Scanning boingboing.net today, I find a story on this.
In 2004 Dmitriy Plaks and several of his fellow students at the University of West Georgia tested whether sound waves can douse fires in hopes of using sound to extinguish flames in a spacecraft. They placed a candle in a large topless chamber with three bass speakers attached to the walls. The candle was lit and the Canadian rock band Nickelback's "How you remind me" was pumped through the subwoofers. Within roughly 10 seconds, once the song hit a low note, the flame was out, according to results published in 2005 in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Of course, you could read this story and believe in their so called 'science'. My preferred explanation for this phenomenon relies on the fact that when I hear Nickelback I also want to die. I submit to you, gentle readers, that what this 'experiment' really demonstrates is that fire is a living thing with a clear sense of self which possesses a modicum of musical taste.
I'm not sure if they've conducted this experiment with primates, but I suspect the result would be the same. Death in less than ten seconds.
This experiment also explains why I seem to get burned a lot; it furthers our understandings of resistentialism.
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