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The 10 Most Absurd Scientific Papers 127

Lanxon writes "It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research."
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Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked 90

An anonymous reader writes "After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe's recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time)."

Comment Build a Michelson Interferometer (Score 2, Interesting) 249

Visible semiconductor sources are dirt cheap. You can buy a manual single-axis linear stage/micrometer fairly cheaply. Only one of the mirrors needs to move. They will learn a good deal about optics, beam splitters, interference, optical path-lengths and all that. They will also need to build a photodetector, so you get electronics aswell i.e. get them to do all the pre-requisite op-amp experiments. I assume most Physics Depts have access to data acquisition software so they can learn about collecting data the way modern way. As well as getting all this practical knowledge you are doing a very fundamental experiment with a very profound result. On top of all that the set-up can be extended to be used in conjunction with other applications, e.g. measure the refractive index of air, basic spectroscopic analysis, adjust it to get a fabry-perot interferometer which leads on to the Physics behind semiconductor lasers and on, and on.....

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