40 Interesting and Unusual Experiments

Creatine, the muscle building supplement, was found in a double-blind experiment to significantly increase cognitive function among vegans and vegetarians.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. The Body Mass Index (BMI) was created for a social statistics experiment and was never intended to be an indicator of health.

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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. 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.

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."

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. Middle-aged black men started visiting doctors less after news of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment scandal broke in 1972. This led to their life expectancy falling by 1.4 years, which accounted for "approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men."