50 Shocking Unusual Experiments Few Know About – Part 2

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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. 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.

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.

32. 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.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. 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.

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.

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.

Cow eyeballs are actually more expensive than the more commonly eaten cow parts, due to demand from scientific institutions for experiments.

42. 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.

43. 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.

44. 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.

45. American psychologist Daniel Kahneman conducted a study in which a group of patients was given colonoscopies. Another group was also given colonoscopies, but with 3 added minutes during which the scope wasn't moved, so it was less painful for them. The second group rated their experience less negatively.

An experiment was done to assess the efficiency of a device to reduce fart smelliness. Farts were as quantitatively collected via rectal tube from 16 healthy subjects who ingested pinto beans. Odor intensity was then assessed by two judges.

47. Between 1918-1945, the Hamilton family investigated psychic phenomena including telekinesis, trance states, seances, and teleplasm. The notes and images of their experiments were donated to the University of Manitoba for viewing.

48. In 1967, a California high school teacher designed ‘The Third Wave Experiment’ to explain how the German population could accept the actions of the Nazi regime during World War 2. Kids were instructed in posture, began each remark with Mr., saluted each other in hallways and hung banners around the school. In 3 days, the movement had grown from 30 to 200 students as students skipped other classes to join the movement. Students showed increased academic skill and motivation. After 5 days students were informed that it was an experiment on how Nazism spread.

49. The Department of Homeland Security ran an experiment where they left CDs and USB sticks in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors. 60% of those who picked them up plugged the device into their office computers, and if it had an official logo, 90% of them were installed.

50. Leonardo Da Vinci once experimented to understand the flow of blood through the valves of the heart, by pouring hot wax into one, making a mold of thin glass from the cast, and then pumping water mixed with seeds through it. He saw how a heart actually regulates itself.