Science is weird, and sometimes in order to make a breakthrough, you gotta just get weird right
along with it. Today we're looking at the top ten weirdest scientific studies ever conducted.
10. “Shots, shots, shots!”
2006 was a simpler time, and it would still be 3 years until LMFAO released
their iconic party anthem, “Shots”. Yet science was well ahead of LMFAO,
as researchers plied subjects with large amounts of alcohol in the name of scientific research.
The aim of the study was to see how badly talking on a cell phone affected a person's
ability to drive. Naturally, they compared it to how badly drinking heavily impaired a person-
but first they'd have to get their data, which meant getting 40 people good and sloppy drunk.
First they put participants in front of a driving simulator completely sober,
and without a phone in their hands. Unsurprisingly, most people did pretty well
avoiding accidents or fender benders. Next, they put those same drivers back in front of the wheel,
but this time they gave them a phone and had them carry on a conversation. Finally,
scientists plied a new group of drivers with alcohol until they were legally drunk and put
them back in front of the same driving simulator. The results were shocking.
The data showed that drivers carrying on a conversation on a phone-
even when it was hands-free- were as prone to getting into an accident as the drunk drivers,
showing that driving while yapping on a cell phone was as bad as driving drunk. Perhaps the most
surprising revelation however was that hands-free cell phone use was as bad as regular phone use.
9. Poop Knifes
Being a scientist can be a tough job, especially when you spend half your
time pleading and begging for funding to fuel your next brilliant breakthrough.
It probably doesn't make any scientists in our audience feel better then to hear about our next,
fully funded scientific study to disprove a native Inuit urban legend.
For years a story circulated through academic and popular literature of an
Inuit man who's family asked him to move into their settlement. The stubborn old man refused,
so to encourage him the family took away all his tools and left him on his igloo out on the ice.
Stubborn to his core, the man instead shrugged, walked outside into the freezing temperatures,
and dropped a deuce. Once his captain's log was hard as ice, he carved it into a knife
using his hands and his spit, then used the knife to butcher a dog for its meat,
used its rib cage as a sled, its hide as a harness which he attached to another dog,
and simply rode off into the dark winter night, like some sort of crappy Santa.
For some reason we cannot possibly fathom, scientists took issue with this story and
set out to prove or disprove it. For eight days a team of researchers adopted an Inuit diet-
for authenticity of their building materials- and then froze their bottom brownies before carving
them into blades. Using a pig carcass, the team attempted to slice and butcher the dead animal.
Unsurprisingly, the human dookie blades did nothing but leave brown
streaks on the hide of the dead pig. Next time you're looking for a job,
try and remember that someone got paid a lot of money to find out human poop knives don't work.
8. Good Intentions and the Ear Mites
This next story hits a little close to home, since we had our own lab rat and resident
challenge expert once infest himself with lice to try out various treatment options- you can
find that little internet gem in our episode, So I Gave Myself Lice... And This Happened.
However, we were pretty sure of the outcome. It seems veterinarian Dr.
Robert Lopez needed proof that bugs are in fact transmissible between animals and humans.
For his study, Dr. Lopez set out to see if ear mites could be transmitted from a cat's ear
to a human ear. He wasn't able to find the answer in any medical literature and was
concerned about a woman's child who slept with a cat suffering from ear mites. So
he sacrificed himself on the altar of science by infesting his left ear with
ear mites from the affected cat. Sure enough, he developed an ear infection severe enough to
limit his hearing. To verify his results, he repeated the experiment two more times.
Don't worry though, Dr. Lopez wasn't done yet, and subsequent experiments saw him infect himself with
ringworms, pinworms, and roundworms. Which gives us a lot of ideas for new challenge episodes!
7. Octopuses on E
Listen, we tried hard to think of a better title for this next experiment,
but sometimes you can't do better than real life.
Octopuses are strange creatures- so strange in fact that some scientists have even hypothesized
they may not be part of the same tree of life as the rest of life on earth.
That's right, octopuses are alien enough to maybe actually be alien.
While this next study didn't prove or disprove that octopuses are alien, it did prove at least
that there's a strong chance we come from different branches of the same tree of life.
Scientists wanted to know if the same serotonin transporter is present in both humans and
octopuses, so to test this fact they needed to fire up that serotonin and see what happened.
And what better way to get the serotonin flowing than with heavy use of drugs.
Scientists drove their octopuses to Burning Man and doped them up on ecstasy- fine,
they did it in a controlled lab environment, but rest assured those octopuses were rolling hard.
Ecstasy just so happens to bind to a specific gene which researchers could observe to verify
their conclusions, and unsurprisingly, the octopuses- who were tripping hard at this point-
started becoming more social and a lot more touchy feely with each other. Which anyone who has ever
been to Burning Man can confirm is proof Octopuses have the same capability to roll on E as humans.
6. Everything is Awesome!- Even Poop
Another poop study, because for some reason science has
yet to plunder all the scientific wealth that poop apparently has to offer.
Listen, some scientists dedicate their lives to eradicating deadly diseases or unlocking
space travel, while others push the boundary of human poop knowledge ever bravely forward.
Six researchers from the University of Melbourne swallowed a Lego figurine head and then tracked
it as it made its way through their body, and how long it took to poop it out. Before the experiment
though, the participants measured their- and we're not making this up- Stool Hardness and Transit
Score, or SHAT, with the dependent variable being the Found and Retrieved Time, or FART.
