Inside the hands-on lab of an experimental archaeologist(arstechnica.com) Back in 2019, we told you about an intriguing experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who fashioned a knife out of his own frozen feces. He used it to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic.
Protocells emerge in experiment simulating lifeless world(elpais.com) Geologist Juan Manuel García Ruiz still speaks with amazement about how he and his colleagues have created “a proto-world” in their laboratory, located just 1,500 meters from La Concha beach in the Spanish city of San Sebastián.
Oxford Electric Bell(wikipedia.org) The Oxford Electric Bell or Clarendon Dry Pile is an experimental electric bell, in particular a type of bell that uses the electrostatic clock principle that was set up in 1840 and which has run nearly continuously ever since.
The Birthday Paradox Experiment (2018)(pudding.cool) The chance that two people in the same room have the same birthday — that is the Birthday Paradox 🎉. And according to fancy math, there is a 50.7% chance when there are just 23 people+This is in a hypothetical world. In reality, people aren’t born evenly throughout the year, and leap years are excluded. However, the numbers should still be pretty close. More on this in the appendix. in a room.
Revisting the Stanford Prison Experiment 50 years later(arstechnica.com) In 1971, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a notorious experiment in which he randomly divided college students into two groups, guards and prisoners, and set them loose in a simulated prison environment for six days, documenting the guards' descent into brutality.
Bribery is largely subject to circumstance: study(elpais.com) A year-long experiment was conducted at the self-service checkouts of a supermarket chain in Modena and Ferrara in Italy to test whether there was any link between corruption scandals and how honest consumers were with their shopping.
259 points by elsewhen 113 days ago | 158 comments
Scientists predict and witness evolution in a 30-year marine snail experiment(phys.org) Snails on a tiny rocky islet evolved before scientists' eyes. The marine snails were reintroduced after a toxic algal bloom wiped them out from the skerry. While the researchers intentionally brought in a distinct population of the same snail species, these evolved to strikingly resemble the population lost over 30 years prior.
Task-Switching Experiment (2015)(psytoolkit.org) The reality is that you can argue that people always multi-task in some way. After all, we always monitor our environment to some degree, no matter what. For example, no matter how deeply you concentrate on doing a task, if you hear someone shout "fire", you will process that information and act on it.