In the 1970s, Dr. K.N. Udupa studied the health effects of yoga on rats. Since rats couldn't be persuaded to adopt yoga poses voluntarily, he kept them upside in glass tubes for one hour daily — simulating the sirasana, or head-stand pose.
Ignoring objections from traditionalists, Dr. Udupa has even initiated tests on rats that are made to simulate a yoga posture. Half a dozen field rats are doing one to two hours a day of sirasana or standing on the head, in openend glass tubes. Wires attached to their tails measure their pulse rate, blood pressure and other metabolic changes.
Stress induced in rats by electric pulses made them irritable and quarrelsome, but after an hour of sirasana they became tranquil and appeared to be contented, Dr. Udupa said.
Researchers have uncovered the "social dimensions of urination" among captive chimpanzees. This topic had previously been "largely unexplored."
They recorded urination events for a total of 604 hours and calculated urination frequency for each subject. They report:
Contagious urination, like other forms of behavioral and emotional state matching, may have important implications in establishing and maintaining social cohesion, in addition to potential roles in preparation for collective departure (i.e. voiding before long-distance travel) and territorial scent-marking (i.e. coordination of chemosensory signals)...
we find that in captive chimpanzees the act of urination is socially contagious. Further, low-dominance individuals had higher rates of contagion.
I guess the obvious question is whether humans also are susceptible to contagious urination. I haven't noticed it, if we are.
In grocery stores, fresh produce such as bananas and tomatoes often goes to waste if it's become a "loose single." Shoppers think it's damaged or imperfect.
German researchers have come up with a way to address this problem: make shoppers think the produce is feeling sad because it hasn't been bought.
This is achieved simply by displaying an anthropomorphized picture of sad produce above the singles.
The produce has to be sad. Happy fruits and vegetables don't motivate shoppers.
Also, making produce sad works better than offering a price discount, because shoppers often assume discounted food must be bad.
Along similar lines, neuroscientist Kelly Lambert of the University of Richmond has trained rats to drive small vehicles. She found that they were eager drivers: "the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the 'lever engine' before their vehicle hit the road."
A recent article in the journal Physical Review E explores what kind of paper is most likely to give you paper cuts. The answer: dot-matrix paper. Followed by magazine pages.
The likelihood of cutting has to do with the thickness of the paper. Too thin and the paper buckles instead of cutting. Too thick and it indents material rather than slicing it. There's a specific range in between too thick and too thin where the paper cuts.
For the purpose of their research, the authors created a "papermachete" which they used to cut apples, bananas, chicken, etc. (see image below).
According to German researcher Otto Nieschulz, when rats listen to music they prefer to listen to French chansons.
But when Nieschulz says 'chansons' does he mean "secular polyphonic French songs of late medieval and Renaissance music" or the "style of French pop music which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s"? According to wikipedia, both are known as chansons.
I haven't been able to track down Nieschulz's original paper, so there's no way to know. I'm guessing the rats might enjoy both.
1928: Emmett Price of the US Bureau of Animal Husbandry swallowed the larvae of an unknown parasite he found in the liver of a dead giraffe. His boss explained that it was considered tradition within the parasitology section of the Bureau to self-experiment in this way.
1909: Dr. Marage of the Paris Academy of Sciences removed the larynx from a dog and made it bark outside of its body. The larynx produced "barks and howls in every note of the canine register, from the deep baying of a mastiff to the shrill pipe of a terrier."
I haven't been able to find out what Dr. Marage's first name was. All the sources I can find simply refer to him as 'Dr. Marage'.
The Sketch - Dec 15, 1909
Scientific American - Feb 5, 1910
Text from Scientific American (Feb 5, 1910):
Marage employed, in his experiments, the larynx of the dog. In order to spare the animal useless suffering, morphine was first administered hypodermically and, three hours later, the dog was put under the influence of chloroform, and the larynx, with five or six rings of the trachea, was excised. A rubber tube of the diameter of the trachea was then connected with the latter by means of a short tube of thing glass, so that a current of cold air could be forced through the extirpated larynx. The pressure of the air was measured with a very sensitive metallic manometer graduated in millimeters of water pressure. The compressed air was stored in a rubber bag similar to those which are employed for inhalations of oxygen, and was kept at the temperature of 98.6 deg. F. The muscles of the larynx were stimulated by the current of a small induction coil, which was energized by a storage battery, and the sounds emitted by the larynx were recorded by a phonograph. The following conclusions were reached:
When the larynx of a dog is removed during chloroform anesthesia, the laryngeal muscles retain their ability to contract for a short period, which varies from 3 to 10 minutes, but no contraction can be produced in the muscles of a dead larynx, even if it is removed immediately after the death of an animal, because the arterial blood has escapes.
In order to produce the vibrations, the current of air should be impelled by a pressure of from 6 to 8 inches of water, as it is in the normal production of the human voice. In these conditions the excised larynx of the dog barks and howls in every note of the canine register, from the deep baying of a mastiff to the shrill pipe of a terrier. These various notes are obtained at will by causing various muscles to contract.
A study published in the June 1968 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol involved giving chimpanzees and orangutans as much vodka (mixed with fruit juice) as they wanted to drink in order to find out if they'd become alcoholics.
Reportedly the chimpanzees were enthusiastic drinkers and became drunk repeatedly. But oddly, the orangutans, although they drank, never showed any signs of intoxication.
Is a coin toss truly random? Not according to the "D-H-M model" which proposes that a tossed coin is slightly more likely to land on the same side that it started.
To test this model, a team of researchers at the University of Amsterdam arranged for a group of subjects to flip coins a total of 350,757 times. Their conclusion: "the data reveal overwhelming statistical evidence for the presence of same-side bias."
What this means as a money-making strategy:
If you bet a dollar on the outcome of a coin toss (i.e., paying 1 dollar to enter, and winning either 0 or 2 dollars depending on the outcome) and repeat the bet 1,000 times, knowing the starting position of the coin toss would earn you 19 dollars on average. This is more than the casino advantage for 6 deck blackjack against an optimal-strategy player, where the casino would make 5 dollars on a comparable bet, but less than the casino advantage for single-zero roulette, where the casino would make 27 dollars on average.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.