Fan Favorite: What are the Weirdest Experiments in Science?

which one do they like? More? So? The scientists played for a lease on loop for ninety minutes, and then they'd switched to Miles Davis and his song four, So they just go from Ford for at least to four. And of course they discovered that the rats like silence better than continuous music. But when they had to choose, the rats like Beethoven more than hard bop. And I

guess that makes sense. If we're talking about on repeat and they're having to hear this over and over, I guess it's a little more soothing, right, Yeah, But the experiments weren't done then, so I have no idea why they did this. They injected the rats with cocaine after this for seven straight days, and once the rats had this cocaine just racing through their system, they couldn't get enough Miles. This, which also makes sense fairly. Science tells

us that coked up rats really love jazz. But there's a whole world of questionable science experiments, from the weird to the funny to the seriously ill advised. And that's what today's show is all about. Let's dig in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Manesh Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass, putting his good name on the line for the sake

of science conducting. What is we assume, the first ever scientific attempt to bring a potato back to life. That's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil, a potato back to life. Mano, this is big science. I saw the potatoes, I saw the labco I had no idea what was going on there. I think that's what the defibrillator is for. And you might be wondering how you can tell the difference between

a live and a dead potato. Well, those are all heavy questions, and hopefully Tristan's work will help shed some light on just a few of those. It maybe two over our heads. We'll see most of what Tristan does is anyway. I know this experiment sounds ridiculous, but honestly, everything on today's show sounds a little ridiculous. So we'll dig into some of the weirdest, most questionable science experiments

in history. Now, Mango, I know, for a while as a kid you wanted to be a scientist, and I've heard you talk about some of the experiments you conducted. So did you come up with any terrible experiments along the way? So many? I mean, you know, my dad's a scientist, and he's a good one. So we test things and I tell him about inventions ideas for inventions I had, like I had an idea for a d microwave, and the whole idea was that, like you could cool

down a hot bagel fast. And yeah, you tell me like why it would or would work or what I'd have to think about. But I think the biggest failure I had as a kid was in second grade and my friends and I were at the bus stop and we always wanted a day off from school, you know, especially when the weather was nice, because you want to

stay home and play and whatever. So I hatched this amazing scheme, like our our friend Kristen had access to a ton of gum for some reason, and I knew that gum on the ground is sticky when you step

on it. And I don't remember how we calculated this out, but there were drawings and some terrible math involved, but we figured that if we could get a big enough wad of sticky gum in the right place, the school bus tire would probably stick to it and get stuck there for the day and we wouldn't have to go to school. I really want to hear that this worked, but I'm gonna guess that maybe this didn't work. Yeah, of course not. I mean, my calculations were off, I guess.

And but the plan was like so elaborate. We we planned about it, we talked about it, We made this giant wad of gum, and then we placed it in what we thought was going to be the perfect spot, and in the school bus tire didn't even roll over, and so it's like super anti climatic and we sort

of like deflatedly walked onto the school bus. But uh, now that I think about, the gum was also care free, so it wasn't really like a sticky type of gum that was your problem because care Free was it's sugarless, right, Yeah, but I mean you go to war with the gum you have and it was not a great day for science. All right. Well, today's show is all about odds science experiments, and just because their bizarre doesn't mean we should automatically

discount them. In fact, I was reading this article by Alex Boss and he wrote a great book about odds science experiments, and there's a section where Alex explains why he first got into weird projects and and why he believes they should still be thought of as worthwhile. So I just want to read a bit from this. So here's what he says. I confess I had no profound

intellectual motive at first. I simply found them fascinating. They filled me with disbelief, astonishment, discussed, and best of all laughter. But with hindsight, perhaps there is a deeper message. These experiments are not the work of cranks. All were performed by honest, hard working scientists who were not prepared to accept a common sense explanation of how the world works. Sometimes such single mindedness leads to brilliant discoveries. At other

times it can end up closer to madness. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing in advance where the journey will lead. Yeah, I mean, that's certainly something to keep in mind as we go along. But while it might be true that none of the people that Alex talked about were crackpots, some of the ones I want to talk about definitely worth So this includes the first guy we've gone on, the list of Renaissance era physician and alchemist named Paracelsus.

