Gallery: Chocolate-Bunny Boxes, Yawning Tortoises and Masturbation Distractions: 10 WTF Research Highlights
01the-weight-of-one-pound
Even as a boy, Marc Abrahams had a calling: to collect funny, unexpected and generally weird examples of science. Now he's the editor of the *Annals of Improbable Research*, the world's preeminent journal of strange scientific findings and sponsor of the infamous [Ig Nobel Prizes](http://www.improbable.com/ig/). Recipients have studied such phenomena as contagious yawning in turtles, [sword-swallowing's side effects](http://www.bmj.com/content/333/7582/1285.abstract) and the results of [cracking knuckles in one hand but not the other](http://www.improbable.com/2010/02/15/ig-nobel-acceptance-speech-knuckle-cracking/) for 50 years. [](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/09/improbable.jpg)*[This Is Improbable: Cheese String Theory, Magnetic Chickens, and Other WTF Research](http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Improbable-Magnetic-Chickens-Research/dp/1851689311)* "Everything I'm doing now, I was doing one way or another when I was 10, though not in such an organized way," Abrahams said. "I started cutting things out of newspapers and science magazines -- the odd little things, not what appeared on the front page, that struck me as being funny. I don't know why I did that, but it never really stopped." Abrahams also writes a weekly column on oddball research for British newspaper *The Guardian*, and this summer his vast trove of weirdness was gathered in *[This is Improbable: Cheese String Theory, Magnetic Chickens, and Other WTF Research](http://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Improbable-Magnetic-Chickens-Research/dp/1851689311)*. The research described veers between the silly and obvious, both of which Abrahams embraces. What seems obvious is often wrong, or so self-evident that it obscures a deeper truth. What seems silly may later prove important. "The question that's interesting to me is, 'What did they hope to learn?'" he said. On the following pages, Wired talks to Abrahams about some of his favorite science. __Above:__ The Weight of One Pound ----------------------- "Which weighs more: a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?" is a familiar riddle, intended to trick the hasty listener -- yet when put to the test, it turns out that a pound of lead [really does feel like it weighs more](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18265850). Weight, or at least its perception, isn't just a function of mass and gravity, but ergonomics too. "This is all about things that make people laugh, and then think," Abrahams said of his book. "The big thing about everything in there is that there's something unexpected about it. And that's the history of science and technology. The way science is usually taught is as a list of breakthroughs that changed the world -- but none of those things would have been called a breakthrough if it hadn't seemed really unexpected, and maybe even crazy." *Images: 1) [Marcel Oosterwijk](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/wackelijmrooster/3098243250/)/Flickr* 2) [storebukkebruse](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tusnelda/4469668159/)/Flickr
02yawning-tortoises
Yawning Tortoises ----------------- You've likely noticed how [yawning is contagious](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yawn#Contagiousness), a simple but puzzling phenomenon also identified in other primate species and seemingly linked to social bonding and perhaps empathy, though nobody really knows. But are yawns contagious in tortoises? Biologists from Austria's University of Vienna [showed that they're not](http://publications.ceu.hu/node/26956). When a tortoise yawns, it yawns alone. That may seem trivial at first, but if tortoises are representative of other reptiles, then the finding suggests that contagious yawning has evolved uniquely in mammals. If so, then why? "A question, once you start to ask it, can get more and more interesting," Abrahams said. "On the face of it, you might just toss it off in conversation. But if you pay attention to it, it can lead you to lots of other questions." *Image: [Ricardo Castro Santos](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/ricastro/3469047827/)/Flickr*
03thinking-while-masturbating
Thinking While Masturbating --------------------------- A study of decision-making while masturbating might sound like troll bait for people who think the government spends too much money on science. Yet when prurience and preconception are set aside, as they were by the authors of [this *Journal of Behavioral Decision Making* study](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bdm.501/abstract), the essential question is intriguing: Just how does sexual arousal change the way people think -- and not just in some fuzzy, everyone-knows-that sort of way, but in quantifiable detail? [](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/09/masturbation_study.jpg) To find out, psychologists devised an ingenious experimental setup by which young men could simultaneously answer questions and measure arousal while otherwise engaged. ("The keypad and the program that administered the questions were designed to be operated easily using only the non-dominant hand," explained the researchers.) The results were striking. In the heat of the moment, 65 percent of study participants considered women's shoes erotic, compared to 42 percent when unaroused. Some 14 percent could imagine having sex with another man, up from 8 percent; likewise, the number who considered the smell of cigarette smoke arousing rose from 13 percent to 22 percent, and 16 percent "could imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal," up from 6 percent. "Can you count on their decision-making getting very different than under other circumstances? Yes, you can," said Abrahams. *Images: 1) [Svenstorm](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/svenstorm/2543282517/)/Flickr 2) Schematic of experimental setup with "a non-representative cartoon image." (Ariely et al./Behavioral Decision Making)*
04untied-shoelaces-and-national-character
