Silly Studies: The Pre-Series Tease

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Hello, Curios.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good whatever time of day you happen to be joining us.

We are just popping up into your little podcast feeds to tell you that we are back for a new series of Rutherford and Fry.

Which starts next week and will be descending into your inboxes.

Inboxes?

What are we doing?

Into your ears.

Yes.

Descend into their ears.

Anyway, as has become traditional over the last bazillion years,

we do a little preview before the main season starts and we always request that you send in some of the most interesting, quirky, or absolutely bananas insane scientific papers from the published literature that have been peer-reviewed.

From the body of human knowledge.

Exactly, and you've sent us a bunch of these.

They have not let us down.

You have not let us down.

These are some of our absolute favourites.

You go first.

Oh, okay.

All right, then.

So, this is a paper that was sent in by Bill Young,

who is from Arlington, Virginia.

And Bill wanted to tell us about a study done about 10 years ago about painted lady butterflies.

This should be right up your alley, Adam.

You're in a bit of biology.

Now, it's a lovely study here.

The problem statement for the experiment was that they wanted to add edible edible dye into the food of caterpillars to see how it would affect the colour of their wings.

Would you like to make a guess as to what the outcome would be

before I tell you?

No, it's a fascinating study.

I did quite a lot of work in my early career on the genetics of eye spots development and colour and it's a really important

question.

Mimicry is a sort of central idea

in biology.

I'm not sure that dye would have much of a, I don't know.

I mean, but of course when a person eats too many carrots, they can turn slightly orange.

When you put a white flower in red water, it flowers turn red.

Overall, though, unfortunately, the study was inconclusive, and for one particular reason.

If I just take you to the discussion section of this paper, it says, our experiment had lots of problems.

These problems affected our results.

These problems have affected our results.

First,

we did not record all of our results correctly.

Next, we miscalculated.

I mean, that seems like a...

Fundamental.

That seems like a sentence that you wouldn't continue writing the paper.

It goes on.

Next, we miscalculated the number of dead butterflies in each group.

Then we mixed up the dates of pupation.

And next, we mixed up the labels and places of the separate groups.

Then we discovered the labels were correct.

And next, some of the butterflies fell off their cups.

And then one of our group members knocked over the bin.

Knocked over the bin for the control group.

All of these mistakes affected our results in some way.

Why would you continue that?

This is the published paper.

I think it might be a student project.

I think it's a student project.

Oh, God, that's amazing.

Isn't it?

Isn't it?

I mean,

first, we did not record all of our results correctly.

That's the sort of end of that study, isn't it?

Yeah, it does say in the conclusion, this experiment could be duplicated by a research group because the method was clearly explained.

Including all the mistakes.

I mean, we miscalculated the number of dead butterflies in each group.

There's a little bit of wordplay going on there.

A little wordplay going on there.

Because that's

counting.

That's basic counting.

Absolutely amazing.

Okay, so we've got a couple of quick ones.

So Zoe from Toronto sent in a few, and we'll just do those sort of titles and a little bit of explanation.

Effects of backwards speech and speaker variability in language discrimination by rats.

That was published in

the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Animal Behavior Processes, Volume 31.

What does that mean?

Well, basically, the researchers got a load of rats and they played Dutch-speaking and Japanese-speaking people backwards to them, and

the rats couldn't tell the difference.

How could they tell the rats couldn't tell the difference?

I mean, the rats were just bored.

They were just like, see, rats do this specific thing when they hear backwards languages that they understand, which is they nod.

And in this case, I mean.

I've got another one for you.

This is from a journal called Weatherwise by B.

Vonnegut.

And I'll just read you the opening sentence.

One way of estimating the wind in a tornado vortex is to determine by experiment what airspeed is required to.

Now, just pause for a moment there while you think, what's he going to say?

Use a complicated piece of equipment to

set up an experiment of extremely delicate machinery in order to measure.

No, to

what airspeed is required to blow all the feathers off a chicken.

This apparently is a phenomenon known to occur in these severe storms.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

If you're going to do these kind of experiments,

how do you do it?

