It's traditional on the internet to do a year-end list of something quirky, so I thought I'd look for unusual scientific studies. Getting the canonical "ten" might not be possible, so I'm going to settle for five:
1. Yawning serves as a thermoregulatory mechanism in parakeets. Unlike higher mammals, parakeets don't yawn as a social function (i.e., you can't make them yawn by power of suggestion, which I'm sure took a good deal of laboratory work to establish with certitude) which makes them an ideal candidate for studying the biological purpose of yawning. Apparently it's to "cool the brain". I think it would be great to have a doctoral dissertation all about yawning parakeets!
2. Dogs have wet noses to enhance selective olefactory sensitivity. Certain types of molecules (water soluble ones, I assume) are preferentially attracted to wet surfaces, and this functions as a filter for the sort of things that dogs want to smell. I'd guess that oily substances just float above the surface of the water, so that poor Fido doesn't get overwhelmed by a spray of perfume. Think of it as the aromatic equivalent of a pair of polarized sunglasses.
3. Rats love to be tickled, and you can hear them laughing if you use an utrasonic transducer. Technically this is science from 2007, but the video was new to me so I'm going to include it. If I ever get a rat, I definitely want one of these gizmos so I can listen to him laughing. It makes them seem so much more human.
4. Electrons can be caught on video. An electron, of course isn't a tiny blue ball, like you see in your textbooks. It's a wave, with alternating nodes (regions of high density) and antinodes (regions of low density). The "density" is the probability that the electron is there. (Don't try to understand it, if you're new to quantum mechanics. Just accept that electrons are weird and can't decide where they are.) I did my own thesis on a theoretic prediction of how you could "see" electrons by the effect they have on a nearby atom, with images very much like this one, but this is a more direct and time-dependent mechanism that allows you to watch the same electron as it moves.
5. The Large Hadron Collider actually worked. The world did not implode in the process, so far as anyone can tell. Maybe not the most remarkable new discovery, but I enjoyed the title of the article all the same!