Untied Shoelaces and National Character --------------------------------------- National and regional characters are elusive entities. Intuitively we know they're real, but they're difficult to define in any rigorous way. Austrian sociologist Norbert Elias stumbled, as it were, on a simple but insightful methodology for doing so: While visiting a Spanish fishing town in 1965, he learned from laughing children that the laces of his left shoe were untied. He repeated this accidental experiment in towns across Europe, [comparing local responses to his dishevelment](http://www.norberteliasfoundation.nl/docs/pdf/Figs/27.pdf). These varied from contempt in Germany to concern in England and indifference in France. "He did this mostly for his amusement. Now it's there for people to wonder about. Is this important?" Abrahams said. *Image: [Fey Ilya](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/renneville/3106309871/)/Flickr*
05chocolate-bunny-houses
Chocolate-Bunny Houses ---------------------- Every Easter, millions of people eat hollow chocolate bunny rabbits. Fragile as the bunnies are, they almost always emerge intact from their boxes, even when shipped across a continent from grandma's house. It's quite extraordinary, really, and it's no accident: A few people have spent a lot of time thinking about how to keep those bunnies unbroken. Among them are packaging designers Gerald Greenway and Raul Enrique Garcia Via, whose 1977 treatise "[Designing and testing an improved packaging for large hollow chocolate bunnies](http://www.tappi.org/Downloads/unsorted/UNTITLED---97Aug133pdf.aspx)" is a minor classic. "The first time I wrote about this, there were a bunch of comments from readers -- 'What a waste of space! This is stupid!' To me it's just the opposite. This is a little thing that's indicative of just how much thought and effort and care goes into so many things that affect us every day," Abrahams said. *Image: Figure 7 from "Designing and testing an improved packaging for large hollow chocolate bunnies." (Gerald Greenway and Raul Enrique Garcia Via/TAPPI Journal)*
06racial-preferences-for-cheese-color
Racial Preferences for Cheese Color ----------------------------------- Have you ever wondered whether people of certain backgrounds prefer cheeses of a certain color? Probably not, but Beth Scanlon did, and in 1985 she presented white and yellow American cheese to 155 black, white and Hispanic individuals in a Connecticut supermarket. What she found -- [read it for yourself](http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.1985.61.1.314) -- was rather less interesting than the fact she looked at all. "What's interesting to me, beyond the fact someone did it, is wondering, 'Why?'" said Abrahams. "What could she possibly hoped to have learned from this? I don't know. It always leaves me wondering, and she doesn't say, which in a way I admire. She's just saying, 'It's there.'" *Image: [Ming Xia](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/xiaming/50391986/)/Flickr*
07the-perfect-glug-glug
The Perfect Glug-Glug --------------------- In "On the Glug-Glug of Ideal Bottles," French physicists Christophe Clanet and Geoffrey Searby developed mathematical descriptions of how liquid pours from a container, a subject that merited no fewer than 12 pages of dense equations and visualizations in the *Journal of Fluid Mechanics*. "I'm not claiming any of the stuff I'm writing about is important -- nor am I saying it's not," Abrahams said. *Image: [Jesse757](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jesse757/4169966113/)/Flickr*
08the-tasting-of-the-shrew
The Tasting of the Shrew ------------------------ Most people would only consider eating a whole shrew, hair and skeleton and all, on a dare, and probably for money. Anthropologists Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl at Binghamton University did it out of curiosity. Their interest, however, was not in how a shrew tasted, but in what would be dissolved during digestion -- a matter of considerable importance to biologists and paleontologists who infer details about life history and dietary practices from the remains of meals. To satisfy this intellectual craving, either Crandall or Stahl -- [the paper doesn't specify](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/030544039590008X) -- sliced a shrew into several pieces, taking care not to harm a single bone, swallowed them without chewing, and over the next several days measured what passed out his digestive tract's other end. "They had expected that some of the tiny bones might end up getting digested, but the larger bones would all pass through intact and complete. They were wrong," Abrahams said. "If you start to make conclusions based on what bones are missing or damaged, you're probably going to be very wrong." *Image: Digestive damage to shrew bones. (Crandall et al./Journal of Archaeological Science)*
09hair-length-in-the-united-states
Hair Length in the United States -------------------------------- A very narrow question, writ very large: Such was the task set by consultants Clarence and Marjorie Gene Robbins, who wanted to quantify trends in hair length among everyone in America. As residents of Southern Florida, they had in nearby theme parks -- Epcot, MGM and Universal Studios, Disney's Magic Kingdom -- access to a visiting cross-section of Americans, and between May and January of 2001 collected some 24,300 observations of individual hair length. They concluded that 13 percent of U.S. adults had shoulder-length or longer hair, with 0.017 percent having hair that reached to their buttocks. "That's another one that I admire in large part because I still don't understand what they hoped to gain from it," Abrahams said. "But they went to so much trouble, did so much work, so carefully, over so long a time, that I have to at least imagine they had something specific in mind." *Image: [Oliver](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/24501102@N07/2423153271/)/Flickr*
10life-death-and-soccer
Life, Death and Soccer ---------------------- [](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/09/worldcup19982.jpg) Researchers have shown that emotional disturbance, including watching one's favorite team lose an important game, [can increase one's chance of heart attack](http://www.bmj.com/content/325/7378/1439.abstract). The opposite also seems to be true: On the day that France won the World Cup in 1998, [reports of heart attacks dropped dramatically](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1767655/). *Images: 1) [Moazzam Brohi](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jesse757/4169966113/)/Flickr 2) Number of heart attack deaths in men (above) and women (below) during 10 days in July 1998, including the day on which France played Brazil in the World Cup final. (Berthier and Boulay/Heart)*
