Creepy animal experiments

Pig Powder
From the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine, comes regenerative powder. Cells are scraped from the lining of a pig's bladder, the tissue is decellulised, and then dried. From this they managed to regrow a finger. There is something chilling about the idea that dried pig organs will be used to regrow human limbs.
Source: PubMed

Pit of Despair
Psychologist Harry Harlow induced clinical depression in monkeys by taking young macaques that had bonded with their mother, and placing them in complete isolation, in a darkened cage, for up to ten weeks. Within a few days they became psychotic, and most could not be treated.
Source: American Journal of Psychiatry


Russians re-attaching dog heads
This infamous propaganda film from 1940 shows Soviet Dr Sergei S. Bryukhonenko removing the head of dogs, and keeping them alive on a heart-lung machine. While possibly a Soviet fake, it produced a major stir in the west.
Source: Time Magazine

Spider Goat
Nexia Biotechnologies developed a transgenic goat whose milk contains proteins like that of spider silk. The milk can then be refined into superstrong biosteel polymers. We crossed spiders with goats, with no idea of how these could impact the ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, DARPA funded it.
Source: Science

Horrifying human experiments

THN1412 Drug Trial
In 2007, drug trials started for THN1412, a leukemia treatment. It had been tested previously in animals, and was found completely safe. Generally a drug is deemed safe to test on humans when it is found to be nonfatal to animals. When testing began in human subjects, the humans were given doses 500 times lower than found safe for animals. Nevertheless this drug, safe for animals, caused catastrophic organ failure in test subjects. Here the difference between animals and humans was deadly.
Source: New Scientist

A human brain - trapped in a mouse!
Researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla discovered how to grow human brain cells by injecting embryonic stem cells into fetal mice. This combines the twin horrors of stem cells and transgenic research to give us either supersmart squirmy mice babies, or people with rodent brains.
Sources: Salk Institute and Washington Post

Implantable Identity Code
The first RFID implant in a human was in 1998, and since then it's been an easy option for people wanting to be a little bit cyborg. Now companies, prisons, and hospitals have FDA approval to implant them into individuals, in order to track where people are going. A Mexican attorney general got 18 of his staff members chipped to control who had access to documents. The prospect of a business forcing its employees to receive an implant of any type is creepy and totalitarian.

Stanford Prisoner Experiment
Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prisoner experiment took place in the 1970s. The psychiatrist took 24 undergraduates and assigned them roles as either prisoners or guards, in a mock prison on campus. After just a few days, 1/3 of the guards exhibited sadistic tendencies, two prisoners had to be removed early due to emotional trauma, and the whole experiment only lasted six of the planned 14 days. It showed just how easily normal individuals can become abusive, in situations where it is encouraged.
Source: Stanford University

Milgram Experiments
The infamous "shock" experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s showed just how far people would go, when ordered to hurt somebody else by an authority figure. The well-known psychological study brought in volunteers who thought they were participating in an experiment where they would deliver shocks to another test subject. A doctor requested that they deliver greater and greater shocks, even when the "test subject" started to scream in pain and (in some cases) die. In reality, the experiment was to see how obedient people would be when a doctor told them to do something that was obviously horrific and possibly fatal. Many participants in the experiments were willing to shock the "test subjects" (actors hired by Milgram) until they believed those subjects were injured or dead. Later, many participants claimed they were traumatized for life after discovering that they were capable of such inhumane behavior.
Source: Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

Hofling Hospital Experiment
In a similar vein is the Hofling hospital experiment, which involved nurses being told to administer a dangerous dose of a drug to a patient. In the Milgram experiment, it could be argued the participants didn't really know the danger of what they were doing. With Charles Hofling's work, the nurses knew exactly how toxic the dose would be, yet 21 of the 22 would still have performed the injection.
Source: Hofling CK et al. (1966) "An Experimental Study of Nurse-Physician Relationships". Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 141:171-180.

Historical atrocities

Sigmund Freud and the case of Emma Eckstein
In the late nineteenth century, Eckstein came to Freud to be treated for a nervous illness. He diagnosed her with hysteria and excessive masturbation. His friend Willhelm Fleis believed that hysteria and excessive masturbation could be treated by cauterizing the nose, so he performed an operation on Eckstein where he essentially burned her nasal passages. She suffered horrific infections, and was left permanently disfigured as Fleiss had left surgical gauze in her nasal passage. Other women suffered through similar experiments.
Source: Freud, Surgery, and the Surgeons (via Google Books)

Nazi Experiments
The medical atrocities performed by the Nazis are well-documented, and undeniably horrifying, with Josef Mengele's work on twins being especially disturbing. What's also terrifying is how useful this information was to medical science. A large amount of our knowledge about how hypothermia and cold effect humans is based on this data. Many have raised questions about the morality of using data gathered under such horrific circumstances.
Source: JLaw

