Harper's Bizarre But GQ Banal

Findings Factoids Trump Tedious Texting

The world is a wondrous place, filled with humans and other bizarre creatures, and the folks who write the Findings column in Harper's magazine give us the latest inside info on just about all of it. This month, for instance, Findings reveals these choice tidbits:

"Dutch children are the happiest in Europe."

"Male chimpanzees frequently beat their mates with branches in order to punish promiscuity."

"People who take naps are less likely to die of heart disease, as are women who can convince their mates to snuggle with them. Men apparently derive little benefit from snuggling."

Findings appears on the last page of Harper's every month, a goofy little goodbye gift to the departing reader. It's a compendium of odd scraps of information, many of them gleaned from recent studies, scientific and otherwise. The items are presented quickly, with no breaks between them, and written in a deadpan, "just-the-facts, ma'am" style. Take, for instance, this passage from the December issue:

"Scientists confirmed that losing money is scary. The pope was planning to abolish limbo. Lesbians have more orgasms; dung beetles with ostentatious horns tend to have smaller testicles; too much testosterone can kill brain cells; and people who look at black-and-white pictures of bananas tend to see a slight yellow tint in the fruit."

Sometimes the revelations in Findings read like the facts printed on the inside of Snapple caps: "Perfectly spun eggs can jump" and "male mice shed tears to show their virility." Other Findings items seem like something from one of the more creative supermarket tabloids: "A Brazilian cat gave birth to a dog" and "A British chicken named Freaky underwent a spontaneous sex change."

And sometimes Findings items read like the plot summary of a particularly weird sci-fi movie: "The Japanese developed a robot wine steward capable of chemically analyzing and identifying foods; when presented with human flesh, however, the robot thought it was prosciutto."

Reading Findings, you develop a new appreciation for fruit flies, whose lives are made a lot more interesting by the weird experiments that scientists devise for them. "Biologists at Yale University learned how to make fruit flies jump, walk, flap their wings and fly on command by using lasers to stimulate specific neurons," Findings reported a couple of years ago. "Geneticists succeeded in giving fruit flies a gene that makes them gay," it reported later. And finally there was this fruit fly update: "Researchers who gave methamphetamine to fruit flies discovered that the drug resulted in long sleepless nights, heightened activity, and frenzied though ineffectual sexual activity."

Sounds like a typical weekend for Keith Richards.

Mice are also the subject of some strange studies reported in Findings: "A nasal spray was developed that clears Alzheimer's plaque from the brains of infected mice; scientists found a way to make mice age faster; and it was discovered that MDMA, otherwise known as Ecstasy, relieves the symptoms of Parkinson's disease in mice."

Which makes you wonder: What's it like to have a job spritzing nasal spray into the noses of Alzheimer's-afflicted mice? That kind of work could make you a little wacky, and Findings does suggest that scientists might be stranger than the beasts they study.