Mind-bending diets, the fastest shrimp in the west and a hole in the Sun: Weird Science Weekly

Weird science isn't just a John Hughes movie about two nerds unwittingly unleashing Kelly LeBrock upon the world; it's happening all the time, all around us. In this inaugural post of Weird Science Weekly, I'm rounding up the weirdest of the weird over the past week, including Japanese diet goggles, shrimp claws that act like stun-guns, and giant holes in the Sun, to name just a few.

Japanese researchers show that weight loss is all in your head

In what may be a new trend of 'fooling your way to a thinner life', researchers in Japan have developed two amazing new sets of high-tech goggles that can trick you into both eating less and into eating healthier.

The first set of goggles uses a bit of digital prestidigitation to make any piece of food you're holding to appear bigger or smaller, while keeping everything else in your field of view (even your hand) normal-sized. Those confronted by the view of a massive oreo cookie in their hand tended to eat less of it (about 10% less for a cookie that looked 50% bigger), and anyone shown a smaller cookie ate more of it (about 15% more for a cookie that looked about two-thirds its normal size).

From there, they took the illusionary wonders a step further and added in smell. Giving the subject a plain biscuit, the goggles overlaid a picture of a chocolate or strawberry-flavoured cookie, with tiny scent bottles pumping out the right smell to complete the illusion. Subjects eating the biscuit were fooled into thinking it was the much tastier-looking treat around 80 per cent of the time!

Although very cool, this all reminds me a bit too much of The Matrix, and the discussion between Smith and Cypher about steak and ignorance (and don't forget that the 'digital rain' from that movie is just backwards Japanese).

Fastest shrimp in the west

The BBC series Earth Unplugged recently covered a weird little sea-creature called the pistol shrimp. One of this amazing little guy's claws is such a powerhouse that it can snap shut at around 100 km/h.

This lightning-quick snap kicks up a bubble of air that only lasts for a fraction of a second, but when it collapses back in on itself, it not only acts like a sonic stun gun to anything trying to attack it, but it also heats up that tiny bit of water to nearly the temperature of the surface of the Sun!

There's a hole in the Sun

Speaking of the Sun, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images last week of a gaping coronal hole, filmed in ultraviolet, making our star look like a giant glowing eye scanning the heavens.

This scientific reason for this is a gap in the Sun's magnetic field opening up, which lets more of the solar wind stream out from its surface. However, just looking at it brings back visions of the Eye of Sauron and makes me wonder: Who took The One Ring this time?

American's heads are growing larger

I have plenty of American friends, so I wouldn't insult them by saying that they have big heads, but according to a study by forensic anthropologists at the University of Tennessee, their heads are actually getting bigger!

It's not due to ego, though. It's likely a host of factors like genetics, diet, health and lifestyle that increased skull sizes over the past 150 years or so, so that the average present-day white American male has a head that can accommodate a tennis-ball's-worth of gray matter over and above what his 19th century counterpart could.

This sort of flies in the face of research that's found that people were actually smarter in the late 1800s, but they didn't have television and the internet then, so it's easy to see what might be filling up the extra room.

Thieves steal exotic bull semen

This has to be the weirdest story I've come upon in a very long time... last week, thieves made off with a large quantity of bull semen from an animal semen bank in Hisar, in the Indian province of Haryana.

It's worth noting that these particular animals, the Murrah buffalo, are extremely valuable due to their ability to produce over 30 litres of milk a day. So, having a cache of Murrah bull semen on hand, to inseminate female Murrah buffaloes and create more of these productive animals, is certainly a way to either get rich or provide a lot of humanitarian relief in the world. However, given the expertise needed to pull off the heist, as well as properly store and use the semen afterwards, there has to be a fairly short list of suspects.

Is there a Keyser Söze of the bull semen world?

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Keep your eyes on the wonders of science, and if you spot anything particularly strange you'd like me to check out for next week, comment below or drop me a line on Twitter!

(Images and videos courtesy: NASA/SDO, Earth Unplugged, Getty Images)

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