Unit 731
Slightly less well known than the Nazi experiments were the ones inflicted on the native Chinese population by the Japanese in WWII. These included vivisection without anaesthesia, induced gangrene, live weapons testing, germ warfare infections, and worse. General MacArthur granted immunity to these doctors in exchange for helping America with biological warfare research.
Source: New York Times

The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment
Between 1932 and 1972, 399 impoverished African-American farmers in Tuskegee, Alabama, with syphilis were recruited into a free program to treat their disease, but were denied effective treatment (penicillin) even after it existed. This was done as an experiment by scientists who wanted to see how the disease would progress if untreated. The leaking of this event lead to major changes in American laws on informed consent in medical experiments.
Source: Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved

Mind control

Optogenetics
A biotech system that allows scientists to turn neurons in your brain on and off using different colors of light. The technique, which requires brain implants, already works in rodents, who can be compelled to turn in a specific direction. Imagine what would happen if optogenetics were used to regulate human behavior.
Source: Wired

Stimocever
José Delgado, a Professor at Yale, invented the Stimocever, a radio implanted in the brain to control behavior. Most dramatically, he demonstrated its effectiveness by stopping a charging bull with the implant. Except this thing could control peoples actions. In one case, the implant caused erotic stimulation for a woman, who stopped looking after herself and lost some motor functions after using the stimulator. She even developed an ulcer on her finger from constantly adjusting the amplitude dial.
Source: Pain journal

MK-ULTRA
MK-ULTRA was a code name for a series of CIA mind-control research experiments, heavily steeped in chemical interrogations and LSD dosing. In operation Midnight Climax, they hired prostitutes to dose clients with LSD to see its effects on unwilling participants. The very concept of a Governmental agency trying to control minds, both to boost the mental abilities of its friends, and destroy those of its enemies, is suitably horrific.
Source: CIA Library

Our new robot overlords

Robo-Rats and Cyber-Beetles
Ready for remote controlled animals to keep an eye on you? Researchers have already found ways to create cybernetic rats and beetles, both controllable via remote. If the concept of beady eyed rats watching form the shadows doesn't scare the hell out of you, then flying bugs might. Of course, the army is very, very interested in both.
Source: Technology Review and Nature

Robots That Eat
The EATR robot (Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot), is a DARPA funded robot meant to forage for itself, by devouring biomass. While the developers swear it's strictly vegeterian, that's hardly comforting in the face of inevitable robot intelligence, and it possibly eating all our forests.
Source: Gizmodo

The Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV)
This robot is a cluster of warheads on a single vehicle, each of which uses jets to hover, track, and then destroy incoming missiles. Just watch the YouTube video of the test of its hovering abilities, and imagine that thing coming after you.
Source: Missile Defense Agency

Self-Replicating Replicators
The RepRap project seems relatively innocent - it's just a cheap and easy program that allows hobbyists to build 3D printers. But it's main goal is to become a self-replicating device: A replicator that replicates itself. A self-replicating system, which can create mechanical objects? This could get ugly.
Source: Rep Rap Homepage

Evolving Robots
Take a bunch of cute, round robots, give them a generation lifespan two minutes, and after a few hundred generations, they evolve to cooperate, find food, and avoid pitfalls. These robots can evolve communication and intelligence, to some degree. Incredibly short lived, with the ability to evolve greater intellect. Just wait till they break out of the lab.
Sources: Technology Review and Science Direct

It could destroy the fabric of space-time . . . or not!

The Demon Core
During experiments with a sphere of plutonium nicknamed the "demon core" at Los Alamos laboratory, scientist Louis Slotin died when a screwdriver slipped and the sphere went supercritical. After the room grew hot and was suffused in a 'blue glow,' he saved the lives of seven other people, but died from severe radiation exposure.
Sources: Trinity Atomic Website and Wikipedia

The Death Ray
In his last years, mad scientist Nikola Tesla was working on a death ray (sometimes called a "peace ray"). It was a particle beam weapon that supposedly could bring down a fleet of 10,000 airplanes at 200 miles. He tried to sell the weapon, which he claimed ran via "teleforce," to the USA and a number of European countries, but none of them would take it. When your death ray is too terrifying for the US military to take, you know that's worrying.
Source: New York Times and Nikola Tesla's scientific proposal about the weapon.

