A look at some of the weirdest scientific research in 2022

In 2022, the serious scientific community brought everyone a lot of novel, funny, and even weird research. Scientists not only had great imaginations, but also worked hard to bring some settings in science fiction novels into reality.

Compiled by Xiaoye

Animals can always surpass human imagination

Fish truck rush!

If fish could drive, what would they like to drive? In January 2022, Israeli scientists installed wheels on a fish tank and taught six goldfish to drive the fish tank on the ground. The fish finally landed! **[1]** They effortlessly "drove" the fish-operated vehicles (FOVs) specially designed for fish to successfully reach their destination and enjoy a delicious reward. So, you might ask, how do goldfish drive? Goldfish swim in the tank and can see the target visually. It will guide the movement of the fish tank in the direction of the destination, so the FOV also goes in the same direction. Researchers say that after a few days of training, goldfish have become excellent drivers. They can not only drive smoothly to their destination, but also avoid obstacles and dead ends, and will not make wrong turns. So why teach goldfish to drive? Scientists hope to understand the navigation ability of animals in unfamiliar environments.

Video 1 Goldfish driving a car [Please go to the "Fanpu" public account to watch the video]

"Take my hit!"

In November 2022, scientists discovered that Australia's "gloomy" octopus (Octopus tetricus) lives up to its name. When they are unhappy, they "throw" at each other to vent their anger**[2]**. In a series of videos shot by Australian and American scientists in Jervis Bay, Australia, these cephalopods deliberately throw mud and shells at one another. They first collect the mud, sand and shells, strike a very special posture, and then spray them out of a tubular structure called a "siphon" in one breath. Therefore, scientists believe that their throwing is a deliberate behavior. This is the first time scientists have seen octopuses throwing objects at each other, and they prefer to throw mud. In the 24-hour video, about 10 octopuses threw 102 times, with both females and males participating. Females threw more, accounting for about two-thirds, and their accuracy was not bad. A female octopus threw 17 times in an hour, hitting her opponent 9 times, including 8 times hitting another female nearby and 1 time hitting the male who was fighting the most. The "attacked" ones would make some defensive or evasive behaviors.

Video 2 Octopus Spray [Please go to the "Fanpu" public account to watch the video]

Cutting off the tail should not delay finding a partner

Although this study was published in November 2021, it won the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology. This is a tragic story about death and love. The protagonist is the South American venomous scorpion, Ananteris. If they are unfortunately caught by their natural enemies, they will break off their tails to survive like geckos. The Ananteris, which has a life, also pays a heavy price for this - it will permanently lose the ability to excrete for the rest of its life, because the discarded tissues include the anus, part of the intestine and other posterior digestive systems. The poor scorpion will experience constipation for several months and eventually die in great pain. Scientists from Brazil are very concerned about whether tail breaking and constipation affect the scorpion's running and mating in the last few moments of its life**[3] . The results showed that in the short term, tail breaking had no effect on running for both males and females, and in the long term, only the running speed of male scorpions slowed down. However, long-term constipation does not affect running speed. As for finding a mate, the situation is not optimistic: the longer it has been since a male scorpion’s tail was cut off, the slower it runs, making it difficult to find a mate; secondly, male scorpions that are in poor health do not perform well when courting; finally, although male scorpions with cut tails are still able to reproduce, researchers speculate that the feces accumulated in their bodies may cause the spermatocysts to deform, resulting in functional impairment [4]**. In short, the longer it takes for a male scorpion to leave offspring after its tail is cut off, the harder it is for it to leave offspring, so it is better to find a mate as soon as possible.

The 2022 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology winner demonstrates how to survive by cutting off the tail.

Parrots vs. humans: The battle for trash

In the 1930s, the Australian army took up arms (two machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition) and fought a fierce battle with their national bird, the emu, for food and fresh water resources. In the end, humans ran out of ammunition and only killed a few emus, and the whole army retreated. Now, a new race has joined the camp against humans: the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo. And the target of this battle is actually urban garbage. Yes, garbage! Humans throw away garbage, and birds feast on it. In September 2022, Australian and European scientists discovered that people and birds have different but unified behaviors: opening the lid of the trash can to throw away garbage vs. eating garbage**[5]**. The clever parrots use their beaks to pry up the lid of the trash can and flip it over. They also teach each other this flipping technique. At the same time, in order to prevent the garbage from being turned over, Australians use heavy stones, water bottles, ropes and sticks to drive away the parrots, but the cunning opponents always adjust their countermeasures in time, and the fight back and forth is very enjoyable. In fact, the purpose of this study is to understand how animals that have to coexist with humans will change their behavior and teach other companions. The complex culture they establish and spread ("war" in the eyes of humans) helps them adapt to the changing human society.

