Welcome Dear Readers to today’s installment of “What the Scientists are Thinking About.” The stories here are actual scientific studies.  And while the  names and institutions  are real,  I have taken the liberty of punching up the reports to make them a little more interesting.

Was the Image of Christ on the Turin Shroud Caused by an Earthquake?

Italian scientists rummaging around in the Vatican Christianity Relic Vault decided to postulate that the Turin Shroud was created by an earthquake because it looked like they were going to have to stay late if they didn’t postulate something by the end of the day.

The Turin Shroud is a length of linen cloth thought to bear the image of Jesus after his crucifixion, and the Italian scientists have recently postulated that the Turin Shroud is real by coming up with this explanation:    a powerful earthquake  took place in 33 AD which triggered a release of neutron particles, effectively imprinting Jesus’s body on the cloth like an X-ray — and that a corresponding increase in the level of carbon 14 messed with the radiocarbon dating tests to register the shroud as being only 768 years old.

If scientists wouldn’t have been so tired postulating the above postulation, they might have gone on to postulate another scenario in which the Turin Shroud was an actual snapshot of Jesus taken by Leonardo Di Vinci after he invented a camera and a time machine and went back in time and photographed Jesus using a strip of linen because he  forgot to invent any photo paper  —  and then folded the shroud up and neatly tucked it under his arm  before  slipping into the Vatican under the guise that he was just there to wash the windows and stuck it in the Christianity Relic Vault when the Pope wasn’t looking.

“We believe it is possible that the neutron emissions by earthquakes could have induced the image formation on the Shroud’s linen fibers, through thermal neutron capture on nitrogen nuclei, and could also have caused a wrong radiocarbon dating,”  Professor Alberto Carpinteri was quoted as saying just before taking to his bed for a week due to a bad case of big scientific word exhaustion.

We Threw Some Shrimp on the Treadmill for you. That’ll be $682,570 please!

Biology Professors Louis and Karen Burnett at the College of Charleston recently spent $682,570 in government grant money to jury-rig a treadmill for  shrimp to workout on and then took the shrimps’ vital signs  –a scientific endeavor for which Uncle Sam picked up the check but didn’t even get to eat any of the shrimp.

According to the National Science Foundation, the money was granted for a project called, “Taking the pulse of Marine Life in Stressed Seas.”

The  researchers wanted to find out just how stressed out shrimp got by running on a treadmill.  The study revealed that running on a treadmill isn’t all that stressful for shrimp but the researchers themselves became stressed out from stressing how much more research grant money  is needed to complete the study.

Next, the scientific duo is planning to measure shrimp stress by figuring out how much sweat is formed on a shrimp’s forehead while it watches videos of people chowing down on Parrot Isle Jumbo Coconut Shrimp at Red Lobster.

Of course,  first they will need several million dollars of  government grant money to determine where, exactly, the forehead is located on a shrimp.

And there you have it, Dear Readers!  What the Scientists have been thinking about.

Until next time . . . I love you