        +23%

Crafts:        +1%

Despradelle:   +31%

Pritchett:     +3%

Wiener:        unchanged

Fur Shed Rate:

Runkel:        +12%

Crafts:        unchanged

Despradelle:   +19%

Pritchett:     +2%

Wiener:        unchanged

Qualitative Behavior:

Runkel:  

          52% attacked photograph; hissing; spitting; 

                generally agitated behavior.

          34% fled.

          14% had no visible response.

Crafts:   

          2% attacked photograph.

          1% fled.

          1% licked photograph.

          94% had no visible response.

Despradelle:   

          79% attacked photograph; hissing; spitting; 

                generally violent, agitated behavior; chaotic 

                tail twitch; screeching; incontinence.

          19% fled.

          2% had no visible response.

Pritchett:    

          7% attacked photograph.

          1% fled.

          91% had no visible response.

Wiener:        (100%) No visible response.

Interpretation

1. Cats do not like men with long beards, especially long dark beards.
2. Cats are indifferent to men with shorter beards.
3. Cats are confused and/or disturbed by men with beards that are incomplete (e.g., Bork) and to a lesser degree by men whose beards have missing parts (e.g., Crafts).

These interpretations are not categorical. They are subject to several obvious qualifications. The most notable are listed below.

Qualification A. This study excluded photographs of men with beards confined largely to the underside of the jaw (see above discussion of Robert Bork). While data are available from studies conducted by other investigators, those studies made use of a different methodology than the one we used in our study. We are therefore hesitant to interpret our findings in light of the “Bork” findings, or vice versa.

Qualification B. This study was conducted with photographs of bearded men. In a future study we intend to investigate feline responses to animate bearded men. A large number of factors might produce significantly different results in the two studies. In particular, there has been speculation that beardedmen produce pheromones which could have a significant effect on cats.[3]

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank The MIT Museum Collection for allowing us to use photographs from its Bearded Men Collection and for generously granting permission to reproduce the photographs as part of this research report. Special thanks to Sally Beddow for assistance in selecting appropriate photographs (the Collection includes more than 71,000 photographs of bearded men) and to Warren Seamans and Kathy Thurston. Special thanks also to Lisa Yane for coordinating the scheduling, travel and housing arrangements for the feline subjects and for obtaining medical clearances in connection with anesthetizing the research assistant.

Notes

1. Bork was a nominee to the United States Supreme Court. Because of Bork’s distinctive beard, his photograph has been used in reaction studies with dogs, rats, and planaria (flatworms) and in bombardment studies with pigeons.
2. We excluded all data pertaining to the fifteen cats who gave birth while viewing the photographs. The reproducibility of the GAVE BIRTH/DID NOT GIVE BIRTH data will be addressed in a separate, future study.
3. Photographs do not, of course, produce pheromones, but they do emanate airborne scents derived from chemicals used in the photo developing process. Our study with animate bearded men will employ a strategy to eliminate this imbalance: before being shown to the cats, each bearded man will be immersed in a photochemical bath.

Bibliography

• Boone, Patrick, “Cat Reactions to Clean-Shaven Men,” in Western Musicology Journal, March/April 1958, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 4-21.
• Ciccone, Madonna Louise, “Feline Responses to Hairy Legs,” in Midwestern Sociological Review, January 1986, vol. 32, no. 1, pp 51-79.
• Conroy, Gary, “Feline Responses to Ponytails,” in Urban Sociology Review, November 25, 1987, vol. 21, no. 36, pp. 302-321.
• Norquist, Winthrop Grover, “Feline Reactions to Supreme Court Nominees,” in Journal of Feline Forensic Studies, vol. 12, no. 8, August 1988, pp. 437-450.
• O’Connor, Sinead, and Brynner, Y., “Feline Responses to Shaven Heads,” in Journal of Head Trauma, May 30, 1990, vol. 42, no. 17, pp. 309-324.
• Quant, Mary, “Cat Responses to Bangs,” in Tonsological Proceedings, May 1965, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 251-262.
• Schwartzenegger, A., “A Study of How Cats Respond to Body Hair,” in Mind/Body Review, December 1983, vol. 3, no. 12, pp. 25-108.
• Seuss, Doctor, “Feline Responses to Hats,” in Veterinary Developmental Studies, July 1955, vol. 32, no. 7, pp. 54-62.
• Smith, J., and Brothers, Joyce, “Feline Responses to Healthy Adults,” in Health Advice, September 1972, vol. 51, no. 9, pp. 32-33.

