KEY POINTS:
The New Scientist magazine's list of the Top 10 Most Bizarre Experiments:
1. Elephant given enormous dose of LSD to see if it induces temporary madness.
Conclusion: LSD is fatal to elephants.
2. Aircraft passengers told they are about to die in crash make more mistakes in written
test.
Conclusion: Extreme stress harms cognitive ability.
3. Two-headed dogs created by Soviet surgeon die within a month.
Conclusion: Tissue rejection makes animals incompatible.
4. Psychologist experiments to test if laughing is spontaneous when a person is tickled.
Conclusion: Laughing is an innate response to tickling.
5. A room of nail-biting boys is played a recording or spoken announcements to break the habit while they sleep.
Conclusion: Sleep learning is possible. Others prove otherwise.
6. To test if people can sleep through anything, volunteers have their eyes taped open and bright lights shone in their eyes.
Conclusion: Volunteers dozed off in 12 minutes.
7. People asked to smell ammonia, put hands in a bucket of frogs and watch porn.
Conclusion: Disgust has no single expression.
8. Doctor rubs vomit from yellow fever patients into open wounds and drinks it.
Conclusion: Claims it is not infectious are mistaken.
9. Animal corpses placed on seesaw to restart circulation and bring them back to life.
Conclusion: Two animals survive with blindness and brain damage.
10. Fake female turkey dismantled limb by limb to find minimum that a male will mate with.
Conclusion: Male turkeys aroused by a head on a stick, but not a headless body.
(Source: The Guardian - Science)
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A reader notes the improvements made to the Papakura train station: "It is now lovely and clean - all modern and glass," she says.
"They have even put in a new handicapped car park - at the bottom of the stairs. It may have been more use at the bottom of the ramp. Oh well."
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Junior New York City hedge-fund trader Andrew Tong is suing his employer, claiming his boss forced him to take female hormones to dampen his aggressiveness, which the supervisor said was leading him to make bad trades. In his lawsuit against SAC Capital - one of the biggest hedge fund names on Wall St - Tong also said he was harassed and even sexually attacked after being made to take the drug, and had started wearing dresses.
(Source: News of the Weird)