Cat-Rat Cooperation Disproves Darwin

Chuck's post last week about the guy who trained a rat to sit on top of a cat sitting on a dog, reminded me of the groundbreaking research of Dr. Loh Seng Tsai, conducted back in the late 1940s/early 1950s.

Dr. Tsai trained a cat and a rat to cooperate together in order to get food. From the LA Times, July 15, 1951:


Dr. Tsai reported that, "Soon all the pairs of cats and rats began to work together. Finally their cooperation was so perfect that they took only three seconds to reach their food from the entrance."

Dr. Tsai figured that these results disproved Darwin's concept of the Survival of the Fittest. He told the LA Times reporter: "In the face of the fact that even alley cats and rats live together, eat together, sleep together, play together and work together, Darwin's theory seems at most only a half-truth."

What's really amazing is that this guy was a professor of biology at first the University of Chicago, then Tulane, then UCLA, and yet he didn't seem to have a clear understanding of what Darwin meant by the Survival of the Fittest. Nor, as far as I can tell, did anyone ever call him out as a crackpot. In fact, there was talk of nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. Dove’s Unicorn Bull

In 1933 Dr. W.F. Dove, a biologist at the University of Maine, conducted an experiment to find out if he could create a "unicorn bull." He removed the two knots of tissue on the side of the bull's head that would normally have developed into horns and transplanted them to the center of the forehead. The experiment was a success. A single, massive horn grew there.

The unicorn horn made the bull the unchallenged leader of its herd. But Dr. Dove observed that the unicorn bull was actually an extremely docile creature. He wrote:


Link: Unicorn Garden

Eating Glass

The new Google magazine archive is a goldmine for weirdness. Here's another find from Popular Science, Nov 1931:


The full results of Hoelzel's glass-eating study were published in the American Journal of Physiology, (Mar 1, 1930), "The Rate of Passage of Inert Materials Through the Digestive Tract." The article includes a helpful chart, detailing exactly how long it took for various substances (including steel ball-bearings and bent silver wire) to pass through Hoelzel's system:



Hoelzel was an interesting character. He became an expert on nutrition and often subjected himself to grueling diet experiments -- particularly experiments involving fasting for extended periods of time. The Life photo archive has a picture of him, taken in 1955. He seems to have been one of the first researchers to make a link between calorie-restriction and longevity, though it didn't really work for him. He died in 1963 at the age of 73.

The Hard-To-Get Woman

Why do women play hard to get? According to research recently conducted at the University of Bristol, it's so that "men can prove themselves more worthy than their rivals."

Here's how it works. The woman acts coy. The man acts eager and helpful. Eventually the woman decides, "I am going to have a child with this male." I assume she says this in a robotic voice.

The researchers hope their study "could eventually lead to a model that could work out the optimal amount of coyness for a woman to use in choosing a male."

I wrote about some similar research in Elephants on Acid. In 1973 researchers from the University of Wisconsin instructed a Nevada prostitute to play "hard to get," and then studied the reactions of her clients. Hard to get, in that context, meant that she didn't indicate to her clients whether she wanted to see them again. Client response was measured by the number of times the guy returned during the following month. The researchers concluded that men don't like women who play hard to get. Instead men like women who are easy for themselves but hard for everyone else to get. (Thanks, Sandy!)

Knitted Dissections

You'll surely want to pick up the knitting patterns to reproduce these creations, to be found at the Etsy site.

How much heat can the body withstand?

In 1948 Dr. Craig Taylor at the University of California at Los Angeles created a heat chamber to determine the human tolerance for extreme heat. He experimented on himself. In the picture (from the Life archive) you can see him sitting in his hotbox, heated to a pleasant 220° fahrenheit. The egg on the metal pan in front of him was frying. The highest temperature he ever endured was 262°.

There was a practical point to this. He was trying to determine the maximum heat a fighter pilot could withstand, should the refrigeration system in their plane fail.

For more info about Dr. Taylor's heat experiments, check out the old article from Popular Science posted on the Modern Mechanix blog.

The Mechanics of Stabbing

In a paper recently submitted to arXiv.org, researchers describe an attempt to determine the exact amount of force required to stab someone. No, they didn't stab real people. They stabbed synthetic materials such as polyurethane, foam, and ballistic soap. But oddly, no one had previously determined the exact amount of force needed for stabbing. Forensic scientists had simply used qualitative terms such as "mild force" or "severe force".

Some of their findings: 1) The best household knife to stab someone with is a utility knife:


2) However, not all knives are created equal. Even two identical knives by the same manufacturer can vary greatly in sharpness and ability to penetrate skin:

Bernie Krause

The musician Bernie Krause has had an arguably weird and fascinating career. He's gone from being a minor pop star to being a scientist in the field of bio-acoustics, or the noises of the natural world. Along the way he came up with the concept of "biophony," short for the biological symphony that each ecosystem makes.

The first clip below shows him at work, while the second is a trailer for his concepts.

LIFE Photo Archive

Google recently announced it's struck a deal to host the entire photo archive of Life magazine. Millions of photos (including many previously unpublished ones) will be made freely searchable online. If you're the kind of person who likes to browse through archives searching for weird stuff, it's pretty much a goldmine.

Only about 20% of the archive is online so far, but I've already had fun browsing through it. Below are a few photos I found doing a search for bird experiments.

The LIFE captions are pretty dry. I thought they could be improved by coming up with new captions in the style of LOL Birds. I'm sure the WU readers can come up with better captions than I was able to.

Shrimp on a Treadmill

Scientific researchers placed a shrimp on a shrimp-size treadmill in order to measure its speed and endurance. This information, they say, "will give us a better idea of how marine animals can perform in their native habitat when faced with increasing pathogens and immunological challenges." Luckily for us, they videotaped the experiment.



The video has become hugely popular on the internet, spawning numerous remixes. For instance, witness Shrimp Jamming to Muzak:



There are so many of these remixes you could probably spend an entire day watching them.

All original content in posts is Copyright © 2008 by the author of the post, either Alex Boese ("Alex"), Paul Di Filippo ("Paul"), or Chuck Shepherd ("Chuck"). All rights reserved. The banner illustration at the top of this page is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Altergott.