Animals
Animal-related topics from the archives of the Mad Science Museum. Arranged in descending chronological order.
Electrified Sheep
& Elephants on Acid
 |  |
Categories
 The Virtual Rat Project. (Aug 2011) A group of American researchers (led by Dan Beard of the Medical College of Wisconsin) is joining forces to build a virtual rat. It'll be a computer simulation of a rat's physiology, which researchers will then be able to use to run virtual experiments. Apparently the idea is not to have the virtual rat replace real rats, but rather to use the virtual rat to help design better experiments using real rats. Link: jsonline.com.
|
The Benefits of Reading to Dogs. (2010) This is weird in a feel-good kind of way. Researchers from the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University took a group of 18 second-grade students and split them into two groups. The first group had to read aloud to a dog for a few minutes every week during their 2010 summer vacation. The second group had to read aloud to a human. The result: those who read to dogs saw improvements both in their reading ability and in their positive attitude toward reading. However, those who had to read to humans saw declines in both. Also, a third of the kids dropped out of the read-to-a-human group. But no one dropped out of the dog group. So obviously dogs are intellectually stimulating companions. The unanswered question here is: what about reading to cats? Links: tufts.edu, sciencedaily.com.
|
|
Seeing Through Cat’s Eyes (1999)
 In 1999 researchers led by Dr. Yang Dan, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, anesthetized a cat with sodium pentothal, chemically paralyzed it with Norcuron, and secured it tightly in a surgical frame. They then glued metal posts to the whites of its eyes, and forced it to look a screen that showed scene after scene of swaying trees and turtleneck-wearing men. |
|
Shock the Puppy! (1972)
When Stanley Milgram published the results of his obedience experiment in 1963, it sent shockwaves through the scientific community. Other researchers found it hard to believe that people could be so easily manipulated, and they searched for any mistakes Milgram might have made. Charles Sheridan and Richard King theorized that perhaps Milgram's subjects had merely played along with the experiment because they realized the victim was faking his cries of pain. To test this possibility, Sheridan and King decided to repeat Milgram's experiment, introducing one significant difference. Instead of using an actor, they would use an actual victim who would really get shocked. Obviously they couldn't use a human for this purpose, so they used the next best thing a cute, fluffy puppy. |
|
Monkey-Head Transplant (1970)
 When Vladimir Demikhov unveiled his two-headed dogs in 1954, it inspired a strange kind of surgical arms race (or rather, head race) between the two superpowers. Eager to prove that its surgeons were actually the best in the world, the American government began funding the work of Robert White, who then embarked on a series of experimental surgeries, performed at his brain research center in Cleveland, Ohio, resulting in the world's first successful monkey-head transplant. |
|
Stimuli Eliciting Sexual Behavior in Turkeys (circa 1965)
 Male turkeys, presented with a lifelike model of a female turkey, will happily try to mate with it as eagerly as they would with the real thing. This observation intrigued Martin Schein and Edgar Hale of the University of Pennsylvania, and made them curious about what the minimal stimulus was that would excite a turkey. They embarked on a series of experiments to find out. This involved removing parts from a turkey model one by one, to determine when the male turkey would eventually lose interest. |
|
The Remote-Controlled Bull (1963)
 Yale researcher Jose Delgado stood in the hot sun of a bullring in Cordova, Spain. With him in the ring was a large, angry bull. The animal noticed him and began to charge. It gathered speed. Delgado appeared defenseless, but when the bull was mere feet away, Delgado pressed a button on a remote control unit in his hand, sending a signal to a chip implanted in the bull's brain. Abruptly, the animal stopped in its tracks. It huffed and puffed a few times, and then walked docilely away. |
|
Elephants on Acid (1962)
 What happens if you give an elephant LSD? On Friday August 3, 1962, a group of Oklahoma City researchers decided to find out. |
|
Demikhov’s Two-Headed Dogs (1954-1969)
 In 1954 Vladimir Demikhov shocked the world by unveiling a surgically created monstrosity: A two-headed dog. He created the creature in a lab on the outskirts of Moscow by grafting the head, shoulders, and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of a mature German shepherd. Demikhov paraded the dog before reporters from around the world. Journalists gasped as both heads simultaneously lapped at bowls of milk, and then cringed as the milk from the puppy's head dribbled out the unconnected stump of its esophageal tube. The Soviet Union proudly boasted that the dog was proof of their nation's medical preeminence. |
 Dr. Allan Walker Blair Blair later explained his actions as part of an experimental study of the effects of the bite of the female black widow on man. A curious aspect of this experiment was that the effects of the bite were already known. As Blair himself noted, a fellow entomologist, William Baerg, had conducted a similar self-experiment twelve years earlier. Baerg had been rushed to the hospital nine hours after being bitten, where he spent three days tossing and turning, wracked by nightmarish, feverish pain. Blair was not only aware of this, but decided to allow the spider to bite him for twice as long as Baerg had risked. As a result, his suffering was proportionately greater. |