NOTE: After this report was published, the authors continued their research.
A later report (including newly discovered historical photos of cats reacting to Abraham Lincoln, Csar Nicholas, and others) can be seen in the Sept./Oct. 1999 issue (vol. 5, no. 5) of the Annals of Improbable Research.
And still further reports appear in many of the subsequent issues of the magazine. Also see the report Feline Reactions to Bearded Men of Beard Type #55G.

© Copyright Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the Sept-Oct 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.

Using a combination of four studies, scientists have shown that television shows can instill a sense of belonging in people with low self-esteem who have been rejected by friends or family. This is called the social surrogacy hypothesis, which figures that in order to fill the emotional void of social deprivation, a person will establish relationships with fictional characters (as teenagers, many of us had a similar type of relationship with late-night Cinemax).

One study showed that subjects who were experiencing feelings of loneliness felt better after turning on their favorite television programs. Another had subjects writing essays about either their favorite shows or some other random subject as a control. The subjects who wrote about their favorite shows used fewer words expressing loneliness than the control group.

The article is surprisingly SFW. Link

One man (Not JFK) stopped the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming WW3. One woman’s cells have continued to save lives even after her death. These are just a couple of the true heros who have saved billions of lives, often unrecognized, through their actions, good thinking, and altruism. Take James Harrison (pictured):

Specifically, his blood contains an extremely rare enzyme that can be used to treat babies dying of Rhesus disease. If you’ve never heard of that disease and figure it’s not a big deal, well, wait for the numbers.

Harrison, being a generous type, has donated his rare, life-saving blood roughly 1,000 times over 56 years. This has saved the lives of–seriously, you’re not going to believe this–over two million babies around the world.

Link – via mentalfloss

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by nmiller.

Despite the many opportunities for research in the oceans, the surfaces of those seas tend to get rough.  Ships being tossed around tend to do less research, so in 1962 the Office of Naval Research helped to develop the Floating Instrument Platform (FLIP).

FLIP can be used in either a drifting or moored mode, based on the science requirements, and FLIP can remain on station in the vertical position for substantial periods of time. For research requiring a stationary rather than drifting platform, a deep moor capability has been developed.

This 350 foot long contraption is towed out to the open ocean, and flipped 90° to the vertical position to become a stable spar buoy.  The 50 or so feet that juts above the waterline becomes the crew operations area, where research can be carried out in stable, calm conditions.

Link (Marine Physical Laboratory)  Photo: Dept. of Navy

Photo: Igor Siwanowicz

Focus Magazine has held a photography contest for the last four years featuring pics from various research projects.  Second place (in Captivating Research) this year went to Igor Simanowicz for this shot of a praying mantis’ threat display.  The rest of the selections over at SpiegelOnline are also impressive.

Siwanowicz’s praying mantis finds herself in good company, among a coral-like vascular system, a robotic seal bringing comfort to dementia patients and an explosion of activity in a neuron cell. The collection presents a fascinating look at the work being done in laboratories around the world.

The picture doesn’t have to be taken by a pro like Siwanowicz, just as long as it makes research more accessible to the non-scientific community.

Link | via Twisted Sifter

On average dogs can learn approximately 165 words. The more intelligent dogs can acquire a vocabulary awareness of around 250 words. In math skills, dogs are aware of numerical differences up to five digits and can calculate the difference.

Link Image Via nyominx

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?

Weird.

Link via Slashfood

Its hard to believe these little things can even fly. They are about as small as a quarter and are simply cool.

Ilan Kroo and his colleagues at Stanford hope to use them for Mars exploration or atmospheric research one day!

Link – via djowtlaw

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by slowboy.