Time Machine
Physicist Ronald Mallett's work is based on using a ring laser to create closed timelike curves, which may allow time travel. Possibly you would only be able to travel back in time to the point when the device was turned on. What could go wrong?
Source: Mallett's proposal for the time machine [PDF]

Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located in an underground facility in Switzerland, is the world's largest particle accelerator, designed to ram protons or lead nuclei into each other at ludicrous speeds. The LHC has suffered a series of delays, and is meant to be back online in November 2009. Physicists admit there is an infinitesimal chance that it will generate a black hole that could destroy the Earth - or possibly another kind of anomaly that would eat the universe. Two scientists have even put forth the theory that the LHC is sabotaging itself from the future, to prevent us unearthing the elusive Higgs Boson particle; others have sued in the hope that they can shut down the LHC before it destroys the world.
Source: Large Hadron Collider at CERN

Additional reporting by Tim Barribeau.

Bell's series "Osteomechanics" and "Crania Mechanica," integrate animal bones into imagined machinery. With the heavy use of brass and electrical prongs, they have a steampunk feel, but Bell's core inspiration comes from 18th Century scientist Luigi Galvani, who experimented with delivering an electrical spark to animal muscles. The sculptures are supposed to evoke a sense of mystery, leaving the viewer to wonder at the era and person that gave rise to these strange little machines, and what scientific problem they were meant to solve.

International Museum of Surgical Science Current Exhibitions [Myspace]
Ron Bell's Osteomechanics and Osteomechanics 2 [Packer Schopf Gallery]

The student-run Cambridge University Spaceflight looks to reduce the cost of suborbital spaceflight, and frequently conducts experiments by launching high altitude balloons into near space. For their eighth Nova launch, they collaborated with a local science club. Club members ages 11-13 were invited to design insulating spacesuits to help the teddy bears survive the -53 °C temperature they would encounter during the flight.

“We want to offer young people the opportunity to get involved in the space industry whilst still at school and show that real-life science is something that is open to everybody” says Iain Waugh, chief aeronautical engineer of student-run Cambridge University Spaceflight.

“High altitude balloon flights are a fantastic way of encouraging interest in science. They are easy to understand, and produce amazing results,” said Daniel Strange, treasurer of CU Spaceflight.

The bears were launched on November 29th and returned to Earth on December 1st. Unfortunately, all four bears appear to have frozen while in space, but the cameras in the payload captured several striking images of their journey.

[Cambridge University Spaceflight via Universe Today]

Chaos is a common theme in Smith’s work, and here he uses gas to play with the notion of order and chaos in science experimentation. The yellow and white smoke above appears ready to consume the carefully placed objects on the counter, but the shape of the billows themselves seem at the same time rigidly controlled. Other photos in the series depict attempts to capture curls of colored gas in open containers, while a few wisps inevitably escape.

The rest of the series, which was created for Wallpaper* with creative stylist Fay Toogood is available on Smith’s website. [via today and tomorrow]

Penicillin - Alexander Fleming was studying bacteria in his own messy way, with no intention of discovering the 20th century's most vital antibiotic. Indeed, his lab sounds like something out of a sci-fi/horror movie, with bacteria and random fungus growing everywhere. Some of the accidental fungus had been tossed away, but looking more closely, Fleming noticed that bacteria wouldn't grow near some of the stuff. It took the work of others to refine and mass produce the extracted antibiotic substance, but if Fleming kept a neater shop, we may never have found it to begin with.

The Aether Wind - In the 19th century, physicists were stumped by the nature of light. It seemed to behave like a wave, so there had to be some substance in space for it to move through. They dubbed this hypothetical intergalactic substance "aether." It was theorized that the motion of the Earth through space, relative to the motionless aether, would subtly alter the speed of light depending on where in its orbit Earth was and what direction you were facing. This was called the "aether wind" effect. Polish-American scientist Albert Michelson (Polska represent!) designed an interferometer that could precisely measure the speed of light and thus detect this wind effect. After several tries and refinements to make his device incredibly accurate, no change in the speed of light was detected. Michelson, along with pretty much every other physicist at the time, was stunned. No aether? WTF?

Rocketry - No scientific failure is perhaps as spectacular as that of a rocket exploding on the launch pad, like the Vanguard rocket expiring in the 1957 photo above. The rockets that have died in the name of science number perhaps in the thousands, yet they did not die in vain. NASA and other government space agencies can put people and payloads into space with astonishing consistency (private rocketry is still catching up), giving companies the confidence to send aloft hugely expensive satellites and ambitious scientific equipment. Our world would be very different if we hadn't learned so much from all those shattered rockets.

Biosphere 2 - We built a big dome and let a bunch of people live in it (none of them were Pauly Shore) to see if they could sustain themselves solely on the air, water and food produced by the plants inside. They couldn't. The overriding element of the Biosphere 2 experience for most participants was "hunger." But when we build a colony on the moon or Mars or somewhere even more interesting, we will build on the lessons learned via Biosphere 2's rampant pizza cravings.

