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For many postgraduate students, a Ph.D. thesis will be their magnum opus – the zenith of
their academic achievement. And with such a significant amount of time and effort being
invested, it’s important that study topics are chosen wisely. Hence, it’s comforting to know
that the world of academic research is a far more inclusive, eclectic and remarkably unusual
place than one might first assume. However left-field a particular subject might seem, there
are almost certainly countless other research papers that wipe the floor with it in the
weirdness stakes. Here are 30 of the very strangest.
29. Which Can Jump Higher, the Dog Flea or the Cat Flea?
Froghoppers aside, fleas are the overachieving long jumpers of the animal kingdom. Fleas
have body lengths of between 0.06 and 0.13 inches but can leap horizontal distances more
than a hundred times those figures. But were all fleas created equal in the jumping stakes?
To find out which would triumph between the dog- and cat-dwelling varieties, researchers
from the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Toulouse, France meticulously recorded the
leaping efforts of a collection of both species of flea. Published in 2000, the resulting paper,
“A comparison of jump performances of the dog flea, Ctenocephalides canis, and the cat
flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis,” declared the dog flea the winner. Yes, the canine-inclined
insect jumps both higher and further than its feline-partial opponent. In 2008 the research
team scooped the Annals of Improbable Research‘s Ig Nobel Prize in the biology category –
the Ig Nobel Prizes being awards that recognize the feats of those who “make people
laugh… and then think.”
Death row pardons, lottery wins and rain on your wedding day – all (arguably non-ironic)
subjects referenced by Alanis Morissette in her 1996 single “Ironic.” One topic that would
probably merit inclusion – despite the research not being published until 2009 (in
Philosophical Psychology) – is the revelation that books on ethics are more liable to be
absent from the shelves of university libraries than comparable books on other philosophical
subjects. “Do Ethicists Steal More Books?” by University of California, Riverside professor
of philosophy Eric Schwitzgebel revealed that the more recent, esoteric ethics books “of the
sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy” were
“about 50 percent more likely to be missing” than their non-ethics counterparts. However,
Professor Schwitzgebel believes this is a good thing, as “the demand that ethicists live as
moral models would create distortive pressures on the field.”
Even babies know it: wet underwear is uncomfortable. Yet precisely why this is so is a
question that went unanswered by hard science until 1994, when the journal Ergonomics
published “Impact of wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort in
the cold.” The authors were Martha Kold Bakkevig of SINTEF Unimed in Trondheim, Norway
and Ruth Nielson at Kongens Lyngby’s Technical University of Denmark. Bakkevig and
Nielson had investigated “the significance of wet underwear” by monitoring the skin and
intestinal warmth, as well as weight loss, of eight adult male subjects wearing wet or dry
underwear in controlled cold conditions. Apart from the obvious “significant cooling effect of
wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort,” the research also
discovered that the thickness of the underwear exerted a greater effect on these factors than
the material used to make the garment. So now you know.
In much the same way that we’d presume dragons don’t get sore throats, it would be a
reasonable assumption that woodpeckers don’t suffer from headaches – but assumptions
are a poor substitute for the authoritative grip of scientific fact. Published in 2002 in the
British Journal of Ophthalmology, “Cure for a headache” came courtesy of Ivan Schwab, an
ophthalmologist at the University of California, Davis. Schwab’s paper details the raft of
physiological traits that woodpeckers have developed to avoid brain damage and bleeding or
detached eyes when hammering their beaks into trees at up to 20 times a second, 12,000
times a day. In addition to a very broad but surprisingly squishy skull and sturdy jaw muscles,
the woodpecker has a “relatively small” brain – which probably explains a lot.
The mosquito is a formidable and destructive pest. And while it’s known that exhalation of
carbon dioxide by its victims acts as a highly compelling invitation to dinner, other smelly
signals have been less well documented. Published in The Lancet, Bart Knols’ 1996 research,
“On human odor, malaria mosquitoes, and Limburger cheese,” changed that. The
entomologist described how Anopheles gambiae, Africa’s most prolific malaria-spreading
mosquito, exhibited a keen partiality for biting human feet and ankles. Crucially, the research
also showed that these mosquitoes can be attracted to Limburger cheese, a stinky fromage
that shares many characteristics with the whiff of human feet, offering potential use as a
synthetic bait for traps. Interestingly, Knols is one of the few people to have won an Ig Nobel
(for entomology in 2006) and a Nobel Peace Prize (shared in 2005 as part of the International
Atomic Energy Agency).
