Well, there aren’t any photos today (I have about a week’s worth, but am conserving them), but we do have science—in the form of weird titles of scientific papers. Athayde Tonhasca Júnior sent this collection with a brief intro:
Perhaps your readers would be amused by scientists being witty or mischievous (sometimes unintentionally), with varied degrees of success.
Any notes are mine. Click titles to enlarge them.
Oy, the citation!
More citation humor:
I presume this acronym was deliberate:
There is also the famous Alpher, Bethe, Gamow physics paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper
Entertaining. Some of these titles remind me of the titles that creative high schoolers give to their annual science & engineering fair projects. In the midst of a hectic morning of project judging, these clever titles always brought a smile to my face.
These plays on words definitely appeal to my brand of humor. They’re reminiscent of the famous “Alpher, Bethe, Gamow” paper.
Two of my favorite humorous titles from systematic biology are “What, if anything, is a rabbit?” (A.E. Wood. 1957. Evolution 11:417-425.) and “Aha, a new genus of Australian Sphecidae, and revised key to the world genera of the tribe Miscophini (Hymenoptera, Sphecidae, Larrinae)” (A.S. Menke, Polskie Pismo Entomologiczne 47:671–681.)
GCM
I think I’ve shared this one with our host before.
“Donald H. Les & Kurt Schwenk. 1995. Para-fuckin-phyletic: A compromise category for classification. Systematic Botany 20(2): 165–411.”
Not a real paper (it’s one page long, not hundreds of pages), but a mock-up of a Systematic Botany article. It was meant as a joke but circulated as a PDF among people like me with a juvenile sense of humour. It took on a viral life of it’s own but Don Les later regretted it as a little too vulgar.
I have seen papers by this guy, and always wondered if I should trust the conclusions.
Second author.
My sadly-late colleague Roger Hendrix loved to come up with titles like this. He also came up with a genetic unit called a moron.
And then my PhD advisor collaborated with an MD named Hawley, and had a grad student named MacKerell. But we could never legitimately get them on the same paper together.
And then I remember sitting in the library and coming across a paper by this guy (1st au) when I was a grad student. I started to turn to a fellow grad student and say, “Get a load of this guy’s name,” but stopped when I realized that I was turning to Jerry Bagel.
I wonder if there is any relation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherri_M._Pancake (Aside from a pretty fascinating career path, she was the president of ACM a few years ago)
I love these. Despite trying a few times with what a I thought were catchy titles, I was never able to prod a journal editor into having a sense of humor.
The humor might be a bit obscure to a general audience, but I think readers of this site will get the joke:
“A Candide response to Panglossian accusations by Randolph and Dobson: biodiversity buffers disease”
Ha ha! I don’t know how the acronym in the copper nanotube paper got past peer review. Even for 2014.
Chinese authors and a Chinese editor. They may have had no idea.
Oh, I see – the email thing – I missed this – cool. All set.
Some very clever stuff in this little compilation – thanks!
Concerning the second paper, there is a compound arsine which is AsH3, and there is an astronomy paper ‘Arsine in Jupiter and Saturn’
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989ApJ…338L..71N/abstract
but sadly so far no ‘Arsine in Uranus’
Ahh yes … the Christmas BMJ. Always worth a look for a smile. Famously less serious than your average BMJ.
PCC’s example is listed here 🙂
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320319
For those with an interesting paper in the works, A.P.A (Acta Prima Aprilia) are collecting submissions for the 2023 number. https://www.actaprimaaprilia.com/submitting-to-apa
Speaking of humorous scientific paper titles…
“Stinging News: ‘Dickinsonia’ discovered in the Upper Vindhyan of India Not Worth the Buzz”
https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.gr.2023.01.003
This is a funny topic 🙂
Immunity Previews usually have catchy titles with word plays. Only in this issue from 2022 there’s “cDC1 to cDC2: Everything I do, Ido1 it for you” and “Dendritic cells (cross)dress for success”.
https://www.cell.com/immunity/issue?pii=S1074-7613(21)X0007-6
The Cox-Zucker theorem is legendary among us mathematicians. And it was intentional, see the background here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine
The “Knox, Knox, Hoose, Zare” paper was a parody article instigated by Dick Zare and published on April 1, 1990, which apparently most folks didn’t catch. He personally approached the co-authors and asked them to participate.
A while back, I published a paper on Sn/OH chemistry and included all isotopes of hydrogen. The last time I checked, it was the only paper in Chemical Abstracts that came up when you searched for SnOT. Life has been downhill ever since.