Science is often elegant. There are ideas that both illuminate the nature of our universe, and allow us to revel in its beauty. Often, people who come to view science as dry or boring have not had access to these concepts.

Image Credit: The Mad LOLScientist’s photostream.

Fortunately for the more sardonic among us, there are also ideas in science that can be quite funny. First, I think that sex itself is funny. Not in the giggling schoolyard way; I think it is deeply funny that adults of all personalities, sizes, shapes and dispositions, will, whenever they get the chance, rip off all their clothes and roll around with another similarly naked adult, grunting and sweating and enjoying every minute of it, before putting their clothes back on, and returning to the serious world of adulthood.

I also find it funny when people can see the world sideways. There are plenty of people who see the world backwards, and some who see it clearly, but seeing the world sideways is the most fun. By this, I mean the ability to find the strange or humorous in mundane, everyday situations, and, sometimes, the mundane in the strange.

So here are five science ideas that help me see the world sideways. From people sticking their faces into plant crotches, to stripper dollars and incestuous ancestors, these concepts can help change the way you perceive some everyday things.

1. Flowers are the genitals of plants.

Most species of life reproduce sexually, by mixing genes of two parents to create a genetically distinct offspring. Mammals do this through sexual intercourse, fish by spawning and insects and spiders by doing something gross that I don’t want to think about right now (I just ate). Flowers have the difficulty of being immobile (unless they’re triffids). They need another method to get their genetic material out into the world.

Flowers contain both male and female reproductive organs. That’s right, most flowers are hermaphrodites. That’s sort of funny right there, but it gets better. The stamen is the male organ, or plant penis. It produces pollen, which contains the plant’s chromosomes. This is the flower equivalent of sperm.

The female organ is called the pistil, and it has a sticky part on the end to receive pollen called the stigma. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. The pistil and stamen are the flower vagina (the other thing you might be thinking is that this is the most juvenile article you’ve ever read on a serious site and you’re never coming here again).

Many flowers are brightly colored to attract insects or birds who inadvertently carry the pollen to other flowers, thus spreading the genetic information. Other species simply release the pollen into the air. When you are having allergies to pollen, it is because you are inhaling too much flower sperm. When you stick your nose in a flower and inhale, you’re getting a concentrated dose of the same thing: flower sperm.

So the next time you’re in a botanical garden or your local park, watch the people as they approach the flowers and stick their noses right inside and inhale deeply. The place where they are putting their face is the flower’s equivalent of a crotch. They get double bonus, because there are both flower penises and flower vaginas right in front of them. Take a deep breath, and get a nose full of floral sex.

2. Fruit is a ripened plant ovary.

This one is similar to the previous, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh a little as I watch people in the supermarket fondling peaches and apples in the produce section. After pollenization, when the pollen (sperm) passes through the stigma (vagina), some trees and plants begin to produce fruit or a nut to surround the fertilized seed. There are a variety of strategies for dispersing the fertilized seed, including hooking onto animals, wind, water, and flinging. With fruit, the goal is to attract animals to eat it. The seeds are strong enough to pass through the animals digestive tract, and, if everything goes according to plan, they can start life with a nice pile of fertilizer when the animal defecates out the seed in its new home.

That’s right. Fruit, in addition to being a ripened plant ovary, is designed to get animals to poop on the seeds. What a wonderful way to start life.

So the next time you’re in the grocery store, stop and think about what the fruit-fondlers are really touching. They could probably be arrested for that in some states.

3. People stink

Most of us have had the experience at one time or another. You’re standing on the metro, and someone squeezes in next to you, reaches up to grab the rail, and hits you with a blast of noxious body odor. There’s no way around it. Unless we constantly bathe and use a variety of products, human beings stink.

The strange thing about this is that it doesn’t seem to apply to other animals. Sure, animals can have a strong odor, but they don’t seem to smell bad to each other. When dogs meet, they sniff each other thoroughly, and seem to quite enjoy it. Many other animals also identify each other and find potential mates by smell. And even if animals don’t smell like roses, they seldom have the overpowering stench that humans can generate.

