Science on a lighter note: offbeat tales of 2005

physorg.com ^ | 122005

[InvisibleChurch]

Alongside tragedies, wars and natural disasters, 2005 has brought its share of unusual, outrageous, tragi-comic and just downright silly science news items.

Among the oddities served up by the world of science:

- A Swiss woman sees colours and experiences tastes when she hears music, scientists at the University of Zurich in Switzerland reported. The rare phenomenon, known as synaesthesia, was confirmed in a 27-year-old professional musician, who saw violet on hearing an F sharp and red on a middle C.

- Researchers at National University in La Jolla, California, threw a dinner party and then analysed the leftovers to see if their guests left significant DNA samples on them. Complete profiles were recovered from 43 percent of the sample, and partial ones from 33 percent. Such work could be useful in catching burglars, who often like tucking into the food found in their victims' kitchens.

- African elephants have at least one thing in common with parrots: they imitate sounds they hear around them, said scientists in the United States and Norway. A captive female jumbo in Kenya was found to imitate the noise of trucks on a nearby road, while a male kept with Asian elephants at a zoo in Switzerland mimicked their chirping noises.

- Enterprising students at Brown University in the United States invented an alarm clock that monitors its user's brainwaves and works out the best time to wake him or her up. The only drawback: the sleeper must wear a headband equipped with electrodes.

- Alexis Lemaire, a 24-year-old student in Reims, France, claimed a world record for working out the 13th root of a 200-digit number by mental arithmetic. The feat, checked by a notary, took him 48 minutes and 51 seconds.

- Also in the maths department, Akira Haraguchi, a 59-year-old psychiatric counselor in Japan, recited from memory the value of "pi," a constant which consists of an infinite string of digits, to 83,431 decimal places. It took him 13 hours to beat the previous record, also set by a Japanese, of a mere 54,000 digits.

- The guardians of animal nomenclature had mixed feelings over a proposal to name three newly-discovered species of slime-mould beetle after US President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A pair of insect experts reserved the names Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi and Agathidium rumsfeldi for their latest creepy-crawlies.

- An odd-looking rodent spotted on sale for meat in a Laotian food market turned out to be not only a new species but also the first member of a new family of mammals to be identified in more than three decades. An alert member of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society noticed the creature, which was baptised a stone-dwelling puzzle-mouse -- or, more simply, "rock rat".

- Cane toads, reptiles imported into Australia in the erroneous belief that they would eliminate pests from sugar-cane fields, are attracted by disco-style flashing lights, said researchers in the Northern Territory who are desperate to find a way of eliminating the fast-spreading creatures. "The old toads are definitely a disco animal," said a member of a group called Frogwatch.

- The fashion for television detective series which focus on forensic science may be unwittingly providing tips to real-world criminals, a study by British researchers said. Some forensic scientists were even becoming unwilling to cooperate with the media for precisely that reason.

- Proof that scientists have a sense of humour: the annual Ig Nobel awards, which give spoof prizes to the most offbeat research. This year's crop went to the inventor of an alarm that rings then runs away and hides, thus ensuring that the sleeper has to get up to turn it off... to scientists who researched whether humans swim faster in syrup rather than in water... to British boffins who analysed the electrical activity of a locust's brain cell while the insect watched a "Star Wars" movie... and to a German team that calculated the pressure produced in penguins' anuses when the birds expel their faeces.

[InvisibleChurch]

[msnimje]

Blinded me with SCIENCE! LOL!

[metmom]

The Swiss woman is interesting; the math geeks have too much timeon their hands. That's just SICK! I can hardly remember how old I am.

[beaver fever]

"Alexis Lemaire, a 24-year-old student in Reims, France, claimed a world record for working out the 13th root of a 200-digit number by mental arithmetic. The feat, checked by a notary, took him 48 minutes and 51 seconds.

- Also in the maths department, Akira Haraguchi, a 59-year-old psychiatric counselor in Japan, recited from memory the value of "pi," a constant which consists of an infinite string of digits, to 83,431 decimal places. It took him 13 hours to beat the previous record, also set by a Japanese, of a mere 54,000 digits. "

Rain Man bump.

[knews_hound]

Oh thats good....

[dangus]

Cane TOADS are REPTILES? Is the name a misnomer*, or are editors that brain-dead? I mean, for crying out, this is a science journal, not some local newspaper. How could a science editor think toads are reptiles?

*No, it's not. Cane toads are class amphibia, order anura... your garden-variety toads, according to the Australian Museum.

[Billthedrill]

...a German team that calculated the pressure produced in penguins' anuses when the birds expel their faeces.

I don't really want to know how they came to their conclusions. Who's gonna check up on them?

[Rokurota]

And after hours toiling away on new and improved models, global warming scientists have touted that their new models will accurately predict this year's winter's conditions. Jeff Hotpants, TDU, stated the models predict "more snow...though less snow could be the case...however, there is a chance it could be the same amount of snow as last year. Our models get better each year."

[metmom]

Probably the same science editor that let this staement go: The magma could be as much as 2,150 degrees Fahrenheit - 10 times the boiling point – which could lead to much warmer seas and thence to an ice age.

from the thread on volcanos:www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1543202/posts

[skeptoid]

I don't really want to know how they came to their conclusions. Who's gonna check up on them?

I think we should assume they did not adorn the subjects with any sort of instrumentation, but merely observed the mass and velocity of the fecal ejections and the dimensions of the orifices involved and then applied simple Newtonian calculations.

But hey, I could be wrong.

(and I can barely add and subtract)

[decal]

"A Swiss woman sees colours and experiences tastes when she hears music, scientists at the University of Zurich in Switzerland reported. The rare phenomenon, known as synaesthesia, was confirmed in a 27-year-old professional musician, who saw violet on hearing an F sharp and red on a middle C."

A number of composers apparently have had synesthesia: Skryabin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bartók and the American Aaron Jay Kernis.

[Billthedrill]

You know, I thought of that, but you'd also have to allow for trajectory if you're going to extrapolate pressure from mass and distance traveled. So somebody had to measure, or estimate, the, er, horizontal vector component of the hurtling poo.

Man, that's one helluva resume entry...

[skeptoid]

...and then there's the average specific gravity of the ejected mass, it's "rate of dispersal", and the prevailing density altitude of each observation.....for starters.