Don’t get me wrong, this is very interesting, but there is something very funny about the idea that “give a chimpanzee stuff and see if they like it” is academic research.
This could absolutely be a headline on The Onion.
This could absolutely be a headline on The Onion.
there is something very funny about the idea that “give a chimpanzee stuff and see if they like it”
"the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza"
"what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic"
"some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants"
Let go of a feather and brick on the ISS gets a different result than doing so on top of Mount Everest. Similarly understanding chimpanzees behavior is a deeper question here noticing some chimps find some crystals interesting in some situations and moving on.
They were able to freeze hamsters entirely then reanimate them with a microwave.
> In 1945, the heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was independently and accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer
Sure, meanwhile using microwaves to heat stuff up dates back to the 1920’s. WWII soldiers would regularly stand in front microwave equipment to warm up. The resonant-cavity magnetron was a British invention that finally made microwaves far more efficient to produce.
The story about noticing a candy bar melting in his pocket is also kind of funny as that’s what normally happens to candy bars in your pockets, further it means he didn’t notice he himself warming up.
The main reason why the uninteresting results in science are always valuable is that negative knowledge is still knowledge. Every idea that gets kicked around and tested was something that would probably have been interesting, so knowing that it's most likely a dead end is worth knowing.
Long live the Ig Nobel Prize! I wish we had a Epic Fail prize equivalent where to honor genuinely nonsensical, failed science experiments because they're often still worth doing.
Research could lead into shit like cows TELLING us when feeling sick or know something etc. Food production, pets, police animals - a lot of potential uses.
The same as literally chemistry and rocks gave us transistors.
Almost no study is crazy.
Playing with glass gave us telescopes and microscopes.
This made my eyes roll a bit.