10 of the strangest scientific studies

It has always amazed me how money is spent of really screwy types of studies and when it comes to ‘science’ it has to be right at the top of the list of silly spenders for silly studies. To give you an idea here’s a list of ten of some of the strangest studies done recently.

10. Elephant Self-Recognition

As a result of this study elephants have joined apes and dolphins as members of a small group of animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror. In order to find out this amazing fact three elephants were observed after placing a large mirror in their living area. The one elephant named Happy had a large white X painted above her eye and a similar mark using and invisible paint of the same texture and smell was placed on the opposite side of her head. The object of self-recognition was met apparently when Happy repeatedly used her trunk to touch her own head to touch the white mark.

Along with that the elephants made repetitive movements in front of the mirror and seemingly used the mirror to inspect their body parts.

9. Sheep recognizing faces

Babraham Institute researchers figure that sheep through sophisticated facial recognition skills have greater social requirements than we all previously thought. They found this out by training the selected sheep to associate one of the following pair; other sheep and humans, with food rewards. Apparently 20 sheep were presented with pictures of 25 pairs of sheep faces and from this they found they could recognize individuals associated with as reward by even just their profile.

It was also found that sheep supposedly can remember as many as 50 sheep faces in addition to familiar human face for up to two years.

8. Do Married Couples Start to Look Alike

It seems that age and length of marriage might be a deciding factor in the study utilizing 110 participants that were ^resented with random photographs of faces, and were then instructed to match the men with the women that most closely resembled each other. Two dozen photographs of couples when they were first married and another two dozen of those same couples 25 years later were used. It seems the judges were able to match the husbands and wives much better when they were older rather than freshly married.

7. Curvy Hips Intelligent

University researchers from Pittsburgh and California using a study of more than 16,000 women and girls which detailed their body measurements as well as including the education level and cognitive test scores to find out that women with a 70% WHR were smarter.

Here’s the thing though – that WHR stands for waist-to-hip ratio and is arrived at by taking your waist size and dividing it by your hip size. So the way it works out is that women with waists that where about 70 percent of the diameter of their hips scored better on intelligence tests and tended to have a slightly higher level of education.

6. Are Women More Attractive in Red

The question asked by psychologists of their participants in the study was this: “Imagine that you are going on a date with this woman and have $100 in your wallet. How much would you be willing to spend on your date?”

At this point they were show pictures of exactly the same women but wearing different colors. IT turns out that in the experiments women that were shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than women in other colors.

5. Do Herring Communicate by Passing Gas

While I hang my head in shame that part of this study even took place in Canada I can point to Scotland as being the other perpetrator of the study that found that Atlantic and Pacific herring create a mysterious underwater sound. It is a high frequency sound that is a result of the fish releasing air from their butts. Accompanying this sound is a fine stream of bubbles but it is the sound that researchers believe the fish use to help form protective shoals at night

4. Bra Support for Bouncing Breasts

Researchers recruited 70 women with bra sizes that ranged from A-cup to Extra-large and then studied them as they walked, jogged and ran while wearing different bra types. During the study biomechanical measurements were taken of breast movement in three directions: up-and-down, side-to-side and in-and-out.

What they found out is that during walking the women’s breasts moved pretty much the same amount in all directions. When they started to jog and run though their breasts moved proportionally more in some directions than others but the overall movement was one of a figure-8. For A-cup women wearing a sports bra the reduction of overall movement was around 53% while G-cup women had a reduction of 55%.

All this to find out that whether women are flat-chested or big-busted ordinary bras fall short when it comes to supporting bouncing breasts.

3. Do Women Walk Sexier When Fertile

In order to find out if women give out subtle hints to men in order to signal the are experiencing different levels of sex hormones the studied the gait of female volunteers and their levels of sex hormones in their saliva.

These results were then compared to the results of 40 men who were shown video clips of the women volunteers and asked then to rate the attractiveness of the women by the way they walked. The researchers where so amazed with the results that they had to run the experiment twice just to verify that those with the most alluring walks were the women furthest away from ovulation. The women who were fertile apparently walked with fewer hip movements and knees close together and this didn’t do much for the men participants of the study.

2. Why Female Monkeys Shout During Sex

Apparently it was incredibly import to find out just why it was that females had the need to shout during sex which they apparently do during 86% of all sexual encounters. It seems to all boil down to getting those pesky male monkeys to actually ejaculate during sex. When the female monkey shouted the male monkeys ejaculated 59% of the time, however if they didn’t shout the males would only ejaculate 2% of the time.

As well they wanted to see if the yelling was a result of how vigorous the sex was and to do this researchers counted the number of pelvic thrusts the males gave and timed when it happened. This thrust counting led researchers to find that when the shouting occurred the thrusting increased and led to more vigorous sex. The end result was that the researchers concluded that female monkeys may shout to help their male partners climax.

1. Foot Size and Penile Length

This old wives tail got the scientific study when researchers measured the feet and penises of 104 men.

Now to get an accurate measurement of the man’s penis as there apparently no perfect way to measure one the researchers stretched the penis with a defined amount of force to determine how long it can get. This supposedly will be a pretty good indication of how long a penis will get when erect.

The result?

There is no scientific support for the relationship between a man’s shoe size and the length of his penis, which of course is making a lot of size 7 or 8 men feel a lot better about themselves.