8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study | Hacker News Reader

8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study

wired.com

39 pointscwan14 comments

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.)

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.

Challenge + Winner: http://phdchallenge.org/awards

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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Still embargoed until Thursday, for no apparent reason. Smooth move, Royal Society. Cached: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:KUXd6aT2o38J:w...

“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...

Although math is still really boring!

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

Doesn't get interesting until third year of university.

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

“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.

With the writeup, at least...

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?'.

...and kudos to those that helped them. it was a great idea. i hope we see more of it.

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.

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