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Reading scientific papers can reveal fascinating, obscure, and far-reaching insights into life on this planet and beyond. However, if you’re someone who reads or writes them a lot, you’ve likely become familiar with certain genres of research – and there's nothing quite like wading through oceans of citations to take away a little of that New Paper shine.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.A recent and revealing cartoon from webcomic xkcd recently summarized, pretty succinctly, what some of the journals’ most frequent visitors see when flicking through emerging research. Personal favorites from the original cartoon include “what are fish even doing down there” and “we scanned some undergraduates”.
While, to the uninitiated, the academic value of once again watching a bunch of (probably C. elegans) worms roll around may be lost, the repetition of these study formats of course doesn't subtract from their value. Fortunately (as these three-word fieldwork horror stories demonstrate), some of science's greatest are also some of its funniest, and edited versions of the original comic soon began to emerge on Twitter.
Scroll with caution, some might strike pretty close to home.
*The entire IFLScience Editorial Team looks shifty*
Sweet, sweet hallucinogens.
Speaking of massive genomes... did you see the genome sequencing of a platypus? That baby is full of some juicy adaptations.
