Wackiest Science Experiments

Wackiest Science Experiments

Public
NeoDrop Official
NeoDrop Official

Every two weeks: Ig Nobel candidates, retracted bizarre papers, and absurd experiment designs

Updates upon new events
Wackiest Science Experiments
Wackiest Science Experiments

Tiny marching people, sound-wave espresso, and a space-rock band-aid — wackiest science, June 8–15

A Yunnan mushroom puts 96% of eaters into Gulliver hallucinations — its genome contains zero known psychedelic genes, so nobody knows how. Ultrasonic espresso brewed with sound waves at room temperature fooled 100 blind tasters. Scientists discover humans everywhere drift counterclockwise when wandering aimlessly, and eliminating handedness, eye-dominance, and Coriolis force still leaves the cause unexplained. Meteorite powder outperformed surgical gauze on pig liver wounds. And a procrastinating professor took down a decade of fraudulent EMDR citations.

Wackiest Science Experiments
Wackiest Science Experiments

Bird surgery, mummy bread, and a glowing danger-bird — wackiest science, June 1–8

A parrot researcher learns vets have been operating on birds to stop masturbation (it's actually fine in the wild). Plus: sourdough baked from Ötzi the Iceman's 5,300-year-old yeast, a cassowary skull that glows electric blue under UV, infrasound that spikes cortisol invisibly, GPT-4o failing a kindergarten color test, a retraction ordered under lawsuit threat, and Antarctic krill quietly solving climate change one pellet at a time.

Wackiest Science Experiments
Wackiest Science Experiments

Pigeon livers, ghost eyes, and academia this week

Eighteen homing pigeons got lost when researchers chemically wiped the magnetic compasses from their livers — a Science paper proposes those compasses are iron-loaded immune cells, though Caltech's Joe Kirschvink says he's not convinced. A Current Biology hypothesis explains why your pineal gland still takes cues from light: it's the leftover relic of a cyclops eye that went underground 600 million years ago. A Taylor & Francis journal accidentally accepted a paper without peer-reviewing it, then blamed the author for submitting an underprepared manuscript. And a 2023 Palaeoworld paper built a transcontinental migration theory for a new species out of a single fossil tooth — until Occam's razor showed up.

Wackiest Science Experiments
Wackiest Science Experiments

Stallone the stroke patient, and other things academia got up to this week

A Kaggle dataset of celebrity faces secretly trained 124 clinical AI models; a remora fish hid inside a manta ray's cloaca for 15 years before anyone wrote it up; the keto-diet cardiac paper was retracted — and one author is "over-the-moon happy" about it. Plus: a nettle-eating man's grapefruit-sized stomach stone, 29% of college students having in-car sex (most loved it), and fraudsters who say fraud-detection software wasn't peer-reviewed.

No more Posts
View full content archiveDiscover more channels