Weird Experiments

dagingercode · 11-04-2007, 04:01 AM

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1894 Falling cats
In 1894, the Academy of Science in Paris requested “a physical clarification of how a cat is able to land on its feet after falling from a great height”. For nonscientists, the answer was easy: cats are simply so skilled at adjusting themselves in the air that they can position their feet underneath for landing. But people a little more in the know suspected that there might be some complicated physics involved. The problem is that a falling cat has nothing to push against. Each turn that it makes with its forequarters causes its hindquarters to turn in the opposite direction. A half-clockwise turn in front means a half-counterclockwise turn behind. Theoretically, the cat should land all twisted up, which obviously is not the case.
At first, researchers assumed that the cat repelled off the hands of the experimenters. But even binding the cat’s paws individually with string to prevent it pushing before falling did not keep it from wriggling itself around right. A hypothesis that cats use the air for resistance also turned out not to be true.
The riddle was finally solved by the French doctor Étienne Jules Marey. Marey was a tinkerer who invented all sorts of mechanical devices, including a film camera that could capture a cat falling at 60 images a second. At a demonstration of the film, some physicists still doubted that the rotation was possible without the cat repelling in some way. But one physicist took a closer look at the pictures and realized the cat’s trick.
The movement occurs in two phases: First, the cat turns its forequarters toward the ground, then—in the same direction—its hindquarters. Changing the position of its paws between the two phases allows the cat’s front and rear to repel off each other. The cat uses the same principle as an ice skater executing a pirouette who pulls her arms in for fast spins and extends them to turn more slowly. The cat does both moves simultaneously: it pulls in its forepaws and thrusts out its hindpaws. That way it is able to quickly make a half-turn of its forequarters toward the ground, while its rear end turns only a little in the opposite direction owing to the resistance created by extending its hindpaws. To bring its hindquarters around, the cat reverses the procedure, thrusting out its forepaws and pulling in its hindpaws.
Marey’s film strips sparked a trend in filming falling animals. Soon people were dropping dogs, rabbits, monkeys and, in one study, a “fat little guinea pig”, who could twist its belly 180 degrees, to the amazement of the researchers. Researchers blindfolded dogs, and also tested animals without tails or organs of equilibrium. Even such a cat could rotate problem free. Apparently cats orient themselves mainly with their eyes.
In the 1960s, one researcher summed up 70 years of research on falling cats: “As can be seen, the turning cat raises a lot of interesting problems, even though their solution may not be of much practical importance—except to other cats.”

Lol

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1902 Dr. Pavlov only rings once
The Russian physician Ivan Petrovitsch Pavlov holds an unusual record: no experiment has had more music groups named after it than the one Pavlov carried out with dogs at the beginning of the 20th century. A rock band called “Pavlov’s Dog and the Condition Reflex Soul Review and Concert Choir” formed in the 1970s, followed in the 1980s by “Ivan Pavlov and the Salivation Army”; in the 1990s the bluegrass band “Pavlov’s Dawgs” and the rock band “Conditioned Response” appeared, joined in the new millennium by the British folk group “Pavlov’s Cat.” Nor were musicians the only ones whose search for a name ended with “Pavlov.” “Pavlov’s Dog” is the name of a communications firm in Ireland, a pub in England, a theater group in Canada, and a drink at the One World Café in Baltimore, Maryland—a mix of Kahlua, Bailey’s, and milk. In 1904, Pavlov won a Nobel prize for his research on digestion. But that isn’t why his name is so popular today. The bigger reason is the fundamental mechanism of learning he stumbled on while carrying out his work.
In his studies on digestion, Pavlov also became interested in how the salivary gland works. To be able to observe the salivary activity of living dogs, Pavlov funneled the saliva through holes in the animals’ cheek and into a small measuring cup. Actually, he wanted to see how the saliva formed when the dogs were fed a variety of foods. But soon a problem arose. After the dogs had been fed a few times, they began to salivate as soon as they saw the food. At first Pavlov regarded this effect as a nuisance and devised techniques for getting the food into the dogs’ mouths without warning. But it turned out that the animals also associated very subtle signals with the food. All it took was the sight of the researcher or the sound of his step to get the saliva flowing.
Very soon Pavlov saw this phenomenon no longer as a flaw in his experiment but as a new area of research. He did experiments in which he controlled the signals that occurred before the feeding: Five seconds before, a metronome would start sounding, or an electric bell. After such a coupling—with the bell, it took only once—the dogs salivated as soon as they heard the signal. They had learned that they would be fed after the sound of the bell. Because the dogs interpreted the least little indication from their environment as a signal for feeding, Pavlov had a new building built in St. Petersburg with soundproofed rooms, in which all the necessary manipulations could be carried out with remote levers and cables.
This fundamental learning mechanism that Pavlov discovered is called classical conditioning. It paired a natural stimulus-reaction response (food-salivation) with a new stimulus (bell). But though a new stimulus can activate innate behavior, in almost any combination, it does not give rise to genuinely new behaviors. How new behaviors are learned was taken up only 30 years after Pavlov by the Amerian psychologist B. F. Skinner with his so-called Skinnerbox.
In addition, Pavlov found out through his research how conditioning can be lost again: ring the he bell a few times without feeding the dog afterwards, and it unlearns the connection. This principle later became the basis for behavioral therapy, in which patients confront situations such as those that produce anxiety. In this way, the association between situation and anxiety is erased.
Today Pavlov is a household name. For cultural critics, his dogs are a symbol for the masses of people in western industrialized societies who let advertising transform them into consumer animals programmed to buy in response to specific stimuli.
Unlike Pavlov himself, one of the most famous scientists of all time, the bands that named themselves after him have never made a breakthrough, or at least, not yet. The closest any of them got was the rock group “Pavlov’s Dog and the Condition Reflex Soul Review and Concert Choir,” which in 1973 in changed its name to“Pavlov’s Dog.” For their debut album, they received $600,000, at the time the biggest advance ever paid in the United States for a record. Three years later the record company dropped the group, and the musicians went bankrupt and disbanded.

