Cleopatra 2525 (2000)

Some of you called this a guilty pleasure, I still don't understand how. Maybe it straddles the "so bad it's good" ratio, but still, come on — this is awful. This came from Sam Raimi's production team. Cleopatra, the stripper not the historical figure mind you, gets frozen and wakes up in 2525. Cue machine CG and colorful outfit armor.

All Souls (2001)

Think of it as Grey's Anatomy meets Disney's Haunted Mansion Yep, that's about it.

Black Scorpion (2001)

Female police officer by day, hooker crime fighter by night. And a Power Ranger too apparently. This dismal SciFi Channel series was based on the Roger Corman movies, which is a questionable judgment right from the get go.

Alien Hunter (2001)

"The Crocodile Hunter" in space. The only thing this show had going for it was Doug Jones' "sick of this shit" alien crew member. He was actually funny, unlike everything else on this show.

Birds of Prey (2002)

Birds of Prey's failure stung the most because it was a great idea, but executed so poorly. They didn't care about the characters, story or mythology at all. I really wanted Batman and Catwoman's baby to be a bad ass crime fighter, but her personality never took off. Still, it did generate decent ratings for the WB for a while.

Special Unit 2 (2001-2002)

Yet another TV show that has a cult following for no understandable reason. This series followed Chicago's top secret paranormal police division that chased down odd happenings or "links," as they unfortunately called them. How many paranormal police shows are there now? Plus one of the characters always freaked me out.

Mutant X (2001)

It's like X-Men for idiots, and those people already have X-Men cartoons. This actual Marvel creation focused so much on making sure the team of new mutants was sexy, that there was very little time left to develop personality or interesting character traits.

Baby Bob (2002)

This CBS sitcom was such a disaster I can no longer find any clips of it anywhere! New parents find out their baby can talk, and instead of throwing this demon in a well decide to keep it around. This was one of those genius "inspired by a commercial" TV shows. Truly terrible.

Bionic Woman (2007)

We were all so excited for this dark Bionic Woman reboot from David Eick — then it started and just went totally off the rails plot-wise and accent wise. Eventually the main character's attitude, the side character's one-dimensional insanity and waste of Katee Sackhoff, all compounded into one giant "meh."

Caveman (2007)
Even though comedian Nick Kroll, who played one of the cave people is hilarious, we all make missteps along the way. The saddest thing about this show was that there were decent jokes in there, they were just totally thrown away on a series no one in their right mind would watch.

Knight Rider (2008)

The new Knight Rider gets the crown as the worst TV Show of the decade. Forget the fact that all the plots centered around finding a way for the main character to take off his shirt. Billy from BSG actually LEFT BSG to do this show. And couldn't do a repeat cameo later on when President Roz was having acid dreams. Yes, this show truly is a work of pure evil. And it didn't even have turbo boost.

Flash Gordon (2007 - 2008)

Terrible acting, ideas and concepts. Every week we died a terrible cheesy death with this SciFi series.

Heroes (2007-2009)

Every season of Heroes except the first belongs on this list. From the tattoo super powers to making the cheerleader a sometimes lesbian. Not even a carnival or killing a character twice can save this series.

Eastwick (2009)

Midlife-crisis witches and Paul Gross' penis were the entire cast of this series. Too PG to ever be anything than a "cute" series that told dick jokes. Sigh, the threeways that could have been.

An October 1 article in the Telegraph describes the useful properties of scorpion venom:

The scorpion Leiurus quinquestriatus lives in the Middle East and among the powerful cocktail of neurotoxins packed into its venom is a peptide that is non-toxic to humans but binds to tumour cells.

In laboratory experiments, the peptide has invaded tumours in breast, skin, brain and lung tissue, but left healthy cells untouched.

"It's as if the tumours collect it," Michael Egan of the company TransMolecular in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told the New Scientist.

Researchers at TransMolecular treated peptide cells with a radioactive isotope of iodine, and then injected them into the malignant brain tumors of 59 patients. On average, the patients who had received a high dose of the radioactive peptide lived three months longer. This was an encouraging enough result to inspire a team at the University of Chicago to start new trials, delivering the radioactive peptide directly to the bloodstream of other patients with brain cancer. If that goes well, it'll be a surprising gift from the frightening-looking thing in the picture above — a scorpion that Middle Easterners call the deathstalker.

The deathstalker could have a pretty exciting face-off with the American brown recluse spider (above), whose bites can destroy human limbs and cause death. Despite the danger of the brown recluse spider, however, two professors from Cornell University set out to analyze their venom. Another Telegraph article reports:

"We show how using NMR spectroscopy for the analysis of a complex mixtures such as spider venom one can find new and entirely unexpected chemistry," said Prof Schroeder.

"Our research shows that brown recluse venom contains important, previously undetected components that have been overlooked."

... The venom... contained messenger chemicals that work in the brain and on nerves.

In addition, the venom has been shown to contain several different proteins, including enzymes such as hyaluronidase, deoxyribonuclease, ribonuclease, alkaline phosphatase, and lipase, which help to break down tissue, among other things.

These researchers are hoping that these newly discovered compounds could treat conditions like arthritis and erectile dysfunction.

Don't let the fascinating chemical composition of the spider's venom fool you, though. You should still avoid it and (obviously) the deathstalker. With the right lab preparation, they could be responsible for keeping your brain and your genitals fit — but you can thank them later.

Radioactive scorpion venom could be used to fight brain cancer [Telegraph]
Spider venom could be used in impotence treatment [Telegraph]

Images from Wikipedia.