Weird, Crazy and Dangerous Experiments There have been some really strange results during research which no one ever expected. That is the thing about research, scientists sometimes find out things which are baffling or strange. Take the research conducted by Facebook scientists. They were very interested in Artificial Intelligence and had some artificial intelligence programs going. Then the unimaginable happened. The programs began to talk to each other but in a language humans didn’t understand. I don’t think I have to tell anyone how disturbing this can be. The programs were known as chatbots. The chatbots had developed a new language which was more efficient than their programed language. At this point there was no choice but to shut them down. It is very disturbing to think artificial intelligence programs could work together without being programmed to do this. Sometimes surveys get very unexpected results and this is what happened during a survey taken at the University of Texas at Austin. A psychologist decided to find out how many students ever fantasized about murder. You would think this would be a very low number or we would be in trouble, wouldn’t you? It turned out 75% of those students surveyed admitted to having thoughts about murdering people. The percentage was very high among both men and women. I have to wonder about this, could it be caused by all those violent computer games? Maybe it was the way the question was asked because that can make a big difference. You just have to wonder because this just doesn’t sound right. There is an award for scientific research which is not the Nobel prize. It is the Ig Nobel award. A scientist might be awarded this for imaginative work among other things. The prize will be awarded on September 14, 2018 but here is what was awarded in 2017. The physics prize went to Marc Antoine Fardin who tried to figure out, "Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?" Well I think I can answer this question, but no one asked me. The scientist must have been using the new math. Get this, the Economics Prize was awarded to Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer for their experiments on whether contact with a live crocodile would affect betting. I think it might scare people away from the table. The Anatomy prize went to James Heathcote for medical research into that burning question of why old men have big ears. The Fluid Dynamics Prize went to Jiwon Han who tried to solve the age-old problem of what happens when you carry a cup of coffee while walking backwards. All kidding aside the next one surprised me. It was the Cognition Prize and it was won by several people from Italy, Spain and the UK. It demonstrated that many identical twins when show pictures cannot tell themselves from their twins. There were plenty of other prizes also awarded. One study had a topic which really seemed like a waste of time to me and waste of money. It was a study to see if wet underwear was uncomfortable. Gee whiz, they could have just asked anyone that question. Here is how the study worked. Eight adult men had their skin monitored. Some were wearing wet underwear and some dry. They were in controlled cold conditions. It was found the thickness of the underwear was also a factor. The study was conducted by two scientists, one from Norway and one from Denmark. Apparently, they had never gotten their underwear wet. Did you ever wonder about the propulsion parameters of penguin poop? Apparently, some scientists have and they conducted a study. They had the need to know how much pressure must build up in the rectum to propel the poop certain distances. They knew the distance the poop went so they were able to find out the pressure, so for all you who were wondering what the pressure would be it is (drum roll please) 60 kilopascals. Quantum physics is a strange world where tiny objects react differently than expected. Objects can exist in two or more states at the same time. This is called superposition. It is beyond me. Let me give you one example of what I am talking about. An electron can spin both forward and backward at the same time. As a lay person I just can’t understand how this is possible and I have to wonder if someday this will be found out to be in error and we only think it is happening. One of the experiments which brought out the worst in people was the Milgram Shock Experiments. They were conducted in the 1960s and seemed to prove one thing and that was when people were told by an authority figure to do something no matter how heinous some will. When people who had an electrical control device were told to apply enough electricity to an innocent person to kill them many did without question. This experiment was repeated many times and the results were the same. Thank goodness many of the participants also refused to administer the shock. It has been found that the name you choose for you baby might have a lasting effect on him or her for the rest of their life. An example of this is selecting a girly sounding name for a boy. This reminds me of that song by Johnny Cash called A Boy Named Sue. This type of name could result in the boy having behavioral problems. I can understand this because the world is a cruel place and a boy with a name like this might be forced to constantly defend himself from bullies and who can tell where this will lead. There are a lot of experiments going on in genetic engineering and some seem very bizarre. One experiment was to see if a cat could be made to glow in the dark and the answer was yes and several were created. So much of some of the things we eat have been genetically modified there are more of the GM foods than natural food. 93 percent of the corn we eat in the U.S. is GM corn and 60 to 70 percent of processed foods now contain GM foods. We have become part of the great experiment without ever giving permission. There are some really weird and dangerous experiments out there and there are also what I refer to as stupid ones. The GM experiments were a matter of money and corporations were allowed to test them on us without any idea of what the long-term effects might be. What many people don’t realize is the life expectancy in the U.S. is going down and it is expected to drop to third world status by 2030.
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