Human beings always need to go beyond their limits

The oldest amputation surgery

Imagine what it would be like to have a thigh amputation without anesthesia; imagine that the only surgical tools available are stone and wood. Combine these two horrors and you might understand what happened to a young hunter-gatherer on the Indonesian island of Borneo 31,000 years ago - the oldest known surgical procedure. This was described in detail in a paper published in Nature in September 2022[6]. Australian and Indonesian scientists excavated an ancient remains in a limestone cave, which died about 31,000 years ago (late Paleolithic period). The remains had two most notable features: about one-third of the left lower leg was missing, but the cross-sections of the tibia and fibula were neat, indicating that they were the result of careful cutting; and the cross-sections also showed healed callus, indicating that the cuts had been cleaned to avoid infection. Scientists have concluded that this person may have undergone a leg amputation before, and the doctor who performed the surgery should have mastered the detailed knowledge and surgical skills of the leg anatomy, muscles and vascular system, and understood postoperative care to prevent the patient from bleeding to death.

The cross section of the left tibia and fibula shows the healed callus, which scientists believe is the result of a complex surgery. 丨Image source: Nature

Happy allergies

Allergies affect many people, and they can be caused by all sorts of things. But the next time pollen season has you in agony, consider that there are people who are even more unlucky than you: people who are allergic to their own orgasms. In a case report from October 2022,[7] a 27-year-old American man, who was otherwise healthy, presented to his urologist with flu-like symptoms, including coughing, sneezing, swollen lymph nodes, and an itchy rash on his forearms, after every sexual encounter or self-treatment. The poor fellow had been experiencing these reactions since he was 18, when he developed epididymitis, a painful swelling of the vas deferens in his testicles, and therefore avoided sexual intercourse. Doctors diagnosed him with post-orgasmic illness syndrome (POIS), one of fewer than 60 documented cases. After considering possible treatments, including injecting him with diluted semen from his own body, doctors settled on a very simple antihistamine regimen of fexofenadine, which is commonly used by allergy sufferers. The treatment worked, and the man later reported a 90 percent reduction in his allergy symptoms and was able to pursue a normal sex life.

A successful and failed transplant operation

Xenotransplantation refers to the transplantation of living cells, tissues or organs from one species into another. The process is extremely dangerous and challenging, and the biggest obstacle to success is the rejection reaction produced by the immune system. In January 2022, experts at the University of Maryland Medical Center announced the successful transplantation of a gene-edited pig heart for 57-year-old David Bennett. Bennett suffers from heart failure and has entered the terminal stage. With little time left, he faces two choices: either die or transplant, and he chose the latter. The research team first knocked out four genes in the pig heart that may cause immune rejection, and then inserted six genes from humans to further reduce the risk of rejection. After more than 8 hours of surgery, the gene-edited heart from a 1-year-old pig settled in Bennett's heart. For a period of time after the operation, Bennett performed well and even had the energy to watch the game. The news of the successful operation became popular around the world within a day, and media from various countries rushed to report it. Everyone believed that this was a wonderful stroke worth recording in the history of human medicine. However, the good times did not last long. Two months after Bennett’s life was extended, his condition suddenly worsened, and he passed away not long after receiving palliative care. In July, the team published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine**[8] . The autopsy results showed muscle cell necrosis, interstitial edema, and red blood cell extravasation, but no microvascular thrombosis that is typical of rejection reactions. The team is still conducting an in-depth investigation. Although the “successful xenotransplantation surgery” was short-lived, medical practice is never achieved overnight. Scientists persist in their exploration and believe that they can eventually overcome the challenges brought by xenotransplantation and save more lives. [9-10]**

