Weird Science thinks its robot-fearing fish just need a drink

We tried to take Flipper's keys away at the beginning of the night but he wouldn't listen.

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Drunk fish aren't nearly as afraid of robots. Typically, researchers who want to study anxiety need to be cruel to rodents. An average anxiety experiment will involve training the mice or rats to associate a sound with an electrical shock. If, for some reason, you wanted to use fish as your study system instead, this wouldn't work especially well for purely practical reasons (namely, moving your fish to a tank where you're able to give it a shock would probably be anxiety-inducing on its own). So, when an international team of researchers decided they wanted to make their zebrafish anxious, they came up with an alternative approach: robots.

They built robotic versions of the fish's natural predators, a heron and a larger fish, and then set them after the real fish. The robotic predatory fish appeared to be very effective, and caused the zebrafish to seek shelter. The researchers then confirmed that everyone's favorite anxiety self-medication—alcohol—worked on the fish, as well.

An unexpected consequence of injury: orgasmic foot. It's hard to even begin to imagine the conversation that brought this woman to her doctor's attention, given the nature of her complaint: sensations in her left foot were giving her orgasms, and she wanted it to stop. As the authors of a paper on this condition note, "Spontaneous orgasm triggered from inside the foot has so far not been reported in medical literature." But, since she wanted them to stop, the doctors naturally responded by hooking up a few wires and giving her even more orgasms. They found that a heavy dose of anesthetic to the right area near the spine blocked both her genital and food-based orgasms, leading them to conclude that an injury in the woman's past had literally led to some nerves getting crossed during the healing process.