stories from the wilder side of science


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Can a remote control help in a bullfight? What if there were 28 hours in a day? Does a dog take a robot dog for real? This website is devoted to scientific experiments that tried to answer such questions. Some truly ingenious - others less so...
You can watch a lot of amusing film clips like the one below and learn about The Mad Science Book a collection of amazing experiments from the history of science.
The experiment above resulted in the formal scientific publication Social behaviour of dogs encountering AIBO, an animal-like robot in a neutral and in a feeding situation (more in the book on page 280). (For more research on robots and artificial intelligence visit Frédéric Kaplans homepage.)
Or watch Étienne-Jules Mareys famous falling cats!
In 1894, the Paris Academy of Sciences issued a general appeal for anyone to "explain how, according to the laws of physics, a cat will always manage to hit the ground paws first after falling from a great height."
The puzzle was solved by physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey who constructed a film camera that could capture the falling cat at a speed of sixty frames per second. The pictures were published in the article Mecanique animale: Des mouvements que certains animaux executent pour retomber sur leurs pieds lorsqu'ils sont precipites d'un lieu eleve (more in the book on page 46).

Marey did similar experiments with dogs and rabbits (see for yourself).

More filmclips about weird experiments can be found here: