1Quaker Oats Radioactive Oatmeal Experiment
In 1998, Quaker Oats and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology paid a $1.85 million settlement to over 100 people who were unwittingly fed radioactive oatmeal as part of a secret experiment during the 1940s and 1950s.
2. In 1939, an experiment was conducted at the University of Iowa on orphans in which the purpose was to induce stuttering in otherwise normally speaking children. Dubbed the "monster study," it caused lifelong psychological issues in some of the subjects.
3. Universe 25 was a mouse "Utopia" experiment that studied societal collapse due to overpopulation using rats. It started with 4 males and 4 females. Their habitat had unlimited food, water and bedding. As population grew, the increased and unavoidable social interaction ended in a strange and terrifying dystopia that collapsed within a couple years. The colony peaked at 2200 and once a tipping point was reached, the mice lost instinctual behaviors. Scientists extrapolate this model to humans on earth.
4. Cow eyeballs are actually more expensive than the more commonly eaten cow parts, due to demand from scientific institutions for experiments.
5. To reduce lion attacks on cows in Botswana, researchers ran an experiment in which they painted large eyes on the butts of cows. Several years later, they evaluated its effectiveness to find that none of the 683 cows with eyes painted on their butts were killed, unlike their unmarked or cross-marked cousins.
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6European Robin Experiment
The avian magnetic compass of the European Robin has been extensively researched. They have been found to use vision-based magnetoreception, i.e., the robin's ability to sense the magnetic field of the earth for navigation is affected by the light entering the bird's eye.
7. Researchers were able to predict whether or not a couple will stay together with extreme accuracy based on one partner's reaction to things that excited the other. For example, if a wife says "look at that beautiful bird" and the husband blows it off, that's a strong indication they'll divorce.
8. Studies of people who have experienced 'clinical death,' but were revived, found a common theme of a "Near Death Experience." Research has suggested that the hallucinogen DMT models this NDE very similarly, suggesting that a DMT experience is like the final moments of an individual's life.
9. In a study of "extreme relistening" researchers found that bittersweet songs were listened to many more times than the other song types. There were listened on average 790 times versus 515 for calm songs and 175 for happy songs.
10. The Experimental Lakes Area is a research station of 58 formerly pristine freshwater lakes in Canada which have been purposely polluted by researchers with everything from fertilizers to anti-depressants to study their effects on aquatic life. It is the only such site in the world.
11Slime Mold Simulations
Slime molds are problem solvers, scooting around on pseudopods before ballooning to release their spores. They can find the shortest path through a maze, and they inspired a slime-mold algorithm that researchers used to map filaments of dark matter connecting galaxies in the universe.
12. In 2010, a Princeton Research Team discovered that rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.
13. Raccoons in an experiment were able to open 11 of 13 locks in fewer than 10 tries and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down. They could also remember the solutions to tasks for 3 years.
14. In 2017, researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University teamed with the Salk Institute in South Korea to edit human embryos. They successfully freed them from a piece of faulty DNA that caused a deadly heart disease that ran in families. The embryos were allowed to develop for 5 days before they stopped the experiment.
15. In the 1950s, Danish government conducted a social experiment where they abducted 22 Inuit children from Greenland to assimilate them into Danish culture. More than half of them died before reaching adulthood.
16Libet's Free Will Experiment
In 1983, American neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments on free will and found that there was some unconscious brain activity before the conscious decision to perform an act. The experiments thus concluded that this brain activity was the initiator of volitional acts, and free will therefore played no part in their initiation.
17. The United States Camel Corps was a mid-19th-century experiment by the United States Army in using camels as pack animals in the Southwestern United States. The Civil War interfered with the experiment and it was eventually abandoned. The animals were sold at auction.
18. Pavlov's dog experiment was widely misunderstood because of mistranslation and misconstruction. Pavlov never used a bell to condition dogs to salivate, because a bell was an imprecise control. Instead, he used tones, duration of tones, and electric shock to study physiological reflexes.
19. On average, half of all service dogs fail their training. Due to this poor rate, South Korea experimented with cloning service dogs that had already passed their training. The resulting clones passed at rates much higher than average.
20. In 1965, when Gatorade was invented at the University of Florida, the football coach wouldn't let researchers experiment on the varsity team and only allowed testing on freshmen (who couldn't play varsity by NCAA rule). Those players described it as tasting like urine or toilet bowl cleaner.
21Maternal-Separation Experiments
American psychologist Harry Harlow conducted maternal-separation experiments on rhesus monkeys. The mothers of baby monkeys were replaced with inanimate surrogates made from wire and wool. It was found babies will take comfort from an inanimate surrogate the same way they would from their mother, despite the surrogate providing neither food nor care, thus highlighting the importance of maternal contact.
22. In the 1800s, a Canadian man named Alexis St. Martin was shot, but he survived and he was left with an open hole in his stomach wall. He was used in experiments for 12 years as doctors could view his digestion in real time through his wound. He lived for another 58 years.
23. A set of Triplets who got separated at birth discovered one another by chance in New York in 1980 at age 19. After investigative journalist, Lawrence Wright looked into the matter, it was revealed the triplets were part of a scientific experiment by Dr. Peter B. Neubauer who had directed their adoption agency to deliberately separate and place them with families with different parenting styles and economic levels.
24. There was a disagreement over the danger of black widow spider bites until a 1933 experiment where professor Allan Blair allowed himself to be bitten. Blair also hoped to determine whether multiple bites would build immunity, but the first bite proved so painful that he decided against it.
25. In a promotional Volkswagon experiment, one randomized group of subway commuters was given the choice of regular stairs and the escalator while a second group could choose between musical "piano stairs" and an escalator. The piano stairs convinced 66% more people than normal to choose stairs.