Despite their notorious penchant for fully, or sometimes partially, dead rodents in their
mouths, cats are surprisingly fussy eaters. What’s more, the pet food industry has found that
kitties themselves represent unreliable and expensive test subjects in the pursuit of more
appealing cat food flavors. Professor Gary Pickering of the department of biological sciences
at Brock University in Ontario, Canada detailed a better option in 2009: the human palate.
“Optimizing the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human
taste panel” describes the bizarre methodology for human tasters to “profile the flavour and
texture of a range of cat food products” – including evaluating “meat chunk and gravy/gel
constituents.” The impact of this on the number of job applications to the beer- and
chocolate-tasting industries remains to be seen.
While “cat food taster” is unlikely to appear on anybody’s dream job list, at least that
profession is unencumbered by the daily risk of serious injury. Sword swallowing, on the
other hand, though occupying a similar position on the league table of tastiness, is a rather
more hazardous occupation. In order to establish just how hazardous, radiologist Brian
Witcombe and world champion sword swallower Dan Meyer analyzed the “technique and
complications” of 46 members of the Sword Swallowers’ Association International. Published
in 2009 in the British Medical Journal, their research, “Sword swallowing and its side effects,”
found that performers had a heightened chance of injury when “distracted or adding
embellishments” – as in the case of one unfortunate swallower who lacerated his throat after
being disturbed by a “misbehaving macaw on his shoulder.” In 2007 Witcombe and Meyer
together received the Ig Nobel Prize in medicine in view of the pair’s “penetrating medical
report.”
20. Beer Bottle vs. Human Skull
Common weekend warrior tales would suggest that a beer bottle makes a good weapon in
the event of a bar brawl. But would a full or an empty bottle inflict the most damage, and
would that damage include fracturing a human skull? These important questions were
answered in 2009 by a team of researchers from the University of Bern with their seminal
paper, “Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to
break the human skull?” Dr. Stephan Bolliger and his colleagues tested the breaking energy
of full and empty beer bottles using a drop tower. Moreover, they discovered that a “full bottle
will strike a target with almost 70 percent more energy than an empty bottle,” but that either
is capable of breaking a human skull. Good to know. In a great twist of irony, Dr. Bolliger and
co. picked up a 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in the “Peace” category.
The titles of scientific research papers can sometimes be fairly impenetrable to the layman;
other times they may take a more direct approach. Published in 2003, “Pressures produced
when penguins pooh – calculations on avian defecation” certainly belongs to the latter
category. The paper’s authors, Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of the then International
University Bremen (now Jacobs University Bremen) and Eötvös Loránd University‘s
Jozsef Gal, decided to address the question of how much internal pressure penguins
generate for poop-firing purposes. With knowledge of just a few parameters – including the
thickness of and distance covered by the fecal matter – the researchers were able to
calculate that the birds employed pressures of up to 60 kPa (kilopascal) to eject their bodily
waste. The project was inspired by a blushing Japanese student who, during a lecture, asked
Dr. Meyer-Rochow how the penguins “decorated” their nests.
Lady Gaga clearly sees herself as something of an artist: her third album is called Artpop,
and last year she voiced her desire to “bring art culture into pop in a reverse Warholian
expedition.” But does anyone else agree? In 2012 University of Cambridge student Amrou
Al-Kadhi decided to write a few words – 10,000 to be precise – on the subject for his final
year undergraduate dissertation. The paper, looking at Lady Gaga’s place in the history of
pop art and her role as a voice of cultural criticism, initially encountered some resistance from
the Cambridge history of art department. However, after several meetings, the provision of a
barrage of YouTube links to Gaga videos such as “Telephone” (which apparently
demonstrated her postmodern aesthetic) and “a bit of work,” permission for Al-Kadhi to
undertake the research was granted.
A 2002 research paper by Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson and Magnus Enquist at
Stockholm University decided to make inroads into the question – most likely contemplated
by very, very few people – of whether “Chickens prefer beautiful humans.” The study saw six
chickens trained to “react to” images of an ordinary male or female face. They were then
tested on a series of images ranging from the average face to a face with exaggerated male
or female characteristics, and a group of 14 (human) students were given the same test.
Perhaps surprisingly, the chickens “showed preferences for faces consistent with human
sexual preferences.” The researchers claim this offers evidence for the hypothesis that
human preferences stem not from “face-specific adaptations” but from “general properties of
nervous systems” – perhaps overlooking the possibility that their human test group just had
very unusual tastes.