When science fiction becomes reality

Brain cells that can play games

The “brain in a vat” is a famous thought experiment. A paper published in Neurons in October reported that the cultured “brain in a dish” successfully learned to play table tennis. [11] A research team from Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada specializes in the development of synthetic biological intelligence (SBI) systems. They first used human stem cells to culture brain nerve cells and added some neurons from mouse embryos. A total of 800,000 brain cells were placed on a high-density multi-electrode array in a culture dish and connected to the virtual video game Pong through electrical signal stimulation. The array is divided into two halves. The neurons in the upper half of the array sense the position of the ping-pong ball through electrical signal stimulation. The frequency of the electrical signal tells the distance of the ping-pong ball relative to the racket. The neurons in the lower half are divided into left and right areas, which control the up and down movement of the racket on the screen through discharge. The researchers then set up a reward and punishment mechanism: when the neurons successfully command the racket to catch the ball, the electrodes will send predictable signal feedback to the brain as a reward; if the ball is missed, unpredictable random stimulation will be sent as a punishment. During the whole process, the behavior of neurons was in line with the "free energy principle" (in simple terms, the brain prefers a predictable future and strives to avoid "surprises"). In the end, in just 5 minutes, these neurons without hands and feet were able to play table tennis in the virtual electronic world in just a dozen rounds. It sounds a bit like The Matrix, but it is not yet known whether they really like playing table tennis.

Video 3 Synthetic brain cells playing Pong [Please go to the "Fanpu" public account to watch the video]

Dead Spider Robot

Friends who are afraid of spiders can skip it.

In July 2022, American scientists used the corpse of a wolf spider to create a terrifying "robot" - a creepy "zombie robot" [12] . Wolf spiders have a unique biological structure. Unlike humans who move through muscles, wolf spiders' bodies are clearly divided into two major parts. The front part is called the "cephalothorax" (prosoma). The spider can squeeze the cephalothorax to inject internal body fluids into specific joints and open its long legs through pressurization. Therefore, in order to revive this spider, the team sealed its cephalothorax with needles and super glue, and injected air into the legs instead of body fluids. Pressurization can stretch the spider's legs, while decompression can shrink the legs. In this way, the spider becomes like the gripper in a claw machine, a mechanical "gripper" that can pick up objects. However, scaring children is not the only purpose of developing this undead robot. Scientists say it also has the potential to be used in electronic manufacturing, or to become a clever trap for catching insects in the wild.

Video 4 Dead Spider Robot [Please go to the "Fanpu" public account to watch the video]

Rat brain? Human brain?

Is it realistic to have a brain that is mostly mouse and a little bit human? In October 2022, a study published in the journal Nature showed that researchers at Stanford University in the United States successfully transplanted human cortical organoids cultured in vitro into the primary somatosensory cortex of developing rats[13] . After the transplant, these organoid cells continued to grow and integrate with the rat's own neural circuits. In the end, one-sixth of the neural composition in the rat brain came from human brain cells. The researchers used optogenetics to make human brain cells discharge in order to regulate the rat's reward-seeking behavior. They hope to use this method to explore brain processes related to human neurological and mental illnesses in more detail. However, some scientists have raised an ethical question about species definition: Are rats that have grown some human brain neurons still rats? At the cellular level, these rats are no longer 100% pure rats. This raises another question: If this is the case, what is the criterion for judging species change? The research team is not currently worried about ethical issues because they fully comply with existing regulations on transplanting human cells into animals. [14]** (See “Can implanting human brain cells into mice help us better understand the brain?”)

Human brain organoids (bright green) were transplanted into the brains of newborn mice. Image source: Nature

Fooling, and then fooling

If you want to pretend, pretend to be a scientist

If you are an “expert” on social media who seems to have profound ideas but is actually full of nonsense literature, then pretending to be a scientist will be more effective. A study published in February 2022 showed that we trust scientists more than “spiritual teachers”. [15] The researchers used an online “New Age nonsense generator” to combine popular phrases to generate some profound-sounding words. They then tested it in 24 countries and found that people were more likely to believe it if it came from a scientist rather than a “spiritual teacher”. The researchers called this phenomenon the “Einstein effect” (smart people are always right about what they say). In some ways, the authors of the paper said that this result is encouraging because it shows that regardless of any religious or cultural background, we trust scientists more than chicken soup masters.

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References

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166432821005994?via%3Dihub

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276482

[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1749-4877.12604

[4] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/QxNVSWzHABXPjnNCJ5uHJw

[5] https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.abe7808

[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05160-8

[7] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214442022002017

[8] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201422

[9] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2319108-man-who-received-pig-heart-transplant-has-died-after-pig-virus-found/

[10] https://www.umms.org/ummc/news/2022/transplant-of-genetically-modified-pig-heart-into-human-patient

[11] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627322008066

[12] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202201174

[13] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05277-w

[14] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/12/1061204/human-brain-cells-transplanted-baby-rats-brains

[15] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01273-8

This article is supported by the Science Popularization China Starry Sky Project

Produced by: China Association for Science and Technology Department of Science Popularization

Producer: China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Xinghe Culture Media Co., Ltd.

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