Nuclear Fusion - Is it a pipe dream or a holy grail? Either way, each failed experiment brings us one step closer to deciding that fusion is not worth pursuing any longer/going to provide us with so much energy we'll be giving it away. There have been lots of failed fusion experiments, but one of the coolest happened in 2002, when scientists sent incredibly strong sound waves through acetone. This created bubbles that expanded, then imploded at very high temperatures. It was hoped that the temperatures and pressures would be high enough to foster a fusion-friendly environment, but they fell a few million degrees short. Still, it hasn't dampened our enthusiasm one bit.

Honorable mention goes to Chernobyl. It was an ill-advised emergency shut-down experiment that caused that catastrophic meltdown and explosion there. Image by: NASA.

He writes:

The magnetic field deflects a lot of the Sun’s incredibly nasty radiation, so if you take it away, we could all get microwaved to a crisp.

Even scarier: The Earth's magnetic field has weakened by ten percent over the last 160 years. Does that mean we're due for a flip? Dan Lathrop, a geophysicist at University of Maryland, will try to find out when he spins up his mega steel ball and recreates (on a small scale) the magnetic conditions on Earth. [via Collision Detection]

(BTW, the trailer is very high-quality, so it may load slowly. If you're having trouble playing it, just hit "pause" and wait for the whole thing to load before restarting.) Here's the official synopsis:

November 9th 1989 - the last day of a divided Germany. As a bankrupt Soviet Empire retreats, Lieutenant NEVSKI (30) leads an ill-equipped team of reluctant Soviet conscripts and two East German civilians on an unofficial mission into a long sealed and forgotten bunker, deep under Berlin.

Bribed by SINDERMANN, a mysterious East German scientist, their aim is to blow up the bunker, destroying it's secrets before Berlin opens up to the West. As a fateful press conference takes place above ground, the East German, LISA MEYER, (28) a construction engineer cuts through the concrete that back in the 1960s was poured down to block access to the bunker where her father died.

Nevski's rag-bag team follow dim concrete tunnels finding an underground hospital, cobwebs and dust shrouding its Cold War secrets. Venturing into the eerie decaying wards and operating theatres, the team un-earth horrific evidence of human experimentation dating back to WWII.

Suffering their first casualties of the night, they realise the concrete blocking the entrance was not to keep intruders out, but to keep the results of failed experiments in - murderous, semi organic killing machines with weapons and gas masks moulded and growing as part of their armoured bodies.

As crowds gather at the wall, unification in sight, clandestine forces arrive from the West; heavily armed American commandos, also seeking the bunker's valuable secrets. Nevski's team find themselves not only struggling to escape the bunker's legacy of inhuman killers but also fighting in a darker, more unofficial Cold War battle for power and survival.

Sadly, the website mentions they're still seeking funding to finish this movie... so I hope it actually gets made. It sucks that all the movie money in Germany is going into crappy TV miniseries about the Moon making the Eiffel Tower collapse. [Cold Storage, via Nuendo]

According to the University of Washington news service:

To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington's computer science building provides the next step in social networking, wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting.

The RFID Ecosystem project aims to create a world that many technology experts predict is just on the horizon, said project leader Magda Balazinska, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The project explores the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags in a social environment. The team has installed some 200 antennas in the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. Early next month researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from about 400 people who regularly use the building.

"Our goal is to ask what benefits can we get out of this technology and how can we protect people's privacy at the same time," Balazinska said. "We want to get a handle on the issues that would crop up if these systems become a reality." . . . The pilot study will incorporate two new student-developed features that aim to exploit the system's potential benefits. One invention is a tool that records a person's movements in Google Calendar. Study participants can set the system to instantaneously publish activities on their Web calendar, such as arrival at work, meetings or lunch breaks.

"It's a perfect memory system that records all your personal interactions throughout the day," Welbourne said. "You can go back a day later, a month later, and see, 'What did I do that day?' or, 'Who have I spent my time with lately?'"

Another tool is a friend finder, named RFIDder (pronounced "fritter"). This sends instant alerts to participants' e-mail addresses or cell phones telling them when friends are in certain places. With RFIDder, each user can specify who is allowed to see their data. They can change the settings at any time, and can easily turn it off whenever they don't want to be found. The system will link to Twitter, an online blog that lets people post their whereabouts online.

"We want to observe how a group of people uses these tools, whether they find them useful, how they adapt them," Balazinska said.

I'm glad the group is studying the privacy implications of all this, because holy crap. Do you really want your colleagues to see when you've left the building or gone to the bathroom on your Google Calendar? Or for your Facebook friends to know exactly where you are at all times? I'm having a hard time understanding why an RFID Ecosystem future is one that I would want to embrace or plan for in any way other than lobbying to make it illegal.

Future of Social Networking [U of Washington News]