In addition to numerous achievements and shocking events, the year 2005 concluded with some extraordinary scientific stories.
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Imported cane toads in Australia also enjoy disco lights |
– Scientists from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) discovered a case of a 27-year-old female composer who could see colors and taste flavors while listening to music. This unusual phenomenon is scientifically known as synesthesia.
– Researchers at the National University in La Jolla, California (USA) hosted a dinner party and subsequently analyzed the leftovers from guests to determine their DNA genetic structure. This application could potentially be used to track down thieves, as they often leave traces when “visiting” the homeowner’s kitchen.
– African elephants share at least one trait with parrots: the ability to mimic sounds they hear around them. Scientists in the USA and Norway reached this conclusion after observing a captive female elephant in Kenya imitating sounds from nearby moving trucks, while a male elephant at a zoo in Switzerland mimicked the soft calls of Asian elephants housed in the same enclosure.
– A group of students at Brown University (USA) invented an alarm clock that can control sudden thoughts and calculate the best time to wake its owner. However, the only drawback of this invention is that users must wear a headband equipped with electrodes while sleeping.
– A. Lemaire, a 24-year-old student in Reims (France), set a world record by calculating the 13th root of a 200-digit number using mental math, while an average person would take 48 minutes and 51 seconds to complete the task.
– A. Haraguchi, a 59-year-old mental health consultant in Japan, set a world record by reciting 83,431 decimal places of pi in a continuous session lasting 13 hours, breaking the previous record held by another Japanese individual who had recited nearly 54,000 decimal places.
– Two American entomologists paid tribute to President G. Bush, Vice President D. Cheney, and Secretary of Defense D. Rumsfeld by naming three new species of beetles after these politicians: Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi, and Agathidium rumsfeldi.
– A peculiar rodent sold for meat in a market in Laos was discovered to be not only a new species but also the first group of mammals to be identified in over 30 years. This creature, which lives in rock crevices, has been provisionally named the rock mouse.
– Scientists in the Northern Territory (Australia) found that imported cane toads, brought to the country to control pest populations, are particularly fond of the colored lights of… nightclubs.
– The results of a survey conducted by a British research team indicated that long-running television shows about forensic experts could inadvertently provide criminals with ways to evade law enforcement. Many forensic experts even hesitate to cooperate with the media for this reason.
– The annual Ig Nobel Prize (which honors scientific inventions that make people laugh) serves as evidence that scientists also have a sense of humor. For instance, one scientist invented an alarm clock that pulls even the heaviest sleepers out of bed by ringing continuously, then it rolls away on wheels and hides in a corner so that the owner cannot catch it to turn it off.
Research on whether humans swim faster in syrup than in water, analyzing the electromagnetic activity of a grasshopper’s brain while showing it Star Wars, and determining the pressure in the anuses of penguins when they… defecate are also among the scientific inventions that received this year’s Ig Nobel Prize.
