Those Bees Will Not Shut Up About Finding Authentic Mexican Food

Scientists from the Macquarie University in Australia and the University of Illinois completely ran out of shit to do in 2008, so they decided to test a hypothesis. And I would like to be absolutely clear here: The following is not a joke. This is the actual wording as it appeared in the scientific study:

That's what they pitched to their superiors. And not only were they not assigned a social worker on the spot, but they actually received the grants to go ahead with the project and obtain their results. It's official: "Scientist" is the hardest job to get fired from.

"Ha ha, seriously? They went for the bee thing? Holy shit! All right, let's science this bitch!"

Their experiment involved isolating a small segment of the bee population, and dosing them regularly with cocaine. Then they would release the addict bees with the rest of the hive to look for "sugar." At first read, that sounds like some scientist just has a coke addiction of his own, access to a lot of bees and an unwillingness to drive downtown, but the bees in question were searching for literal sugar, and not more of the nose kind.

"Yes. Yeeesss! My research is complete! Now, my bees, TO THE COCAINE!"

The report says that, despite their drugged state, the bees still remained completely accurate in reporting the sugar's location back to their hive. It's just that they exaggerated how much there was, how easy it was to get and how

These Spiders' Families Hardly Recognize Them

A career in NASA is just the best: Even if you don't make the A-team where you get to do infinite backflips in the zero gravity of space, you still get to be a researcher on the ground, gettin' bills for carrying out whatever crazy bullshit you whipped up last minute on grant day. And so at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, they decided to

Spiders on marijuana weaved about half their webs before abandoning their project. Presumably because a rerun of

That Elephant Spoke to Buddha on The 10th Plane

Louis Jolyon West is a son of a bitch. Let's just get that right out of the way. He's the kind of irredeemable bastard you have to pat down on his way out of the Salvation Army. His most notable experiment, at the University of Oklahoma, was researching the effects of LSD. After witnessing a few bad trips, West drew a parallel between the drug-induced fits in humans and the tendency of some male elephants to go "on musth"--a fugue-state where they are overtaken by a bizarre kind of temporary rage and attack everything in sight. Figuring that nothing goes better with crazy than more crazy, he thought to combine the two, and

"Well damn, Johnson, I honestly can't tell when an elephant is trippin' balls. Do you think it's working?"

West and his lab assistant hooked up with a morally lax zookeeper at Oklahoma City's Lincoln Park Zoo, who gave them access to Tusko, a 7,000-pound, 14-year-old male elephant. To accurately dose the elephant within levels experienced by the average human drug user, they painstakingly calculated the elephant's metabolic rate, assessed the relative potency of the drug, accounted for the weight difference, then converted all the measurements to Fuck It, and just shot everything they had into him. About 300-milligrams of pure LSD. Enough for 3,000 hippies to bother God about their mundane bullshit on a Friday night. So what valuable data did this experiment yield?

Five minutes after the injection, he fell over and died.

In a move that practically elevates dickotry to an art-form, this is the actual conclusion to their report: "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD - a finding which may prove to be valuable in elephant-control work in Africa."

Those Rats Can Feel the Bass in Their Bones

Sometimes, comedy just fails at its task. Sometimes the effort to bring out the inherent humor in something--to dissect a subject, analyze it, spin it and ultimately reintroduce it so that society might understand it better--simply does not work. Sometimes the world just writes a better joke. Here is the actual lead to a story announcing the results of this scientific paper:

"A new study has been published, demonstrating for the first time that rats on ecstasy who listen to loud music have more sex than rats on ecstasy who do not listen to loud music."

Science, everybody!

Knowledge Gained: They prefer Nine Inch Nails.

You can buy Robert's book, Everything is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead, or follow him on Twitter and Facebook or you can get good grades, study hard, and one day pursue a fruitful career feeding psychedelic mushrooms to bats to see if they fly "all fucked up."