We're the ones who get paid to make poop jokes on the internet, so scientists, stay in your lane.
Unsurprisingly the lego head traveled through their systems with ease,
but if you're a University of Melbourne student you can rest easy knowing your
tuition is going to fund some of the most groundbreaking research in human history.
5. Dead Man Karate
Dead Man Karate sounds like some kind of awesome, mysterious fighting style- but it's not. Instead,
it's basically scientists using dead people to punch stuff because... science.
The human hand is weird when you compare it to that of our closest relatives, the apes.
We've got shorter palms and fingers but bigger thumbs, and while the common argument
is that this improves our dexterity and allowed us to master the use of tools,
some scientists believe that it was also a natural adaptation that allowed us to develop the punch
as a fighting technique. Animals after all have all kinds of advantages we don't- teeth, claws,
spines and spikes of all kinds, and our closest relatives basically have superhuman strength.
Compared to every other animal out there, humans without tools are just two-legged buffets.
However, a punch can really make the difference when you've got no natural weapons. To prove this,
scientists hacked off the forearms of eight male cadavers and then rigged them up onto
a pendulum. The hands were manipulated into a traditional punch and an open handed strike,
with the results showing that a punch with a tight fist delivered over half as much force as a
strike with a loose fist. The shape a human fist makes when it's balled up tightly into a punch
also helped protect the hand and forearm from damage, proving that while our hand
may not have evolved specifically for punching, it's very well suited for it.
4. Mosquitoes Have Good Taste In Music
Mosquitoes are the most dangerous animal in the world, responsible for hundreds of millions of
human deaths over the course of history. That's why any study that promises a new weapon against
this winged menace is welcome in our book- but this time, the sword is double-edged.
It's known that low-frequency vibrations help insects get laid- we're not being crass,
that's literally the science. Male and female mosquitoes use the vibrations of
each other's wings to find each other and copulate. However, nobody knew what would
happen if you set out to disrupt the ability for mosquitoes to sense these vibrations.
Then scientists blasted mosquitoes with the Skrillex song Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,
watching how mosquitoes reacted. Incredibly, the song seemed to significantly reduce the mosquito's
appetite for food and sex both, likely because it overwhelmed their sensory organs and messed
with their perceptions. The research was carried out as an attempt to find environmentally friendly
ways to control mosquito populations, though we're not sure what's worse- being forced to sit through
Skrillex at high volumes or running the risk of catching dengue fever from a swarm of mosquitoes.
3. Captain Obvious and the Black Widow
1933 was a heady time for science. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity had upset classical
Newtonian physics, man was dreaming of taking rockets into space, and the airplane had at last
brought mankind so close together that surely war was never possible again. But, in the mind of Dr.
Allan Walker Blair of the University of Alabama, there were some questions science still needed to
settle- such as this superstitious fluff that Black Widow spider bites were truly dangerous.
Ain't no overgrown skeeter-killer gonna stand in the way of science,
so Dr. Blair hollered out, “Roll Tide!”, and shoved his finger right in a Black Widow's face.
The results were immediate, and completely obvious to any of the millions of country
folk who had dealt with Black Widows on their land for hundreds of years.
Within two hours the good doctor's assistant had to take over writing the lab notes
because Dr. Blair was suffering from extreme pain, uncontrolled sweating and vomiting,
and severe mental status changes. It took two days for the symptoms to go away
and the good doctor to state at last for all science to acknowledge, “The venom injected by
the bite of the adult female spider, Latrodectus mactans, is dangerously poisonous for man.”
Then a few years later an entomologist from the University of Kansas thought to himself,
“'aint no bog-dwelling 'Bamer boy gonna outscience me!”, and went and got himself bit too.
2. Improving American Healthcare
Americans will do literally anything to figure out how to deny healthcare to most
of its population, so scientists set about to figure out how to treat kidney stones
without actually letting someone see a doctor.
After a patient told him that he had dislodged one of his kidney stones at a roller coaster,
Professor David Wartinger of Michigan State University College
decided to build a replica renal system and take it with him on several coasters-
and sure enough the side-to-side motion of being jostled seemed to work kidney stones free.
Researchers later got wind of this curious find and conducted more rigorous tests,
discovering that riding at the back of a rollercoaster had an exponentially greater
kidney stone passage rate at 23 out of 36 rides, than riding at the front at 4 out of 24 rides.
So next time you've got a kidney stone, buy yourself a day pass to a local theme park,
because you can't afford medical treatment anyways.
1.
Thanks to a totally mysterious and utterly unexplained rise in authoritarianism starting
in the year 2016, social scientists have been increasingly curious about how to identify
far-right authoritarian tendencies in people and their support for dictators.
This time they linked up with regular old scientists to make a startling discovery- people
who are disgusted by body odor are far more likely to support authoritarian policies and figures.
The study measured individual's social attitudes on a Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale
and their responses to the body odor of strangers. Interestingly, those who displayed the greatest
disgust at another person's body odor also scored highest on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale.
The researchers concluded that individuals specially sensitive to their
chemo-signalling system, a tool for regulating interpersonal contact and disease avoidance,
were more prone to fall in line with authoritarian figures since
xenophobic views are so closely aligned with dictatorships. For their research, they used
speeches and news reports of Donald Trump, who frequently showed authoritarian tendencies.
Now go watch Science Experiments That Went Horribly Wrong- or click this other video instead!