How do you get a chicken in that sort of condition?

And it says here that with modern technology of a wind tunnel or a shock tube, however, the difficulties associated with accelerating the bird to tornado speed could be obviated.

The theory then is that if you get some kind of a fowl up to a high velocity, then the feathers will all come off.

But with a less velocity, it's possible that the feathers might just be pulled pulled out

without the chicken otherwise being harmed.

That's essentially the idea, right?

What wind speed pulls the feathers out of a bird without anything else bad happening?

This feels like this guy, B.

Vonnegut from the

State University of New York at Albany,

it sounds like he sort of based this off a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

Well, that he's done a sort of,

you know...

What speed causes a chicken to shed all its feathers when it's fired out of a gun?

Well, also, though, apparently there's something, a response known as flight molt, which is when

a chicken gets really stressed out, the follicles relax, so the feathers can be pulled out with far less force than is normally required.

Possibly, this is a mechanism for survival, leaving a predator with only a mouthful of feathers and permitting the bird to escape.

I mean, endless, endless things to explore there.

I should add that at the bottom of the paper, it says, The author is indebted to Professor Kenneth Abel of the Biology Department of this university for his guidance to the scientific literature pertaining to the aspects of plumage.

Wow.

That took a bit of a dark turn, that one.

Yeah, it did.

It did.

We should have read the results.

We should have read the results in fall.

Thank you, Zoe, from Toronto, for reading that.

I've got one here, which I'm going to do something unusual in this regard because it's a proper academic paper.

It comes from 1974.

This was sent in by Carl Titman.

And the paper is in the Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis, which is a proper academic journal, volume 7, page 497, fall 1974, was when it was submitted.

And it's by Dennis Upper from the Veterans Administration Hospital in Brockton, Massachusetts.

And I'm going to read out the entirety of this paper to you.

Gordy, okay.

And the title is The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of Writer's Block.

Received 25th of October 1973, published without revision.

What, there's no...

Is it just a blank page?

Tell me the title again.

The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of writer's book.

I mean, I'm sorry, there is one word in

the block of text, which is references, and there are none.

I think this might qualify as the shortest academic paper.

I mean, well, given that it's got no words in it at all.

Well, so, but they've gone to the journal which has gone through this process of peer review, which is the sort of gold standard of publishing in science, where the paper is submitted and sent to other experts in the field who send back their comments and recommend that it should be published or not.

That's normally done in secret.

In this case, because this is quite a special paper, they've included the comments by reviewer A.

And I'll read them out.

I have studied this manuscript very carefully with lemon juice and x-rays and have not detected a single flaw in either design or writing style.

I suggest it be published without revision.

Clearly, it is the most concise manuscript I've ever seen, yet it contains sufficient detail to allow other investigators to replicate Dr.

Upper's failure.

In comparison with other manuscripts I get from you containing all that complicated detail.

This one was a pleasure to examine.

Surely we can find a place for this paper in the journal, perhaps on the edge of a blank page.

Well, I'll tell you, there's certainly a number of academic papers that I've read where I wish that they would maybe have a little bit more writer's block than they do.

So, as ever, we've got some wonderful stuff coming up in this series.

We've got an episode about wind, but not that kind of wind.

And not chicken plucking wind.

No, no, no chicken plucking wind.

No chicken pluckers anywhere near here.

What about pheasant pluckers?

No, none of them either.

And we've also got an episode about...

I genuinely cannot remember what we recorded on Monday.

Right, don't tell us.

It was had, we had a guest in the...

Oh, it was Monday.

Today's Friday, and we recorded this on Monday.

It was about

he was the neuroscientist.

Oh, I know.

It was about left neglect.

Oh, yes.

But it wasn't about that.

No, it wasn't.

It was about

symmetry.

No.

No, it was about

brain.

No.

It was attention.

Our producer has just whispered in our ear attention.

And

he's been very generous in saying that he thought we were joking, but we genuinely forgot what it was about.

Because we have the attention spans

of a

group of people who do experiments on butterflies.

Thank you very much.

Good night.

We'll see you next week.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be host.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.