The reason is sweat. Very few animals sweat. In humans, it is not actually sweat that leads to odor. Instead, it is the smells released by bacteria that grow on our skin. Bacteria love warm, wet places, and so they grow much faster in sweaty areas. Furthermore, our own body hair, especially armpit and pubic hair, seems designed to trap in those very smells that can be so offensive.

So what is funny about all this? We are the only animal that stinks to members of its own species.

4. Drugs, dollar bills and strippers

There is a widely quoted statistic that 4 out of 5 bills in the US contain traces of cocaine. Of course, this does not mean that each bill has been used to snort the drug, but rather that one bill with a large portion of powder on it can spread trace amounts of cocaine to any other bill it touches. There might not be much on it, but odds are that the money you used to buy groceries had some cocaine on it somewhere.

Here’s another place where a lot of dollar bills circulate: strip clubs. Although it varies from state to state, often tips are given by placing a one dollar bill between the dancer’s breasts, in the garter belt, or even in the G-string (or so I’ve been told). There are around 2700 strip clubs in the United States. Studies of dancer income show that tips can vary widely on an hourly basis, but $50 an hour as an average is not an extreme estimate. Let’s say each club has an average of 25 dancers; sure, some have 5 and some have 50, but this is just a ballpark calculation. I will attempt a more thorough, personal survey as soon as I can.

So 25 dancers in 2700 clubs means there are 67,500 strippers in the US. If they average $50 an hour, working 30 hours a week (it’s not really a 9-5 type of job), that’s $1500 per girl, or $100 million dollars a week for the industry. With 50 weeks to work in a year, that’s a rough estimate of $5 billion dollars earned by strippers as a whole.

And most of that money is paid in $1 bills.

The US Treasury prints 16,650,000 $1 bills every day. If they work 5 days a week, 50 weeks a years, that is about $4.12 billion in $1 bills. A $1 bill lasts around 18 months before being replaced by a new bill. If each new bill printed replaces an old bill, the entire population of dollars will cycle through in 18 months of printing. This means that there are roughly 6 billion $1 bills in circulation.

There are $6 billion in ones, and strippers make $5 billion a year, also mostly in ones, that means that the odds of any given dollar passing through a G-string are quite good. Notice that we cannot say that exactly 5 out of 6 dollars have been used in a strip club, because there are some that repeat and some that sit in drawers (the wooden kind), but we can say that a large percentage of the ones in circulation pass through a strip club at some point during the year.

I find this especially funny when I think of moralizing prudes who go to the stores, and as change, they get a handful of dollars that just last night were stuffed in the minimal undergarments of an exotic dancer. So the next time you’re standing behind someone at the register., think about where their new dollars have been. Odds are it’s someplace that they wouldn’t approve of.

5. Your ancestors had sex with their cousins.

You have two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. Each generation you go back in time, the number doubles. So after 10 generations, you have 1024 ancestors. By the 1400’s you have a million, and by the 800s, you have more than a trillion mathematical ancestors. Of course, there were nowhere near a trillion people in the 9th century. There were closer to 200 million. This means that there are people who appear more than once in your family tree. In other words, there are people who had multiple children, and then the descendants of those children found one another and united to produce more offspring. They were sleeping with their (distant) cousins, and this happens thousands of times within everyone’s genetic tree.

If you go back even further, there comes a point, estimated to be around 5,000 years ago, when there lived a common ancestor to everyone alive today. That means that all of us are related within the last 150 generations or so. That means whoever you are sleeping with is your cousin- although possibly your 150th cousin.

The upside of this is that any relationship further than a few great-grandparents back, there is no problem. You could even look at our interrelatedness as a sign of fundamental connectedness between all human beings.

Or, you could make fun of someone who doesn’t know better for sleeping with their (35th) cousin.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the strange ideas that exist to entertain those of us who look at the world sideways. There are other mind-bending concepts: pi is an irrational number that is defined as the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle. Light behaves as a particle or a wave, depending on who’s asking. Toast always seems to land butter-side down. There are many more.

The point is to provide you with some ways to find something interesting in the everyday, something bizarre in the normal, and something strange in the mundane. And something for your inner 12 year old to giggle about.