Do Cats Always Land on Their Feet? (and Other Absurd Scientific Studies)

Science is generally considered a rather serious business, full of big questions, dense calculations and incomprehensible jargon.

Then there is the Annals of Improbable Research, a venerable journal that has published data on the effects of peanut butter on the rotation of the Earth and how access to television can be an effective method of birth control. The publication’s stated goal is to publish “research that makes people laugh and then think.” Its articles—which are mostly satire, but with some occasional real research into offbeat issues—probably accomplish the former goal more often than the latter, but they do often contain a grain of scientific truth at their core. And, of course, the organization’s Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ is an indispensable institution on the international scientific landscape.

For your reading pleasure, we bring you an (admittedly unscientific) list of the 5 most improbable research projects from the Annals:

Do Cats Always Land on Their Feet?

How did Fiorella Gambale, a scientist at the (nonexistent) Institute for Feline Research in Milano, Italy, answer this age-old question? Simple: she dropped the cat Esther 100 times each from a variety of heights and charted the results. Improbably, the cat landed on its feet all 100 times when dropped from 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 feet, but failed to do so even once when dropped from 1 foot.

Although these results were never vetted by other scientists—so there’s no way of knowing whether Gambale actually performed the tests—the finding that cats really do land on their feet when dropped from more than 12 inches from the ground actually does jibe with established scientific beliefs. The explanation is that they need a few seconds of free fall to trigger their righting reflex, which allows them to bend their back and twist their torso to orient their feet towards the ground.

Why Does Everything Taste Like Chicken?

“The field of culinary evolution faces one great dilemma,” wrote Joseph Staton, of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. “Why do most cooked, exotic meats taste like cooked Gallus gallus, the domestic chicken?” Staton tasted a wide variety of meats (including kangaroo, rabbit, goose, pigeon, and iguana) in exploring the question, and ultimately determined that the quality of “chicken taste” is a conserved trait, something that came about once in the evolutionary history of invertebrates and was passed on to many species.

Sadly, Staton’s attempt to sample dinosaurs was thwarted: He apparently made several calls to Chicago’s Field museum to “borrow merely a single bone” from their T. rex but his request was “entangled in red tape.”

Is Kansas Flatter Than a Pancake?

A team of geologists from Texas State and Arizona State Universities addressed this very serious question with the cutting-edge tools of their field: digital elevation analysis software, complex mathematical equations, and a standard-size flapjack from the local IHOP. They found that Kansas is, in fact, considerably flatter than an average pancake, which is actually more rugged than the Grand Canyon when viewed up close. They write that Kansas, on the other hand, “might be described, mathematically, as ‘damn flat.’”

Apples and Oranges: A Comparison

Comparing these two fruits is not quite so difficult, it turns out, when you have access to a Nicolet 740 FTIR spectrometer, which can precisely measure the frequencies of light emitted from any substance. Scott Sandford, a NASA researcher, put this device to use on dried samples of a Granny Smith apply and Sunkist orange that had been pulverized and compressed into pellets. He found that the spectrums of light emissions from the fruits were remarkably similar, a rather stunning revelation given how frequently people employ the what he calls the “apples and oranges defense”: that we should avoid comparing two different things because of how different the fruits are.

“It would appear that the comparing apples and oranges defense should no longer be considered valid,” Sandford wrote. “It can be anticipated to have a dramatic effect on the strategies used in arguments and discussions in the future.”

Which Came First: the Chicken or the Egg?

Alice Shirrell Kaswell, a staff member at the Annals of Improbable Research, definitively answered this question once and for all in 2003: The chicken, it turns out, came approximately 11 hours before the egg. Kaswell came to this finding by separately mailing a dozen eggs and one (1) live chicken via the U.S. Postal Service from Cambridge, Massachusetts to New York City. Both items, sent out on a Monday, arrived on Wednesday, but the chicken was delivered at 10:31 a.m., while the eggs didn’t arrive until 9:37 p.m. Problem = solved.

Joseph Stromberg | | READ MORE

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian.