Arizona biologist M. Cale Morris created an artificial leg (a boot on the end of an aluminum pole) to test the response of rattlesnakes to being stepped on.
He stepped on a total of 175 rattlesnakes and concluded that, despite popular belief, they're not very aggressive. The majority of the stepped-on rattlesnakes tried to crawl away without biting the fake leg.
Jay R Traver (1894-1974) was an entomologist at the University of Massachusetts. In 1951 she published a paper in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington describing how her body had been infested by mites.
Much of the article reads like a horror story. She details the itching and crawling sensations she felt as mites crawled under her skin, and even in her eyes:
The movements of a mite that had entered under the eyelid could be felt as it crawled slowly about, then began to 'dig in' at which moment the eye suddenly became even more swollen than before.
She describes her efforts to capture the mites by digging them out of her skin, and goes into detail about the increasingly caustic substances she applied to her skin in an attempt to rid herself of the mites. She even tried radiation therapy.
The catch is that the medical community refused to believe she was actually infested by mites, and they still don't. The consensus is that she was suffering from "Delusory Parasitosis" (the false belief that one is infested by parasites). As one reviewer has noted, "the article makes no sense entomologically. The house dust mites do not and cannot parasitize humans."
The current value of silver is around $32 an ounce. The value of gold is around $2975 per ounce. Being able to turn silver into gold would generate a substantial return.
As it turns out, back in the 1920s the French scientist (and alchemist) François Jollivet-Castelot claimed he could do exactly this, and he shared his method.
If you decide to try it, let us know how it works!
In 1929, Dr. Yusaburo Noguchi, a Japanese biologist, made headlines by claiming that by means of "electrical nutrition and glandular control" he could change a person's race. He could "change an Indian to a darker color" or "mold a Japanese so that he would have the same appearance as the Caucasian."
New England Journal of Medicine - Nov 7, 1929
After his brief moment in the limelight, Noguchi seemed to disappear from view. At least I haven't been able to find out any more about him. Japanese archives probably have more info.
But you have to wonder what kind of insane stuff he was up to.
I can guess what he meant by "glandular control." Back in the 1920s, a number of scientists believed it was possible to reprogram biology by transplanting glands from one person to another, or from one species to another. A famous proponent of this idea was Dr. Serge Voronoff who claimed that he could rejuvenate elderly men by grafting monkey glands onto their testicles.
But what did Noguchi mean by "electrical nutrition"? Was he simply electrocuting people? Probably.
Some weirdness from the world of In Vitro Fertilization. Since the 1970s, one of the tools used to gauge male fertility by IVF clinics has been the "Hamster Egg Penetration Test."
The hamster egg penetration test (HEPT) (also known as the sperm penetration assay) is the most accurate test that predicts whether your sperm will be able to fertilize an egg. It can also predict whether lab techniques can improve your sperm’s ability to fertilize an egg.
During a hamster egg penetration test, a lab analyst will evaluate your sperm samples using techniques that are similar to the techniques used in IVF. The only difference is that a doctor uses eggs from a hamster. A lab analyst will chemically treat hamster eggs to see if human sperm can penetrate them.
The prepared sperm are incubated with 15 to 20 chemically treated eggs. If your sperm is working how it should, it will be able to penetrating the eggs. The lab analyst will then count how many eggs were penetrated and calculate a percentage.
In other words, they test to see if the sperm of the male donor can fertilize a hamster egg.
Although medical professionals often present the procedure as unable to create an embryo, these claims are not technically correct. If the human sperm succeeds in penetrating the hamster egg, a hybrid embryo is indeed created, known as a humster. These embryos are typically destroyed before they divide into two cells; were they left alone to divide, they would still be unviable.
Along similar lines, neuroscientist Kelly Lambert of the University of Richmond has trained rats to drive small vehicles. She found that they were eager drivers: "the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the 'lever engine' before their vehicle hit the road."
A recent article in the journal Physical Review E explores what kind of paper is most likely to give you paper cuts. The answer: dot-matrix paper. Followed by magazine pages.
The likelihood of cutting has to do with the thickness of the paper. Too thin and the paper buckles instead of cutting. Too thick and it indents material rather than slicing it. There's a specific range in between too thick and too thin where the paper cuts.
For the purpose of their research, the authors created a "papermachete" which they used to cut apples, bananas, chicken, etc. (see image below).
March 1968: Robert McDavid, a junior at Schulte High School in Terre Haute, Indiana, performed a heart transplant on a live rabbit for his science fair project. School administrators had approved his project. In fact, they applauded it as highly topical since the first successful human heart transplantation had been performed just the year before by the South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard.
After performing the operation, McDavid measured the length of time that the rabbit's body functioned with the new organ. He later exhibited the results of his project at the Regional Science Fair of Indiana State University and received an award for creativity in his field.
Questioned by reporters, McDavid revealed that he had prepared for the procedure by first conducting a number of practice operations, including skin grafts and bone section transplants on chickens. He said that he had also read a number of books about transplants and had conducted interviews with several physicians.
I haven't been able to track down if McDavid went on to become a surgeon.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.