When beset by a flurry of hiccups, a few minutes of putting up with the involuntary jolting is
usually sufficient to get them to subside. However, other times they can become a far more
unmanageable problem, beyond the healing scope of even the oldest of wives’ tales. In such
situations there’s a surprising but highly effective cure. Published in 1990, “Termination of
intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage” details the case of a 60-year-old patient
whose seemingly non-stop hiccups were brought to an immediate halt by a massaging finger
in the rectum. A second occurrence a few hours later was curbed in a similar fashion. The
research from the Bnai Zion Medical Center in Israel notes that “no other recurrences were
observed.” The inspiration for the report was Dr. Francis Fesmire, who penned a medical
case report with the same title in 1988 and with whom the researchers shared an Ig Nobel in
2006. Fesmire passed away in 2014, and one fitting epitaph from an entertainment-oriented
research magazine mused, “Dr. Fesmire found joy and fame by putting his finger on – nay, in
– the pulse of his times.”
Theirs is a list dominated by flying, pecking and defecating, and pigeons can now add
“appreciation of fine art” to their skill set. Published in 1995, “Pigeons’ discrimination of
paintings by Monet and Picasso” came courtesy of Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto and
Masumi Wakita at Keio University in Japan. And sure enough, the paper presents evidence
that pigeons are indeed able to distinguish between works by the two artists. The birds were
trained to recognize pieces by either Monet or Picasso; and crucially they then demonstrated
the ability to identify works by either creator that had not been shown to them during the
training period. Not bad for rats with wings. Professor Watanabe – who went on to explore
paddy birds’ appreciation of the spoken word – put the paper into context, saying, “This
research does not deal with advanced artistic judgments, but it shows that pigeons are able
to acquire the ability to judge beauty similar to that of humans.”
It’s a phenomenon that most people will be familiar with: small balls of lint accumulating in
the belly button. Still, until fairly recently the mechanism behind this process lacked a
satisfactory explanation from the realm of science. Fortunately, that all changed in 2009 when
Georg Steinhauser, a chemist and researcher at the Vienna University of Technology,
published a research paper entitled “The nature of navel fluff.” After gathering 503 samples of
navel lint, Dr. Steinhauser concluded that the culprit behind this common occurrence is hair
on the abdomen, which dislodges small fibers from clothing and channels them into the belly
button. As the Austrian himself has pointed out, “The question of the nature of navel fluff
seems to concern more people than one would think at first glance.”
The effects of cocaine on human body movement can be observed in nightclubs the world
over on just about any given weekend. And as it turns out, the tediously familiar
overestimation of dancing prowess is not just limited to humans. In a 2009 paper entitled
“Effects of cocaine on honey bee dance behavior,” a team of researchers led by Gene
Robinson, entomology and neuroscience professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, analyzed how honey bees are affected by low doses of cocaine. Honey bees are
known to perform dances when they locate an abundant food source; and the team found
that administering the drug prompted bees to circle about 25 percent quicker as well as
dance more exuberantly and for longer. The bees also exaggerated the scale of their bounty.
No surprise there then.
Though its contents are difficult at first to make out, the grainy black and white image above
actually depicts two bats engaged in some X-rated nocturnal activity. And that’s precisely the
topic that a group of researchers from China and the U.K. chose to explore in their 2009
paper, “Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time.” The group looked at the copulatory
behavior of the short-nosed fruit bat and observed that “females were not passive during
copulation but performed oral sex.” More interestingly, the researchers also discovered that
the longer the bats spent engaged in fellatio, the longer the copulation itself lasted – and that
when fellatio was absent, pairs spent much less time mating.
Country music is one of the most popular genres of music in the United States, with a huge
audience that encompasses all age ranges. Yet given its recurrent themes of wedded
disharmony and excessive drinking, Steven Stack of Wayne State University and Auburn
University‘s Jim Gundlach decided to probe whether country music might have an influence
on municipal suicide rates in America. Published in 1992, their research paper, “The Effect of
Country Music on Suicide,” actually discovered a strong link between the amount of country
music radio airplay in any particular city and the suicide rate among the white population in
that area. The reaction was mixed: Stack and Gundlach initially received hate mail, but in
2004 they won the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine.
The notoriously demanding exam that London’s black cab drivers must pass is called the
“Knowledge” – and with good reason. Covering around 25,000 streets inside a six-mile
radius of central London, the test generally requires three to four years of preparation and
multiple attempts at the final exam before success is achieved. University College London
neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire was inspired to take a closer look at this feat of memory after
researching similar examples in the animal kingdom. Published in 2000, the resulting study,
“Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers,” discovered that
“cabbies” had physically larger posterior hippocampi – the areas of the brain responsible for
spatial memory – than their non-cabbie counterparts. Professor Maguire’s follow-up study
(with Dr. Katherine Woollett) in 2011 confirmed that trained cabbies were better at
remembering London landmarks but not as good at recalling complex visual information
compared to the unsuccessful trainees.
