The 6 Most Intriguing Stupid Questions Answered by Science

#3. Which Is the Tastiest Dinosaur?

Tim Boyle/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Since time immemorial, the human quest to understand the world around us has been driven by a single all-important question: Can we eat it? Even for Darwin, his groundbreaking work in biology was second to his desire to devour as much of the web of life as possible. So it stands to reason that the scientists who study dinosaurs seek to unlock the only mystery that matters: Which one would have gone best with a glass of pinot noir?

Thus, after careful study, researchers determined that the most delicious dinosaur was this one:

Nobu Tamura
"Who wants ... uh, gray meat?"

That's an ornithomimosaur, a relative of the modern-day ostrich, and the best cut of meat on the Flintstones' dinner table.

How can they possibly know what a long-extinct animal might have tasted like? By carefully studying the kinds of animals we like to eat today. For example, humans have an affinity for poultry and lumbering herbivores, but tend to shy away from carnivores and family pets. An animal's taste comes from the type of muscles it has, which depends on the type of activity it gets up to in the wild, so scientists are able to discern that the most palatable dinosaurs would be the ones that behaved most like chickens or cows.
Which means they were possibly suicidal and probably rapists.

That brought them to the ornithomimosaur, which means when somebody builds the real Jurassic Park, it's going to feature a whole lot of those things and one huge slaughterhouse.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images
And at least one jackass who'll insist on having it well-done.

#2. Do Testicles Do Better in Skirts?

Pretty much anywhere you go in the world, it's universally agreed upon that skirts are girl clothes and pants are boy clothes. In the West, it wasn't until the 20th century that women were even allowed to get around with covered legs, and even then they usually had to wear a skirt on top to keep up appearances. The notable exception is that crazy backward world of Scotland, where the manliest men get around in kilts and you don't laugh at them when they come at you with a battle axe. But do they know something the rest of us don't?

Getty Images/Lifesize/Getty Images
Other than how to live on 10 percent sunlight without developing rickets.

Scientists at a university in the Netherlands decided to figure out whether dressing up like a Japanese schoolgirl might award heretofore unknown manliness benefits to the bearded sex. After dressing some dudes in skirts and conducting even more humiliating tests, they discovered that the skirted men had healthier sperm and all-round better reproductive potential.
That makes two bagpipes they can work better than you.

The reason is that apparently skirts provide the ideal temperature and conditions for your little swimmers, who find trousers too warm and restrictive. The implication is that when it comes to assigning clothing to the genders, 99 percent of the world has got it ass-backward. We'd have been better off listening to the Scots from the beginning, at least if we could understand what they were saying.

And while we're on the subject ...

#1. Why Do Ancient Greek Statues Portray Testicles Inaccurately?

Hemera Technologies/ Images

The next time you're in a museum looking at some ancient statues, take out your balls. Or if you don't have them, ask a stranger to show you his. Now compare them to the statue. Notice anything?

Sean Gallup/Getty Images News/Getty Images
"Yeah, but screw you; it's just cold in here."

Harvard psychologist Chris McManus did. While vacationing in Greece, he noticed something fundamentally wrong with the anatomical makeup of many of the male sculptures: In most real men, the right testicle hangs higher in the scrotum than the left. And, for reasons not entirely clear, the right testicle is actually the bigger and heavier of the two. Don't believe us? You can weigh them yourself while we wait.

Jupiterimages/ Images
OK, that's taking way too long. You're starting to creep us out.

But in Greek statues, it's always the opposite -- the left nut is bigger. We know this because in the most detailed study of its kind, McManus embarked on a one-man crusade examining, cupping, measuring, and ... umm ... "fondling" the testicles of close to 200 sculptures to unravel the mystery that has undoubtedly baffled mankind for centuries. The Greeks correctly put the right testicle higher, but made the left one noticeably bigger.

Why? Was that a true reflection of reality at the time? Has a few thousand years of sexual selection somehow favored guys with giant right balls? Or was there, as the paper speculates, some kind of arcane symbolism at play? We hope so, and that McManus has since embarked on an entirely scrotum-based Da Vinci Code-esque adventure.

Columbia Pictures
Tom Hanks is already growing out terrible pubes for the adaptation.

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Related Reading: At least these scientific experiments made sense. That is not always the case. Please explain why we needed to know how coked-up rats react to jazz. And even that study sounds saner than researching whether turkeys will fuck a severed turkey head on a stick. And just to prove that scientists are equally cruel to human subjects, read about the children who were propagandized into brutalizing a clown.

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