LUCY<3 · 11-04-2007, 04:22 AM

dude.
i "learned" all that shit in my phsycology class 2 semesters ago.
lol i only vaugly remember the second one.
and i had to write a report on it.
and it was completely focused towards cruelty towards animals instead of the psychological part in the experiment.
sooo...i got a D. just because it was a good paper...just way off topic.

dagingercode · 11-04-2007, 04:31 AM

1914 Stairway to a banana
The picture has great symbolic value: A chimpanzee stands on a pile of three wooden crates and grabs for a banana. Generations of psychology students have interpreted the scene as a clever monkey suddenly deciding to pile one crate on top of another to reach an otherwise unattainable fruit. Of course, the story is a little more complicated than that. The German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, who devised this intelligence test for monkeys, arrived in Tenerife at the end of 1913 to take over the direction of the Anthropoid Station there. He actually intended to stay only a year, but the First World War intervened, and one year turned into six.
During this time, Köhler conducted a series of elegant experiments on the intelligence of apes. In so doing, he became convinced that “chimpanzees manifest intelligent behavior of the general kind familiar in human beings.” This view reassured the then evolutionary biologist. Only a brief time had elapsed since Darwin established the theory of natural selection, and biologists were looking everywhere for clues to confirm it. The physical similarity of men and apes was one piece of circumstantial evidence pointing to their kinship, but Darwin was convinced that men and apes were also close intellectually. How close is what Köhler hoped to discover through his experiments.
On January 24, 1914, he led six of his chimpanzees into a two-meter-high room, hung a banana in the corner, and placed a wooden box in the middle of the floor. Then he waited. All the animals tried in vain to leap for the banana. “Sultan soon relinquished the attempt,” wrote Köhler, “paced restlessly up and down, suddenly stood still in front of the box, seized it, tipped it hastily straight towards the objective, but began to climb upon it at a (horizontal) distance of half a meter, and springing upwards with all his force, tore down the banana.” Sultan had solved the problem. He had unexpectedly and singlemindedly acted as though he had had a sudden insight.
Köhler was all the more surprised when his chimpanzees failed repeatedly at the next problem: The banana was hung higher, and the monkeys could only reach it by piling the boxes on top of one another. Köhler noted that the problem for the chimpanzee “falls into two very distinct parts: one of which he can settle with ease, whilst the other presents considerable difficulties.” The easy part was to shove a box under the banana, the hard part, to pile a second box on the first. This “curious fact” perplexed Köhler, because the difficulty for humans is totally different. When a person first realizes that he can get near the banana by putting a box under it and standing on the box, it then becomes clear that the greater height afforded by piling up two or three boxes will allow him to actually reach the fruit. For a human, “adding a second piece of building material to the first is only a repetition of the placing of the first one on the ground.” Not so for a monkey.
Grande, the chimpanzee in the picture, struggled harder and harder with the second box. Over time, she succeeded in building a little structure, but for years she kept making the same mistake. And even after many successful attempts in the right direction, she would suddenly be utterly clueless again about what to do with the second box. Köhler concluded that a chimpanzee has no insight at all into the mechanics of its constructions: “Almost everything arising as ‘questions of statics’ during building operations, he does not solve with insight, but by trying around blindly.”

