

8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study  - cwan
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/kids-study-bees/

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hugh3
_the students wrote in the paper’s abstract. “We also discovered that science
is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done
before.”_

I am so tempted to add that to the abstract of my latest paper.

(Tragically I'm up to the 600-character limit anyway. Maybe I can delete the
bit about the applications to extrasolar planets.)

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StavrosK
Tangentially, this reminds me of some contest where you had to write "I smoke
crack rocks" in a scientific paper that got published. Some redditor
brilliantly worked that phrase into a legitimate sentence, I loved it.

~~~
shrikant
Challenge + Winner: <http://phdchallenge.org/awards>

~~~
StavrosK
Hah, thanks for that. However, this was significantly less impressive than
what the reddit commenter did, who worked it in a chemical sentence to the
effect of:

In our experiment, we used two chemicals, iodine (I) and carbon (C) to observe
their effects when burning. In one particular instance, the fumes produced
after burning I were highly corrosive (we observed I smoke crack rocks and
other similarly hard substances).

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anigbrowl
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Still embargoed until Thursday, for no apparent reason. Smooth move, Royal
Society. Cached:
[http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:KUXd6aT2o38J:w...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:KUXd6aT2o38J:www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/vr/Projects/PRESENCCIA/Public/presenccia_pub/sharedDocuments/presenccia_publications/Publications/wp2/UCL_lotto/Blackawton%2520Bees%2520\(Submitted\).pdf+blackawton+bees+filetype:pdf&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgszOumKYHJeS1bfI0mWWk3Kq580HSdpP1yRd7wiWrrxNI5B4GdezOwl_CG9FT-
amvqpQJws_JlW0EA6KIS8lCpvpIC8offE6_l5Egj7wCQH0XUkAVilMdrclV34-yLgatAyqf3&sig=AHIEtbQT05fCCiuNl5gbuH_iorSOFgGH8Q)

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kissickas
“I thought science was just like math, really boring,” he said. “But now I see
that it’s actually quite fun."

Well, I guess it's something...

~~~
Dementati
Although math is still really boring!

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hugh3
At the third-grade level? Yeah, it's boring.

Doesn't get interesting until third year of university.

~~~
kissickas
I haven't taken three years of university math but I found high school
calculus fascinating.

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sliverstorm
“We discovered that bumblebees can use a _combination_ of colour and _spatial
relationships_ in deciding which colour of flower to _forage_ from,” the
students wrote in the paper’s abstract.

I think it's safe to say they had some help.

~~~
roel_v
I'd be hard pressed to believe that a group of 8 year olds would congregate at
the playground and say 'hey, this homework assignment we had last week, what
journal could we submit this to?'.

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sorbus
I may be missing something, but from the article it seems like they've just
demonstrated that Pavlovian conditioning works on bees. On the other hand, the
real story is kids getting excited about science; I would like to know how
many of them are going to end up going into science when they get older as a
result of this experience.