Ever felt so hungry that you could eat a horse? How about a shrew? While such scenarios
are never likely to present themselves to the average person, scientists can be an altogether
more experimental bunch. Take 1995 paper, “Human digestive effects on a micromammalian
skeleton,” by Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl, anthropologists working at the State University
of New York. Said paper investigated what would happen to a shrew – which was first
skinned, disemboweled, parboiled and cut into segments – if it was swallowed, sans
chewing, by a human. Interestingly, many of the rodent’s smaller bones “disappeared” on
their transit through the human digestive system, while other portions of the skeleton showed
“significant damage” despite the lack of chewing – a promising result to those studying
human and animal remains. Following this peculiar paper, Brian Crandall became a science
educator hoping to motivate future generations of (hungry) scientists.
In 1935 Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger tried to highlight the absurdity of newly
developed aspects of quantum theory. In his thought experiment, the strange quantum
properties of a system are drawn on to suspend a hypothetical cat in a state of being
simultaneously dead and alive. Sixty-six years later, a new piece of research saw the cat
replaced by two ducks, in far less paradoxical though no less opposing states of life and
death – but now with the crucial addition of gay sex. Published in 2001, “The first case of
homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos” describes Kees Moeliker’s bizarre
experience. The Dutch ornithologist witnessed a male duck administering a 75-minute raping
of the corpse of another male duck, freshly deceased after flying into a window. More
recently, Moeliker has presided over an annual commemorative event and public
conversation on how to make sure birds stop flying into windows. The event’s name? Dead
Duck Day.
Unfortunately, the horror injury that befalls Ben Stiller’s character Ted, in 1998’s There’s
Something About Mary, often traverses the realm of fiction to bestow real-world agony upon
boys and men who wish they’d opted for a button fly. A 2005 paper by Dr. Satish Chandra
Mishra from Charak Palika Hospital in New Delhi, India looked at reported methods of
intervention for this most unpleasant of problems and found that many common approaches
either take too long or can actually make the circumstances worse. The researchers’ paper,
“Safe and painless manipulation of penile zipper entrapment,” details instead a “quick,
simple and non-traumatic” method using wire cutters and a pair of pliers – though “painless”
does seem a highly ambitious adjective in this particular context.
3. Flatulence As Self-Defense
The idea of a correlation between fear and bodily emissions of one variety or another is not
surprising, but a 1996 paper by author Mara Sidoli detailed a much more extreme example of
this relationship. In “Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread,” Sidoli described the
miserable tale of Peter, a “severely disturbed adopted latency boy” who endured a difficult
and traumatic early life. Despite various setbacks in his later growth, Peter demonstrated
“considerable innate resilience.” However, he also developed what Sidoli called a “defensive
olfactive container,” using his flatulence “to envelop himself in a protective cloud of familiarity
against the dread of falling apart, and to hold his personality together.” With such a vivid and
prose-rich approach to scientific research, it should come as no surprise that SIdoli scooped
the Ig Nobel for literature in 1998.
2. Harry Potter = Jesus Christ
Putting an end, once and for all, to the notion that literary theory sometimes lacks real-world
application, “Jesus Potter Harry Christ” is a thesis by Ph.D. student Derek Murphy that looks
at “the fascinating parallels between two of the world’s most popular literary characters.”
What’s more, after successfully exceeding his Kickstarter funding goal of $888, Murphy’s
thesis has been transformed into a commercially available book, published in 2011, which
won the Next Gen Indie Book Award for Best Religious Non-Fiction that same year. Though
the idea of analyzing the similarities between J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard creation and the Son
of God might seem like a frivolous endeavor, Murphy – who is currently doing his Ph.D. at
Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University – assures his public that the book’s contents are
“academic and heavily researched.” Now, where’s the fun in that?
Published in the journal Surgery in 1986, “Rectal foreign bodies: case reports and a
comprehensive review of the world’s literature” does exactly what it says on the tin. The
research, by doctors David B. Busch and James R. Starling, based in Madison, Wisconsin,
looked at two cases of patients with “apparently self-inserted” anal objects, as well as
available documentation on the subject.
Other factors taken into account included the patient’s age and history and the number and
type of objects removed. The resulting list of 182 foreign bodies makes for an eye-watering
read: of particular note are the dull knife (“patient complained of ‘knife-like pain'”) and the
toolbox (“inside a convict; contained saws and other items usable in escape attempts”). The
doctors’ paper was recognized for its literary value with an Ig Nobel Prize in 1995. One
person’s pain is clearly another’s pleasure.
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