An enterprising Harvard University student found an outlet for that creative energy that comes from intense focus on a teeny subject, a phenomenon well familiar to anyone who made it through graduate school. She started a website, which seems to be mostly Twitter fodder, called LOL My Thesis. Authors sum it up in one (two, max) pithy sentences. I cannot choose a favorite. If I had done this for my law school paper, I think it would have been: “When a homeless woman called the ACLU after the DSS took her kid away, it did not end well for anyone except me, since I really needed a topic.”
But reading these, I conclude that scientists have the comedic edge. Ready? Swallow first!
Rocks that are next to each other in Massachusetts now were also next to each other 400 million years ago.
— Geology, Amherst College
A newly discovered worm protein does the same thing as a more well-known worm protein.
— Biology, MIT
I have killed so many fish.
—Characterizing the Role of [A Specific Gene] in Second Heart Field Progenitor Cells: A Close Look at Zebrafish Embryonic Cardiogenesis.
We should accept health as a human right because if we don’t, a ton of people will die.
—Political Philosophy, Policy and Law/Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia.
Is Health a Human Right? Examining Philosophical Problems in Human Rights Through A Study of Malaria in East Africa
These rocks are the same as other similar rocks.
—School of Earth Science, The Ohio State University.
Women in male-dominated majors are less likely to feel comfortable in these majors than their male peers because, you know, the patriarchy.
—Psychology, Texas A&M University
Women in STEM: True Self-Knowledge and Achievement Motivation
Sometimes when your DNA is slightly messed up it creates issues.
—Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Michigan
The Tea Party has no cohesive political ideology; they’re just yelling about stuff more or less at random.
—Political Science, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Paleomagnetic evidence confirms that carbon-stained, fire-cracked rocks were indeed heated in a fire.
—Geology, University of Puget Sound
I made a uterus dance.
—Medical Illustration, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Horned dinosaurs chewed their food like electric hedge trimmers, but microscopic scratches on their teeth say they evolved different ways of trimming the hedgerow.
—Functional Anatomy and Evolution, Johns Hopkins University: School of Medicine.
Dental Microwear and the Evolution of Mastication in Ceratopsian Dinosaurs.
Electric fish recognize potential mates in just milliseconds. For us, it takes four years and 20% of the time we get sexy with the wrong species.
—Mathematics, UCF
Nixon got mad, and then he got bomby.
—History, McMaster
What’s really amazing is that science majors, when not writing formal papers, can produce such excellent prose. One big reason academic writing is so verbose is that, once the five-syllable words gets stripped away, what’s left is often, “Well, DUHhhhhh!”