Bizarre studies that are too weird to believe
Key Takeaways
Join MDLinx as we take a brief look at some of the weirdest studies published over the past year. From the animal kingdom to ingesting and expelling Legos, no stone was left unturned the past year by researchers intent on studying the offbeat and bizarre.
Effects of ecstasy on octupuses
Ever wonder if animals react to recreational drugs similarly to humans? Well, you're not alone. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, conducted a study to analyze just that. They found that when octopuses are given ecstasy (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine [MDMA]), a synthetic drug that affects mood and awareness of surrounding objects and conditions, they are more social and engage in exploratory physical contact with each other.
Through genetic studies, they found that octopuses and humans—although separated by over 500 million years of evolution—share the same serotonin transporter, which is encoded by the Slc6A4 gene. This gene is also the primary binding site for ecstasy. They conducted the study to determine whether the prosocial functions of serotonin were preserved across evolution in vertebrate and invertebrate species, and were surprised to find that they were. Their findings were published in Current Biology.
Rollercoaster kidney stone removal—it's a thing, apparently
Prescribe a trip to Disney World to cure kidney stones? You may want to do just that after reading the results of this weird study, published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. These researchers found that riding at the back of a rollercoaster brought about a better kidney stone passage rate (23 of 36 rides) than riding at the front (4 of 24 rides).
To conduct this study, researchers actually used a modified adult ureteroscopy and renoscopy simulator (Ideal Anatomic) as a patient surrogate. The simulated kidney and its renal calculi (suspended in urine) were strapped in and taken for 60 rides on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad rollercoaster at Walt Disney World, Orlando, FL.
As strange as this study sounds, it won the 2018 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize, awarded annually "for achievements that first make people laugh then make them think."
Researchers eat Legos to measure SHAT and FART scores
Worried parents, rest assured that if your child swallows a Lego, it will only take 1-3 days to pass through his or her system and will not cause any complications. So say researchers from the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, who actually conducted a study to determine how long it would take six adults (the researchers themselves) to swallow the head of a Lego figurine and then expel it in a bowel movement.
The study, published in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, was filled with relevant yet irreverent measurements and acronyms, such as Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score and Found and Retrieved Time (FART) score. Exclusion criteria for the study included an "inability to ingest foreign objects" and an "aversion to searching through fecal matter."
They found that the average FART score was 1.71 days, and that "females may be more accomplished at searching through their stools than males," but this could not be validated statistically. Finally, they recommend that "parents should be counselled not to search for the object in stools as it is difficult to find." Say what you will, but we don't think it's worth the search even if it were easy.
Tracking Australian MAMILs
The prevalence of middle-aged men in Lycra (MAMILs) has apparently increased since 2002 in Australia, according to a recent study published in the Medical Journal of Australia. Researchers from the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, found an increase in the sightings of "this species"—comprised of middle-aged men who cycle for exercise or recreational purposes at least once a week—from 6.2% in 2002 to 13.2% in 2016.
To reach this conclusion, they did a careful analysis of data on national sport participation from both the Exercise, Recreation and Sport and Ausplay surveys to determine trends in the numbers of people taking part in recreational and exercise-related cycling, as well as data from the New South Wales Population Health Surveys and 3 years of the Australian census to determine trends in cycling to work. They also found a more than doubling of the prevalence of MAMILs in the most affluent residential areas, where the number is two times higher than in the least socioeconomically advantaged areas.
"MAMILs in Australia are socially graded, and also grade themselves according to bicycle-related expenditure and hill gradients overcome. They often form cohesive and supportive groups, but may not reflect a population-wide social movement to increase physical activity among adult Australians," the researchers concluded. Beware: We believe this species may be international, and not restricted to Australia.
Cannibalism: You really are what you eat
Researchers conducted a study to better understand why cannibalism was practiced in the Paleolithic era. They developed a nutritional template of caloric values for the human body and compared it to other animals common in the Paleolithic era—an early phase of the Stone Age when primitive stone tools were first used.
Human meat is less nutritious than the meat of other larger animals, and therefore, cannibalism during the Paleolithic era was probably not nutritionally but socially or culturally motivated, according to the study published in Nature Scientific Reports.
"The use of the human nutritional template presented here highlights that humans (and by inference hominins) fall within the expected range of calories for an animal of our average body weight. We are, however, significantly lower in calorie value when compared to single large fauna (such as mammoth, bison, cattle and horse) that have a much greater calorific return per individual than many of the groups of cannibalized human remains," they concluded.
Strange as this may be, it is probably good news for the human race, as a whole. Even better, these researchers also won the 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for Nutrition for their work.