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A woman pretends to faint. A cat side-eyes her.

First things first: cats know everything. Well, usually. So if you attempt to fake them out by pretending to faint for online clicks, most of them will be onto you immediately. This has become quite the trend over the last few years, and the cat reactions are, let’s just say, so-very-catlike.

In a Facebook reel compilation posted by Kitty 1st, people pretend to faint and/or die in front of their cats to see how they’d respond. With the chyron, “Pretend to faint to test the cat,” the first subject falls to the floor while their little grey fluff-ball sweetly rubs its body on their arm.

The next scenario didn’t fare as well. Dropping to the ground and pretending to be dead, their cat glanced over and then just walked on by, seemingly without a care in the world.

The next clip might be the best. A person is face down on the floor and their cat trots by, a little skip in its step. When the frisky feline sees their person presumably passed out or worse, they actually jump and keep on walking.

One woman lies on the floor and, when her adorable black cat doesn’t react, she picks her head up. At that exact moment, her cat falls to the ground with the caption, “I die too.” This is met with sweet laughter.

Another guy slides onto the ground, and his black cat could not care less. As it skulks off, someone (seemingly the cat, but probably not) pulls the body off camera.

@ellie_thetabby

Ill take that as a win #cats

The commenters feel seen. One jokes, “Since cats try to kill you on a regular basis, I’m sure they just think mission accomplished and move on their merry way. Until they get hungry anyway.”

Another asks, “Was it me or did one of the cats roll its eyes? I swear the cat must have been thinking ‘Over Actor.’ Lol.”

But many people in the comments take it seriously, as they know their cats are brilliant and empathetic. “Cats are smart and intuitive. They know when something is really not good and feel when someone is pretending that it is bad. Simple! They really know how to help a person and save him when they feel trouble.”

 cats, fake fainting, cat reactions, animals, cutness A cat rolls its eyes.  GIPHY, Saturday Night Live, NBC 

Research supports this. In Dr. Alice Barker’s article Can cats sense illness in humans” for Cats.com, she writes, “Cats have a famously refined sense of smell and it has been found that they can detect pheromone changes coming from the human body.”

She further adds, “When people get ill and the decomposition of cells causes chemical changes in the body, it is well evidenced that cats can sense the hormonal changes using their olfactory pathway.”

This knowledge has been around for a while, but Redditors took it to a psychological test. In the subreddit r/cats, someone asked “Do cats really love their owners?” The first comment is so pure: “It depends what you mean by ‘love.’ If you mean being generally obsessed with me, following me everywhere, demanding constant physical contact and rushing to me whenever I’m hurt, then yeah: pure, unadulterated, unmistakable love.”

 cats, love, pets, animals, humans Cat hugging person.  Photo by Chewy on Unsplash  

A few make jokes. “Love? Maybe. Stockholm syndrome? Possibly. Cats are tiny dictators who tolerate us because we’re their personal chefs. But when they curl up on your lap after a bad day, you’ll swear it’s love—and that’s all that matters!”

So if you fake-faint and your cat curls up next to you or just keeps walking, they probably love you either way.

One other note shared by this Redditor: “If you’re comparing cats to dogs (as most people unfairly do), a dog’s love is more like worship and a cat’s love is more human. It’s based on respect and if they like being around the person, rather than blindly adoring someone because they view them as a master. This is often why people who have only had dogs view cats as villainous and contemptuous; they’ve grown to expect absolute adoration from an animal whether or not they give anything in return."

To that point, for a little fun contrast, a person tried the “fake faint” with both a cat AND a dog. (Though it's noted more than once that both cats and dogs love their owners. Cats just aren't as equally fooled.)

  -Fake fainting in front of a cat and a dog.  www.youtube.com, @AxelineOfficial 


Heroes

We're putting this forest on fast-forward to learn what Earth will feel like in 100 years.

The plan is to give us a flash forward look at the Earth's future.

We've all been there — stuck in a cyclical conversation about some random hypothetical situation we can't actually imagine.

"If we can return to talking about the social media plan." "Please, David. David, no. David. DAVID. NO." Photo from iStock.

And then some blessed person shouts from the back of the meeting room and says, "Well, why don't we just go see for ourselves?"


Why spend all this time arguing about how something's going to go down when we can just go do it?

