Has anyone ever tried dropping a small rodent from a great height?

do it. report back.

actually don't, find some way of simulating the test first and then try it on a live one once you have reasonable basis for believing your hypothesis to be true.

Wow. Remarkable what a few innocent minutes with Google can turn up.

"Despite differing opinions regarding the preferred species used for modeling human TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), many investigators have accepted rodent models as the most suitable choice for neurotrauma research."

"Controlled cortical impact models have been used in the ferret, rat,and mouse... The controlled impact is delivered to the intact dura by a compressed air-driven metallic piston causing deformation of the underlying cortex"

All very interesting but I still think it would be better for you to carry out your own "scientific" experiments.

My physics teacher claimed that if a mouse fell from the top of the eiffel tower it would have a 50/50 chance of survival.

chances are it would land on a miniature version of the eiffel tower being sold from a stall at the bottom. so i would say less. i wasn't allowed to take one onto a plane in my handluggage cos they are spikey.

Aha, the original quote, from "On Being the Right Size" by JBS Haldane

"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes."

If we actually could do the being shrunk and injected into someone's blood stream, would we actually physically have to fight off the white blood cells, or would they be sort of zombie equivalents, slow and brainless and easy to evade?

I dropped my hamster off the side of my bunk-bed once. He survived.

wasn't scientifically controlled, doesn't count.

that's what i was thinking. do it again. in a vacuum.

With 2,000 hamsters.

Here's a map of where you could get them all from:

http://www.britishhamsterassociation.org.uk/locate_breeder.php

Somehow I suspect I could put my energies to better use than typing "hamster" and "farm" into Google. But it's Friday, woteva.

what if you drop one of these

http://www.hoothollow.com/August%202005/Sugar%20Glider%20voplaning-%20047950%20w%20moon.jpg

from the stratosphere?

it would starve to death

It would still be adorable.

It appears from that picture that someone already did.

that picture is crazy!

there is a great article in this month's harpers about experiments on mice and the 'mice-for-research industry'
i don't know if this experiment wld get funding tho

The post with the picture killed me ! great friday thread overall... will help me wait for the time to leave the office and hit the bar !

That harper's article was fucking great.

I had pet mice as a little girl and one jumped off a balcony an entire story down and didn't seem phased. I was though – "Mrs. Frisby! Come back!"

that harpers article made my brain spin for all the crazy stuff i'm sure had to be cut out. i wld read a book on all that. i've visited psych labs as a journalist but never got to talk about the animals there except for the researchers saying that it was one of those things that they knew was an 'issue' out in the world but was so totally a part of their research world that it'd become second nature pretty much.
i mean and while i'm happy to have a full-time job that pays the bills/debts right now, that article totally renewed dreams of being and investigative/science journalist all the time.

also, the bit about taking blood from the eye!

Supposedly, if you drop a tarantula from 3 feet, its abdomen or whatever will asplode.

A couple weeks ago a squirrel was leaping from one branch to another in front of my house and missed and fell probably 30 feet. It took off running the moment it hit the ground. This was on grass though.

It was kind of hilarious.