This is from the Onion:
University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year designing and constructing.
The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study's final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment. According to researchers administrating the standard Y-maze test, the fucking bastard never even broke his stride during the first trial, always selecting the correct route while consistently avoiding blind dead-end alleys.
"We were unable to observe any statistically significant behavioral changes in the subject, largely due to the fact that he was in such a goddamn hurry to finish the maze," said Dr. Richard Barret, who was forced to estimate the mouse's various reaction times after one of his assistants smashed the lab's stopwatch in anger. "Further analysis will be required to garner any useful knowledge regarding this particular mouse's neurological processes, his reflex response to stimuli, and how in the hell that stupid jerk reached the goal without screwing up once."
Damn you mouse, and damn your "learning" abilities. Don't you know we have important research to conduct?
I like this part too:
"Taking into account my past successful experiments with chimpanzees, it is my final analysis that we are dealing with one smart little fucker," said team member Dr. Russell Sutton, who has already applied for an additional grant to study cognitive learning in the same mouse. "I wonder if he'll be so smart without a functioning hippocampus."
- Log in to post comments
This reminds me that there is no such thing as foolproof because there will always be a better fool to muck it up.
Every now and then it's good to be reminded that, no matter how badly experiments go, at least I'm not doing in vivo stuff.