That "let's just go see for ourselves" attitude is why I love this weird forest experiment happening right now in New Hampshire.

Talking about climate change feels a lot like that awful meeting: We've nailed down a lot of the big questions about climate change — like where it's coming from — but a lot of the little things aren't as clear. And arguing about it can get ... tedious. It feels like a huge, insurmountable problem we can't quite grasp or tackle completely.

But at the Hubbard Brooke experimental forest in New Hampshire, a group of scientists are embracing the "let's go check it out" attitude.

Scientists are putting electric heaters in a small patch of forest to see what a warmer world will actually be like.

It's called the Climate Change Across Seasons Experiment and is being run by Professor Pamela Templer.

The idea is fairly simple: The scientists are putting electrical cables under about 6,000 square feet of forest soil. When they're turned on, the cables work kind of like a big electric blanket, warming the soil by about 9 degrees. That's not enough to bake anything or cause any real damage, but it does mimic what the average temperature of Earth may be like a hundred years from now.

They've been doing this since 2012, and they've found some interesting effects already.

In the heat, the trees as a whole are filtering less carbon from the air. Their roots also take up less nitrogen from the soil, which is actually changing the soil composition and might have domino effects further down the line.

From a scientific point of view, this could help us predict what'll happen to America's forests as a whole in 100 years.

This isn't just a cool experiment, though. It's also a refreshing moment of cutting through hypotheticals.

Science often thrives on careful discussion and consideration, but it's awesome to see people stepping away from hypothetical arguments and actually trying things out. It's freedom.

And we all know how that feels:

Photo from iStock.

You may not have heard of the Ig Nobel Prizes, but they're basically the best thing about science.

They're a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given out once a year. But these awards don't go to the kinds of studies that'll get anyone a meeting with the president or cure space fever. Instead, the prizes are given out to some of the weirdest, strangest, and just plain funniest academic achievements of the past year.

There are prizes in 10 different categories. Here are this year's winners:


1. The effect of polyester pants on rats' sex lives.

Image via iStock.

The reproduction category was won by the late Ahmed Shafik, of Egypt, for two studies looking at whether polyester, cotton, and wool trousers affected the sex lives of rats and humans.

2. Assessing the perceived personalities of rocks.

Image via iStock.

Are your rocks rugged? Sincere? Excited? These winners of the economics prize can tell you!

3. Why dragonflies love tombstones.

Photo by Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images.

Nine scientists won the physics prize together for figuring out why certain dragonflies kept wigging out around polished black tombstones. Turns out the polished grave markers look just like water to the bugs!

The scientists also looked at why white-haired horses were so dang good at shooing away flies.

4. The chemistry prize was given to Volkswagen, for making emissions "disappear."

Photo by Alexander Koerner/Getty Images.

The chemistry prize this year was a little dig at Volkswagen, who cheated automobile emissions testing.

5. What happens if you scratch an itch while looking in a mirror?

Image via iStock.

Five scientists in Germany revealed that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can fix it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side instead! For that they won the medicine prize.

6. Scientists ask lying liars about lying.

Image via iStock.

Scientists asked 1,000 liars about how often and how good they were at lying. Turns out, kids are masters of deception. This won them the psychology prize.

7. "On the Reception of Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit."

Image via iStock.

Turns out some people are just bad at detecting what is and what isn't proactive paradigm-shifting phenomena that'll revolutionize your energy flow. Who knew? This was the winner of the peace category.

8.  For two researchers who learned what it means – what it really means – to be a badger and a goat.

Thomas Thwaites at the prize ceremony. Photo by Michael Dwyer/AP.

The biology category was jointly awarded to two men: Charles Foster, who lived as a badger, otter, deer, fox, and a bird; and Thomas Thwaites, who created an entire prosthetic goat-suit ... to live among the goats.

9. For a three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasure of collecting flies.

Image via iStock.

Specifically both dead flies and "flies that are not yet dead." This was the literature prize.

10. "For investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs."

Image via iStock.

The perception prize was given for finding out that doing this might make images appear brighter and more distinct. Wow.

These are hilarious, but it's all in good fun.

Photo by Michael Dwyer/AP.

The winners all have a chance to bow out if they don't want to take part. And if they do want to accept their awards, they're invited to Harvard, where they're greeted with an adoring audience, (real) Nobel laureate emcees, prizes, and even an opera.

