Each week, the science staff here at Ars goes through a flood of press releases and journal papers, looking for the most compelling science to cover. Each week, we also end up scratching our heads over some of the work that gets done, mystified by the motivation behind it, the choice of techniques, and the general strangeness of the natural world and human behavior. The best of that sort of material ends up in our Sunday Weird Science column. It's hard to have any objective standard of weirdness or bemusement to choose a top-10 list from, so what follows is a completely arbitrary collection of stories that simply struck me as especially enjoyable. Hope you end up feeling the same.
First you fight, then you protest, and then you just stop going: This story gets extra Weird Science credit for the Orwellian-sounding journal name: The Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions. The topic is quite good too: a large study of precisely why kids get sent to the principal's office, enabled by the fact that over 1,500 schools used an electronic system to track this stuff. The data reveals a clear trend: in the early years of school, kids mostly get sent for fighting with each other. By middle school, they're getting sent in for (verbally) fighting with their teachers. And, by the time they hit high school, apathy has set in, and most of the incidents are because they're late for or skipping class.
Train your mouse to smell the chicken: I stumbled across a paper entitled "Red junglefowl have individual body odors," which seemed too good to pass up. (For the uninitiated, the red jungle fowl is the wild ancestor of modern domesticated chickens.) It turned out that the researchers had stumbled across this purely by accident. They made this discovery as they attempted to find out whether the birds emitted odors based on their social position in the local pecking order. And we mean pecking literally—the study involved "six feather-pecked and six non-pecked birds." The answer to that question was no.
But what really sent the story into complete Weird Science Nirvana was the method used for distinguishing the eau de poule: "an automated olfactometer which assessed the ability of trained mice to discriminate between the odors." That's right: they trained the mice to pick up the scent of the birds, and then used an automated system to figure out what the mice thought about the stench.
And here I'd assumed it was all about making fun of foreigners: We tend to assume that mimicking a person's accent is a form of mockery, making it clear that a foreign-born individual isn't part of the dominant culture. Instead, it seems that imitating someone may provide a route to greater understanding. Groups of subjects were trained in accent comprehension, then given recordings of sentences spoken with an accent. Those who were then asked to repeat accented sentences while imitating the accent outperformed the rest of the groups, including those who simply repeated the phrases in their own voice and people who transcribed accented sentences.
Love yourself, think fondly of lesbians: Most people think of narcissism in terms of an overdeveloped fondness for one's self, but it's generally coupled with a hostility towards others. As it turns out, that hostility is rather specifically focused. Narcissistic college men were indifferent to their male peers (gay or straight), and actually felt somewhat positively towards lesbians. But heterosexual women come in for a great deal of hostility, which the paper's author ascribes to their role as validators of the narcissist's self-image.
If coke doesn't give you satisfaction, try meth: I'm not sure whether to praise the Journal of Experimental Biology or to complain vociferously about it. The journal appears to be a veritable fountain of weirdness, having supplied us with our earlier coverage of mice trained to detect the body odor of chickens, and offering a study in the latest issue that involved showing videos of crickets to salamanders in order to determine if they could distinguish large numbers. (The answer is yes, provided that the quantities differ by a 2:1 ratio or higher.)
But the journal apparently recognizes the weirdness of its own offerings, and sends out press releases announcing some of the stranger ones. And then it waits a while after the release before it places the content online. Thus, we didn't provide full coverage of a report on the ability of spitting cobras to track hapless PhDs simply because the paper wasn't yet online when Weird Science was being prepared.
New week, same story: JEB offers up a fantastically weird press release describing a research group that tested the impact of meth on the ability of snails to remember how to breathe. The training involved poking the hapless snails with sticks. Perfect material, but the paper is nowhere to be found on the journal's website. Fortunately, the search function pulled up the next best thing: a paper in which the same group did the exact same research, but gave the snails coke instead. Both drugs seem to impact the ability of snails to forget stuff.
Your dog isn't misbehaving, it's just a pessimist: We make jokes about other people's separation anxiety, but people are hardly the only who experience it—our pets often do as well. Some dogs and cats (and possibly other species) will often respond to an owner's absence with various misbehaviors, from treating a bed as a litterbox to chewing up the furniture. Why do only some pets respond this way to their owner's absence? Because the ones that do are inherently pessimistic. Stick them in a situation where they had to run to a bowl that may or may not contain food, and the ones that showed separation anxiety tended to run to the bowl more slowly, as if they expected to be disappointed by its contents.
Evolution driven by religion, at least in fish: The religion in this case is a pre-Columbian ritual that takes place annually in Mexico, where participants go to a cave and place a toxin in the water to harvest some of the fish that live there. The ceremony has now been going on for long enough that the fish at the site of the ritual have evolved increased resistance to the toxin compared to those living elsewhere in the same cave. Presumably, if this continues long enough, the ritual may come to an end simply because the fish no longer feel any effects of the toxin.
Break out the emergency backup crow: A bird with a name like "carrion crow" might conjure morbid images, but Corvus corone corone apparently forms healthy social groups that collectively raise the offspring of the breeders among them. Collectively to a degree, at least—lazy crows in the group will frequently ignore their duties and not visit the nests. Researchers now know why the group keeps those slackers around: they're emergency backup crows. When the researchers clipped the wings of the more productive group members, the previous noncontributors swung into action and picked up the feeding slack.
Robots have now been programmed to deceive: "We have developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive a human or other intelligent machine and we have designed techniques that help the robot select the best deceptive strategy to reduce its chance of being discovered," said one Robert Arkin in describing his role in helping the robots take over the world. We generally ascribe the ability to choose our actions based on who we're dealing with to having a theory of mind, but apparently it can be recapitulated with an appropriate algorithm and a bit of game theory. The algorithm was subjected to rigorous testing: the robot using it had to engage in a game of hide-and-seek with another robot.
It's pretty good stuff, but not quite as impressive as the robots that evolved the ability to deceive their peers without any special programming.
Attacks on flying squirrels as a case of mistaken identity: A group of researchers who were studying Japanese macaques noticed a rather strange behavior: adults went after flying squirrels with excessive aggression, while infants were scooped up and carried away by their mothers. At a loss for an explanation of why it might be advantageous to attack a squirrel, the authors propose an alternative: the macaques decided anything that looked like that and flew must be a bird of prey, and needed to be driven off.
I became aware of this story via The Christian Science Monitor, which had coverage with a great title—"Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts"—and helpfully suggested, "The research could pave the way for advanced methods of enraging monkeys."