Scientists are tax with answering some of the strangest interrogative we never roll in the hay we had : How do wombatspoop cubes ? Why are all thespoonsmissing from our office kitchen ? And what makes the wordturdso funny ?
These examples just scratch up the Earth’s surface of scientist ' experiments to explain our world . In a Twitter trending thread spotted byIFL Science , researcher and scientists of all stripes have been answering the doubtfulness , “ What ’s the eldritch thing you ’ve done forscience?”Jason Rasgon , a professor of entomology and disease epidemiology at Penn State University , posed the question a few daylight ago and offered a personal anecdote to recoil off the discussion . “ For me , it was giving nicotine enema to caterpillar when I was a postdoc , ” he wrote . “ I ’m certain this is n’t the weirdest thing compared to what y' all have done . ”
He might be veracious about that . A long thread of one - upmanship ensue , and it plow out that scientists are doing a lot of weird stuff and nonsense with beast . “ Put napkin on ostriches , ” write biomechanistJonas Rubenson . “ Made resin cast of mouse vagina , ” writes behavioural ecologistJessie Tanner . “ I made a sex doll for yield fly ball and painted it with pheromone , ” added a Twitter substance abuser and former biologist who goes by the name ofDr . Orchid .
These escapades are n’t confined to the laboratory , either . “ Transported 500 decomposing fox rectums in my hand luggage on a Ryanair flight of steps , ” writes parasitologistCharlie Evans . Someone else wrote that they once lend 100 live spiders on a carpenter’s plane — and you thought snakes were the forged of your worries .
Their responses give us a newfound respect for the professionals who immerse themselves in bizarre and sometimes crude situations for the interest of science . Here are a few other stories they apportion .
[ h / tIFL Science ]
