1Worms
An experiment on worms survived the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and their descendants were flown to the space station in 2011 by Space Shuttle Endeavor.
2. A linguist (dâÄôArmond Speers) in Minnesota spoke only Klingon to his son for the first three years of his life, as an experiment in language acquisition.
3. An experiment was conducted in a hospital where the sign at a hand-washing station was changed from “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases” to “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases” resulting in a 45% increase in the use of soap or hand sanitizer.
4. Quaker Oates and MIT conducted an experiment in Fernald School on unsuspecting, mentally retarded children. They tricked them into eating radioactive cereal by telling them they were in a "science club."
5. 18th-century French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, as a final experiment told his colleagues that he would try to blink as long as possible after being beheaded. Some sources say he continued to blink for 30 seconds.
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6Starvation experiment
In World War 2 conscientious objectors took part in an experiment in which they were starved for 6 months to decide how to treat victims of mass starvation in Europe.
7. Judit Polgar is a female chess player who defeated Kasparov, Karpov, and Spassky. She was part of an experiment by her father to prove (chess) genius is made, not born.
8. In an experiment conducted (on a guillotined man) by Dr. Gabriel Beaurieux in 1905, he quite reliably proved (to his satisfaction) that a severed head (that of the convicted murderer, Henri Languille) remains conscious and alert for some time after being separated from a body.
9. In an experiment, every one of 54 undergraduates in winemaking and tasting thought they were tasting a red wine while it was actually a dyed white wine. Furthermore, when comparing identical wine of different prices, experts raved about the expensive wine while panning the cheap wine.
10. The Body Mass Index (BMI) was created for a social statistics experiment and was never intended to be an indicator of health.
11San Francisco experiment
In 1950, 'One of the largest human experiments in history' was conducted on unsuspecting residents of San Francisco by the US military in a germ-warfare simulation and Nuremberg Code violation that utilized the Bay Area's iconic fog to help spread two kinds of bacteria over the city.
12. Astronaut David Scott dropped a hammer and a feather on the moon, repeating Galileo's gravity experiment. Within the accuracy of the simultaneous release, the objects were observed to undergo the same acceleration and strike the lunar surface simultaneously, which was a result predicted by well-established theory.
13. Charles Darwin became interested in how vegetables crossed the oceans. In one experiment, Darwin fed seeds to a bird, shot it, and then placed the carcass in a bath rub to float. After a month, Darwin retrieved the seeds from the floating carcass and planted them. The seeds germinated.
14. Creatine, the muscle building supplement, was found in a double-blind experiment to significantly increase cognitive function among vegans and vegetarians.
15. An experiment was conducted on the New York subway where seated passengers were asked: "Excuse me, may I please have your seat?" 56% of them moved.
16Roadkill rage experiment
A NASA scientist Mark Rober conducted a tongue-in-cheek experiment to see what animals drivers are more likely to hit. He placed rubber fakes on the side of the road and found that 6% of drivers intentionally swerve to hit them, tarantulas being hit the most.
17. Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla planned to secretly experiment on children, lining the walls of schoolrooms with high-voltage lines, believing that exposing them to the energy would make them healthier and smarter, and he believed every home in the future would soon do likewise.
18. In the 60's US Army did an experiment, where two people Dave Dobson and Bob Selden without nuclear training had to design a nuke with only access to publicly available documents. They succeeded.
19. Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron in the 50s ran experiments on humans which involved giving several electric shocks a week, taping blacked out football helmets to their heads and playing repetitive messages in their ears for months at a time. Some patients apparently forgot who they were and how to talk.
20. Wi-Fi was developed by using technology from a failed experiment attempting to detect mini black holes.
21Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey (Author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") volunteered for MKUltra experiments involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs as a student. This inspired him to promote the drug outside of the experiments, which influenced the early development of hippie culture.
22. When Michael Crichton (American author) was in college, he conducted an experiment to expose an English professor who he believed was giving him abnormally low marks. Crichton submitted an essay by George Orwell under his own name. The paper was returned by his unwitting professor with a mark of "B−".
23. There was an experiment where 2 groups (Rattlers and Eagles) of 11-12 year old boys who were given separate camps in a state park. When the groups became aware of each other, they began raiding each other’s camps, which led to physical combat. The investigators ended the experiment fearing someone would seriously get hurt.
24. Scientists took advantage of the three-day flight ban over the US after 9/11 to conduct experiments on the effect on the atmosphere of jet planes. They found the days were a little warmer and the nights cooler, suggesting that the exhaust trails planes leave in the sky act like clouds.
25. Only one of the guards of the Standford Prison Experiment (Dave Eshelman) was particularly brutal, and the more brutal he became, the more prominently he faked a southern accent.
