Thanks to the curiosity of scientists, we have the opportunity to take advantage of all technological advances known to us today. But thanks to the same curiosity, scientists sometimes do strange, if not downright stupid, things.
Here is some weird stuff that scientists have actually studied, and most importantly, what they have learned.
1. Physicists from the American Physical Society have determined that you can heat up coffee in a cup by yelling at it. This requires constant yelling at the cup for 1 year, 7 months, 26 days, 20 hours, 26 minutes and 40 seconds in order to generate sufficient sound energy.
2. The Moroccan sultan Moulay Ismail had 1171 children from 504 women. Some scientists believed that it was impossible to have so many children. And scientists from the University of Vienna decided to calculate how many sexual acts the Sultan had to perform in order to conceive such a record number of offspring. They wanted to prove that this is quite possible. According to their calculations, the sultan would need to have sex at least once a day, and for this he would need not even 504, but from 65 to 100 women.
3. Have you ever wondered how slippery a banana peel can be when you step on it? Scientists at Kitasato University are interested in this. They calculated that the coefficient of friction (the force of friction between two bodies) between a banana and the floor is about 0.07. For comparison, the coefficient of friction between two ice surfaces is between 0.02 and 0.09.
4. In 1995, Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita decided to investigate the ability of trained pigeons to distinguish between paintings by Picasso and Monet. Each pigeon showed itself in different ways - some performed better on the task, others worse, but most (at least 85% of cases) still distinguished correctly.
5. Japanese researchers have calculated how long it will take to travel into space on the "space elevator". It turned out 8 days.
6. Scientists have found that bananas are slightly radioactive. They warned that to prevent the risk of getting a dangerous dose of radiation, you should eat no more than 1 billion bananas in one sitting.
Promotional video:
7. Scientists from Juntendo University, Japan, decided to find out what kind of music will help experimental mice who have undergone heart transplantation to live longer. They used three genres of music - opera (La Traviata), classical (Mozart) and new age (Enya) - for three groups of heart-transplanted mice. It turned out that the mice that listened to the opera and Mozart lived longer - 26.5 and 20 days, respectively. The mice that listened to Enya lived for only 11 days.
8. Scientists from the Babraham Institute in Cambridge figured out how well a sheep remembers the faces of its relatives. Research has shown that sheep can memorize up to 50 other sheep's faces. They also retain a familiar image in their memory for up to two years - that's about a third of their lives. However, they cannot distinguish between human faces. In their defense, we can only say that a person also cannot in most cases distinguish one sheep from another.
9. Thanks to the research of David Cole, we can now breathe easy, because, as it turned out, human meat is much less nutritious than the meat of large animals. Cannibals, don't starve yourself!
10. Amos Dolber has calculated a formula by which you can find out the air temperature by chirping crickets. Count the number of chirps in 15 seconds and add 40; the result is the air temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.
11. Through the research of Paula Romao and her colleagues, we now know what millions of grandmothers have always known and practiced. Saliva is a really effective cleaner for dirty surfaces!
12. In a study, scientists from the University of Minnesota found that people swim in syrup at about the same speed as in water.