Viagra Cures Hamster Jet Lag: 5 WTF Scientific Findings
by Ian Fortey
Science is weird. That doesn't mean it isn't awesome ... it's just that if you look at all of the experiments that have ever been done, 75% of them will bore you, 5% will change your worldview, and 20% will make you think, "WHAT IN THE UNHOLY HELL?!" Since we Modern Rogues tend to be children at heart, we're definitely going to talk about that last group.
Viagra Cures Hamster Jet Lag
Viagra hit the market at the end of the 1990s, and jokes about male potency were never the same again. You couldn't shake a stick without hitting a joke about your grandpa getting all randy down at the shuffleboard tournament. It was a whole thing. But all of that ignored the amazing science behind the pill, which was actually designed to treat cardiovascular issues. The boner thing was just a more lucrative side effect.
It turns out that Viagra has even more uses that no one suspected, at least one of which is an absolute game changer if you're a hamster. It cures hamster jet lag.
Pixabay
"There's no way I can go out drinking. My brain is still on Western."
To test this out, hamsters were given shots of sildenafil, the sciencey name for Viagra. Then researchers flew the hamsters to Paris. Wait, no, that didn't happen. But they did tweak their day/night schedules by turning their lights off and on 6 hours earlier than normal, effectively time traveling the hamsters to Paris as far as the rodents knew. Again, we refer to our earlier statement: Science is weird.
And the ones with Viagra on board were able to adjust to the shift in time zones 50% faster. How could you tell? Because hamsters run on a wheel, using fairly strict schedules, and the Viagra hamsters got back to it much more easily than other hamsters. Hopefully without getting their big ol' hamster chubbies caught in the spokes.
Uranus Smells Like Farts
Most of us likely know that Uranus is HEHEHEHEHE. In mythology, Uranus was the father of Saturn who was the father of Jupiter and, in terms of naming planets, it made all the sense in the galaxy to call the next planet Uranus.
It also happens to smell like farts.
Pixabay
Also known as "The Blue Ball Of Nothing".
When scientists dove into studying Uranus's composition, they discovered dank, murky gas clouds. As an icy variation of a gas giant, Uranus only has a solid chunk deep down in its core, while the outside is composed mostly of freezing gases like methane and ammonia. But recent research into the infrared light escaping the planet indicates the presence of hydrogen sulphide, which is a core component in the rank smell of a classic fart.
So Uranus is just out there stinking up the joint, and we have finally found proof. Science smelt it and Uranus definitely dealt it.
You Can Make Diamonds Out of Tequila
What can't tequila do? Actually, don't answer that. Especially if you've been drinking tequila, because the answers are going to get weird. Instead, let's just focus on the science side of liquid courage, because it can totally be turned into diamonds. Well, diamond film.
Turns out if you heat up 80-proof tequila on a silicon or stainless steel substrate, you're going to diamond coat that thing. Tequila has a perfect balance of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon that puts it in the "diamond growth range," which is probably a thing that existed before some clearly drunken scientists decided to bake tequila onto their steak knives just to see what happens.
Pixabay
"Happy anniversary. I know it isn't a diamond, but science says it's close enough."
The researchers in this case were just researching cheap ways to make diamond coatings, which have numerous industrial applications in everything from electrical insulation to medical tools to supervillainy. They were initially using acetone and ethanol but noticed that the best films made from ethanol had the same proportions of booze to water as tequila. From there it was probably pretty easy to talk the boss into letting everyone bring tequila into the lab "for work purposes."
You need to heat this stuff to 800º C to make it work, so no need to worry about accidentally puking a coating of diamond into your toilet any time soon. Though if we could, we would absolutely do that, because a diamond-coated toilet sounds awesome.
A Clam Is Found To Be The "Longest-Lived Non-Colonial" Creature ... After Scientists Killed It
An ocean quahog is a kind of deep sea clam that spends its life living and ... well, not much else. It's a clam, it's not like it's backpacking across Europe. Still, it's doing what clams do, and that's certainly of no interest to most people. Except scientists. Because, again, science is weird. We cannot stress that enough.
One particular clam that was dug up in 2006 turned out to be 507 years old. That clam was around in the 1400s, which is just mind blowing to think about. In fact, it was the "longest-lived non-colonial animal" ever discovered, according to Guinness World Records. So obviously, scientists put it in the freezer.
The Verge
"I taught him to play dead! ... Wait, crap!"
The thing about clams is that you can only find out how old they are after you bust them open. It's like how you can count the rings on a tree to see its age, but with 100% more clam murder. Initially, researchers had estimated it to be around 400 years old, but after they they froze the living crap out of it, they were able to open it (because it was just, like, super dead) and more accurately read its age.
As strange as it sounds, putting clams in the freezer is actually standard practice, because what is science? It's weird, that's what. So they didn't deliberately kill it just to find out its age. It was more like, "Well, this thing is dead. I wonder how old it is. Oh. Ohhhhh ... crap."
How to Make a Chicken Walk Like a Dinosaur
You've probably heard that chickens are the closest living relative to the dinosaurs. If you ever see a plucked chicken walking around, you're absolutely going to think "Oh Jesus, RAPTOR ATTACK!" The only thing that might throw you off is the way it walks. You've seen raptors before, and that tiny one doesn't walk anything like that.
Fortunately, scientists have figured out a way to make chickens walk like dinosaurs. Because of course they have.
The reason chickens walk differently is because their center of mass is all wrong. Dinosaurs had long tails -- a chicken has a bum nubbin. It alters the whole gait. But if you're a paleontologist with a penchant for determining how a genuine dinosaur looked when strutting down the boardwalk, you have to turn that chicken into a dinosaur. And you do that by sticking a plunger to its butt, cartoon-style. If there weren't pictures and associated scientific writings to accompany this, you wouldn't believe that anyone did it. But believe this:
plos.org
Yeah, that wasn't a joke earlier. Researchers literally strapped a stick to a chicken's butt and then watched it walk around, trying to hold up the weight of butt-stick. And just like that, we now know how a dinosaur moved. It's simple math: Sci + ence = weird.
