Blog of Weird Papers

[Cramulus]

http://www.ncbirofl.com/

A selection of bizarre recently published papers.

They contain such great lines as: "Twenty-four dogs were divided into two equal groups, one of which wore cotton underpants and the other polyester ones. Seven dogs wearing nothing were used as controls."

"In 2 experiments, viewing very cute images (puppies and kittens)-as opposed to slightly cute images (dogs and cats)-led to superior performance on a subsequent fine-motor dexterity task (the children's game "Operation")."

and how about this title? Sex differences in Nintendo Wii performance as expected from hunter-gatherer selection

[Cramulus]

Salmonella excretion in joy-riding pigs

Selected excerpt from the Materials and Methods:
"The plan was to select a part of a group of pigs approaching the age of slaughter. Our knowledge of the Salmonella content of the ingredients of the feed would lead us to consider that these pigs were being fed salmonellae. Using rectal swabs, we would examine this group of pigs on the farm and find their salmonellae excretion rate by this method. We would then take a truck that had been cleaned and made free from salmonellae, and load these pigs upon it as if they were going to be slaughtered. However, rather than taking them to slaughter, we would give them a joy ride through the countryside and end the trip, not at the slaughter-house but back at their home farm. We would examine them again at this time because, if the experiment had been successful, the pigs would have had a similar stress situation to pigs bound for slaughter. We then intended to repeat this experiment on the same pigs at a later date, but this time deliver them to slaughter."

[Cain]

I think I came across this the other day.  But my browser crashed and I lost the link 

Mad science is always awesome.

[Richter]

TRUF and Key word: MAD.

Also, I'm now reading a detailed analysis of navel lint.  This is great.

[Requia ☣]

There is some incredibly useful information in here.

[Requia ☣]

Would be more useful if the papers themselves were more accessible. 

[Kai]

http://www.scientificblogging.com/evilutionary_biologist/ecological_niche_modeling_and_finding_sasquatchs_range_distribution

Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modelling

[Template]

http://www.scientificblogging.com/evilutionary_biologist/ecological_niche_modeling_and_finding_sasquatchs_range_distribution

Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modelling

I don't know if I understand, even, but 

[Kai]

http://www.scientificblogging.com/evilutionary_biologist/ecological_niche_modeling_and_finding_sasquatchs_range_distribution

Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modelling

I don't know if I understand, even, but 

Basically, with the tools they present in the article you can model the geographic range of any organism and therefore the ecological niche. They used an extreme example to show how they could really do it with anything. What the results told them is the ecological niche for black bears is about the same, the conclusion being that sasquatch sightings are misidentified black bears. It was actually an interesting study, just with a very weird data set. Catchy title too.

[Template]

http://www.scientificblogging.com/evilutionary_biologist/ecological_niche_modeling_and_finding_sasquatchs_range_distribution

Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modelling

I don't know if I understand, even, but 

Basically, with the tools they present in the article you can model the geographic range of any organism and therefore the ecological niche. They used an extreme example to show how they could really do it with anything. What the results told them is the ecological niche for black bears is about the same, the conclusion being that sasquatch sightings are misidentified black bears. It was actually an interesting study, just with a very weird data set. Catchy title too.

Oh.  That's seriously cool.