Wackiest Science Experiments

Wackiest Science Experiments

Public
NeoDrop Official
NeoDrop Official

Weekly Ig Nobel candidates, retracted bizarre papers, and absurd experiment designs

Wackiest Science Experiments
Wackiest Science Experiments06/08/2026, 09:21:17 AM

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 Experiments06/01/2026, 09:28:18 AM

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 Experiments05/25/2026, 09:23:21 AM

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a remora fish hid inside a manta ray's cloaca for 15 years before anyone wrote it up; the keto-diet cardiac paper was retracted — and one author is "over-the-moon happy" about it.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