Köhler’s experiments are considered classic today, and are still being carried out in modified form. But what they prove about resemblances between people and apes is hard to say. Similar behavior between people and chimpanzees does not necessarily imply similar ways of thinking.

1907 The 21-gram soul
The story was so hot that even the New York Times carried it. “Soul has weight, physican thinks,” read a headline on page 5 of the newspaper on March 11, 1907. The article reported the curious experiment of a certain Duncan MacDougall, a doctor from Haverhill, Massachusetts.
MacDougall had long been working on the nature of the soul. According to his peculiar logic, if the psyche continues to function after death, it must occupy space in the living body. And because everything that occupies space also has weight, according to the “latest conception of science,” the soul could be detected “by weighing a human being in the act of death.” So MacDougall constructed a precision weighing machine: a bed arranged on a framework whose weight, with contents, could be ascertained to within exactly 5 grams.
The very sensitivity of the scales, however, greatly restricted the choice of research subjects. “It seemed to me best to select a patient dying with a disease that produces great exhaustion, the death occurring with little or no muscular movement, because in such a case the beam could be kept more perfectly at balance and any loss occurring readily noted,” wrote MacDougall later in the journal American Medicine. People dying of pneumonia, for example, were unsuitable. They would “struggle sufficiently to unbalance the scales.”
The best subjects proved to be patients with tuberculosis, whose last moments would be “as nearly inactive as could be found.” MacDougall found them at the Cullis Free Home for Consumptives. It is not known whether the patients or their families gave consent for the experiments. What is known is that some people were skeptical of MacDougall’s studies in biological theology. In the case of one of the research subjects who had been weighed, MacDougall complained that the “scales were not finely adjusted and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work.”
MacDougall placed the first dying patient on his scales at 5:30 in the evening. Three hours and 40 minutes later, “He expired and suddenly coincident with death the beam end dropped with an audible strike hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound.” MacDougal had to place two dollar-coin pieces on the scale to bring it back into balance. The difference was 21 grams.
The next five subjects painted a confusing picture: in two cases the measurements were unusable; a third patient’s weight decreased after death but remained stable after that; the weight of two others decreased and then went back up again; and the fifth patient’s weight sank, went back up, then sank again. In addition, MacDougall had difficulty specifying the exact time of death.
Yet such details did not deter him in his belief that he had proved the existence of the human soul. Indeed, he carried out a second experiment that confirmed his finding: 15 dogs (“between 15 and 75 pounds [6.8 and 34 kilograms]”) perished on the scales—all without the slightest loss of weight. MacDougall did not reveal in his article in American Medicine how he was able to persuade the dogs to die on his weighing machine, but in all likelihood he poisoned them. MacDougall has not happy with this experiment. Not because he found it reprehensible to kill 15 healthy dogs out of scientific curiosity, but because the results could not be compared directly with those of his research subjects. Ideally, the test should have been done on dogs that also were so diseased that they could not move, wrote MacDougall: “It was not my fortune to get dogs dying from such sickness.”
Opinions of scientists on MacDougall’s soul-weighing machine diverged widely. Some of his colleagues thought the experiments were silly; others felt MacDougall had made “the most important addition to science that the world has known” and discussed how his method could be improved. The use of dying subjects struck them as particularly troublesome because the rapid onset of decomposition could explain the change in weight. “How much more satisfactory it would be if the subjects were normal men in perfect health,” a New York doctor was quoted as saying in the Washington Post. He suggested hanging the electric chair on a scale and determining a condemned person’s weight before and after electrocution.
MacDougall conducted further experiments and attracted attention again in 1911 when he affirmed that he had observed the soul leaving the body, “a strong ray of pure light.”
The only enduring legacy of this experiment is the weight loss that occurred in the first research subject: for a hundred years the idea that the soul weighs 21 grams has persisted in popular culture. In 2003, that notion even made it into the movies. In a film titled “21 Grams,” director Alejandro González Iñárritu explored the deeper meaning of life and death.

Laydie · 11-04-2007, 04:52 AM

ahhhh, so many letters. *headache, headache, headache*