Marc Abrahams, who started the prizes, said the prizes are unique because it's not about who's the best or the worst or the most important.

"The only thing that matters is that it makes people laugh and then think," Abrahams said.

And there are a couple things we can take away.

Such as just because something is funny doesn't mean it can't still be helpful (imagine using the itchy mirror trick for a kid with chicken pox or in a burn ward). Or maybe these prizes show that science is still a human endeavor, and humans are, in the end, pretty weird, funny little animals ourselves.

But most of all, Abrahams hopes these can be a kind of inkblot test. People so often get told what's good and bad, but these prizes are so off-the-wall, they kind of defy any pat analysis. Abrahams hopes that each person will end up thinking and deciding for themselves which of these are good, silly, stupid, hilarious, or secretly brilliant.

As for me, I think I'm going to change up my wardrobe and then see what this whole badger thing is about.

Majestic manta ray glides through the deep blue sea.

"Mirror, mirror, under waves — who's the fairest manta ray?"

Presumably, that's what's on this guy's mind.



That ray, you see, is circling around a mirror placed in its tank by Csilla Ari, a researcher at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Ari filmed a pair of these aquatic blanket-creatures on two separate occasions: once with a mirror in their tank and once without. She observed a noticeable difference in the behaviors of these typically antisocial animals in the presence of their own reflections.

They would blow bubbles while facing the mirror, for example, or wave their fins around and swim circles past the looking glass. But as fun as it is to spend an afternoon watching fish act funny, this strange little experiment still begged the question: Why would a manta ray care about a mirror?

It turns out, there are actually a few possibilities.

1. They were just making sure they're not a vampire or monster.

It's a commonly accepted scientific fact that evil mystical folk creatures don't have reflections — and once upon a time, people treated the so-called "devil ray" like monsters. There were stories of these flappy fish using their prodigious size to sink ships, and they gained a (completely fabricated) reputation for attacking humans. They even starred in a couple of monster movies, like "The Sea Bat (1930)" and "Devil Monster (1936)" — though sadly, none of them left their fin-prints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

While manta rays can get pretty big — some are more than 20 feet across — they're not actually that dangerous in real life (and they're definitely not demonic).

2. Or they were checking to see if they had anything in their teeth.

So if manta rays aren't man-eating monsters, what do they eat? It turns out, they're really into those teeny tiny floating plants and animals we call plankton — so basically the opposite of human flesh. In fact, the ray's iconic horns are actually fins on the sides of their head that help them funnel plankton into their mouths!

Nom nom nom nom nom.

3. Perhaps they wanted to admire how smart they look.

Manta rays have the biggest brains for their bodies of any fish. There are even some stories of rays coordinating and cooperating with each other (even though they generally keep to themselves).

Intelligence is beautiful, so maybe these rays were just taking in the sights?

Woohoo! We're smart! Let's have a flap party about it!

4. They could have also been looking for gray hairs.

The manta ray as we know it today has been around for about 5 million years, and its relatives date back around 20 million years. And they're not just an old family either — individual rays can live to be 50 years old! (Which is, like, really old for a fish.)

"Get off my lawn."

5. Or maybe, just maybe, these manta rays got so excited by the mirror because their advanced intelligence make them self-aware.

The mirror test is a kind-of-vaguely-defined lowest-bar litmus test for determining if animals possess a higher consciousness like humans. The basic idea is that if an animal can recognize itself in a mirror (instead of, say, confusing its own reflection for another member of its species), then that animal must be at least somewhat aware of its own identity.

Other animals that have passed the mirror test include dolphins, chimpanzees, elephants, and magpies. It's only a tentative step, and it may not work for nonvisual animals like octopuses, for example (which lots of us already recognize as a vastly superior alien race). But if the manta rays in the experiment above did actually recognize their own reflections, it would make them the first fish to demonstrate self-awareness.

YAY I'M SELF-AWARE UR SELF-AWARE LET'S BE BFFL.

Of course, we can't exactly prove these manta rays are really as vain as we think they are ... at least, not yet.

But if this research checks out, it has the potential to be an ocean-sized milestone in our larger understanding of consciousness and evolution. Which means we're one step closer to being able to swim up to a manta and say, "Hey, who's that handsome devil ray in the mirror?"

And I think we're all agreed: That would be awesome.