This is still one of my favourite IgNobel winners for Physics from 1999: <i>The optimal way to dunk a biscuit in a cup of tea</i> *<p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/462987.stm" rel="nofollow">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/462987.stm</a><p>* <i>biscuit = cookie in the UK</i>
TLDR; researchers at UC Santa Barbara, intending to show how statistics can be used misleadingly, received statistically significant results when scanning a salmon with fMRI to show that it's brain responded differently to photos of different social situations. The salmon was dead.<p>(sauce: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9t3bc4" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/9t3bc4</a>)
This belongs to "pure gold dust" category of my neurofeedback-related readings. Makes a good point about the prevalence of data dredging in scientific (and esp. medical) communities.
As we're talking about serious (though not entirely un-ludicrous) experiments concerning dead fish, I'm not going to miss an opportunity to post this video of a dead fish placed in "fast flowing water" (it's actually a tank with a jet and an outlet, but the effect is much the same).<p>Which way do you think the dead fish will move, upstream or downstream? Place your bets now.<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/44887922" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/44887922</a>