Showing posts with label weird science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weird science. Show all posts



The friendly folks at the UK's amazing newspaper The Guardian compile a list of the Top 10 most bizarre experiments in history. By all means, check out the whole article... but here are the headlines... elephants on acid, two-headed dogs and a see-saw to revive the dead. Ladies and gentlemen, we simply cannot make sh!t up that's any weirder than this.


1. Elephant receives massive dose of LSD to see if it induces temporary madness.

Conclusion: LSD is fatal to elephants

2. Aircraft passengers told they are about to die in crash make more mistakes in written test.

Conclusion: Extreme stress harms cognitive ability

3. Two-headed dogs created by Soviet surgeon but die within a month.

Conclusion: Tissue rejection makes animals incompatible

4. Psychologist begins experiments on son to test if laughing is spontaneous when tickled.

Conclusion: Laughing is an innate response to tickling

5. A room of nail-biting boys is played a recording or spoken announcements to break the habit while they sleep.

Conclusion: Sleep learning is possible. Others prove otherwise

6. To test if people can sleep through anything, volunteers have their eyes taped open and bright lights shone in their eyes.

Conclusion: The men dozed off in 12 minutes

7. People asked to smell ammonia, put hands in a bucket of frogs and watch porn.

Conclusion: Disgust has no single expression.

8. Doctor rubs vomit from yellow fever patients into open wounds and drinks it.

Conclusion: Mistakenly claims it is not infectious

9. Animal corpses placed on seesaw to restart circulation and bring them back to life.

Conclusion: Two animals survive with blindness and brain damage

10. Fake female turkey dismantled limb by limb to find minimum that a male will mate with.

Conclusion: Male turkeys aroused by a head on a stick, but not a headless body

 


Ignore the New Agey blathering in the intro... this interview with physicist Paul Davies succinctly presents a notion of cosmogony guaranteed to offend both hardcore atheistic scientists and religious fundamentalists.

The laws of physics work forward in time and backward in time equally well...

So you're not talking about super-smart beings in the far future who go back in time and somehow fiddle with the laws of physics to create the big bang. You're saying this happens just through the act of observation itself, through the fact that human beings or other intelligent beings are aware of the universe...

This is just standard quantum physics. Standard quantum physics says that if you make an observation of something today -- it might just be the position of an atom -- then there's an uncertainty about what that atom is going to do in the future. And there's an uncertainty about what it's going to do in the past. That uncertainty means there's a type of linkage. Einstein called this 'spooky action at a distance.'"

 

Weird Science #3: Salt Water BURNS!!!

Author: Ink-Stained Wretch

Erie, Pennsylvania's own modern-day Tesla, John Kanzius, is at it again. First he devised a crazy new method to (theoretically) cure cancer by cooking it with nanoparticles and radio waves... now he's figured out how to use RF waves to make salt water burn.

This would be my favorite article of the day, if for no other reason, then because it features a quote from a Penn State scientist named "Rustum Roy."

Yes, "Rustum Roy." Apparently this is a real human being and not some sidekick of Doc Magnus and The Metal Men.

 

Weird Science 2: Mute of Wavilation

Author: Ink-Stained Wretch



All objects have a frequency or set of frequencies with which they naturally vibrate when struck, plucked, strummed or somehow disturbed. Each of the natural frequencies at which an object vibrates is associated with a standing wave pattern.

 

Weird Science 1: Levitating Light Bulb

Author: Ink-Stained Wretch



'light bulb' is a levitating yet powered lightbulb. It will float stably in midair and remain on for years without any physical contact, charging, or batteries. Ironically, with the levitation and wireless power circuitry both on, this entire package still consumes less than half the power of an incandescent bulb.

This is not a trick or a photoshop manipulation. The bulb and the casing contain hidden circuitry that uses electromagnetic feedback to levitate the bulb roughly 2.5" from the nearest object, and uses coupled resonant wireless power transfer to beam power from the housing into the bulb itself.


Technology inspired by Tesla

Watch the video of the thing in action.