Now Parasulsis is known for doing some of the earliest research in toxicology and also psychotherapy, which are I guess both weird in their own right, but without doubt his strongest claim to theme was his account of how to grow your own homunculous. To grow your own homunculous, mega can grow your own I do want to confess I'm a little rusty on my pseudoscience lingo from what you said the right. So, so, what exactly is a humunculous.

It's a mythological creature. Fairly, Parasolsis believed in all sorts of those, including giants and wood nymphs. But homunculus was basically like a tiny living human the size of a doll or something, and paras els has actually claimed to have made his own, which he said was about a foot tall. Right. And you said this man was a doctor, right, Yeah, I mean it was easier to get into medical school back then. Some people thought he was a medical genius.

Others thought he was more of this loud mouth, drunk type. I'm guessing the truth was somewhere in between. But these are actually the instructions Paracelsus has laid out to create your own little homunculous. So here we go. Let the seed of a man by itself be putrified in a gored glass and sealed up in horse done for the space of forty days until so long as it begins to be alive, move and stir. After this time, it will be something like a man, yet transparent and without

a body. Now, after this, if it be every day warily, imprudently nourished and fair with man's blood, and be kept for the space of forty weeks and a constant equal heat of horse dung, it will become a true and living infant. You know what, just hearing this, it kind of makes me want to go back and watch those old s n L skits where Steve Martin played them medieval barber because it sounds like pretty similar advice. And you know, I admire Paracelsis ingenuity, and obviously at the

time they had a much different set of knowledge. But I feel like it might be smarter for the human race to stick with the you know, the old fashioned horse dung freeway to make a true and living infant. But anyway, you know, word of crazy experiments like this and these medical fallacies, they got passed around a lot

during the Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance. So much so, in fact, that a physician philosopher named Sir Thomas Brown actually put together a massive list of these widely believed tall tales, and he referred to these as vulgar errors. So Brown would go around testing all these

absurd claims in order to disprove them once and for all. So, for example, one weird idea that it's spread in the sixteen hundreds was that you could make an accurate weather vane just by hanging a dead kingfisher bird from a string. It's as simple as that. I love arts and crafts projects.

I'm guessing that didn't end wilda well. Apparently he found himself a dead kingfisher one day, and he hung it up from a beam outside, and much to his dismay, the bird just sort of dangled and seemed to sway at random, you know, as you'd expect from a corpse of a dead bird. But you know, being this man of science, Brown knew he couldn't definitively disprove this claim with just a single dead kingfisher, So he got another one, strung it up next to the first, and watched his

both birds spun aimlessly in different directions. So with that, with that degree of science, Mango Brown was able to say conclusively that dead kingfishers are a poor way to determine win direction. So forget trying. This is just not

gonna work. I do like that it took uh, just two dead birds to put a stop to this idea, but it you know, no one else had thought of this, and I feel sorry for like whatever poor salesman at the market had stocked up on baskets of kingfishers, and I guess like Brown just ruined his entire business model.

That's there and other interesting cat I came across was this guy named Johann Conrad Dipple, and he was this German scientist in the late sixteen hundreds who had actually been born in the real Castle Frankenstein, which is kind of amazing, And of course he had a lot of ideas. Probably his least bizarre achievement was that he developed one of the world's first synthetic pigments, in fact, the first. It's a die called Prussian Blue that's still in use today. Yeah,

I've heard of Prussian Blue. But I think you said least bizarre achievements. So what was his most bizarre achievement? Yeah, I did because I wanted to talk about Dipple's oil. It was supposed to be kind of a life extending potion, but was in reality just this like terrible, disgusting slurry made from a mix of random animal bones and hides. It's too bad. I'm curious that Did he sell a lot of dipples oil? I'm at and it must have been a big hit with the local villagers there. Yeah,

you'd think so, but not so much. In fact, Dipple was eventually run out of town because of all these rumors that started circulating about what he was really doing in his lab. Like one of the rumors claimed that Dipple was a grave robber and that he'd once tried to move a soul from one corpse to another using just a funnel, a hose and a bit of lubricants. You need the lubricant to get it through. But yeah, I think we can both agree that's a bit of the suspect signs there. I mean, I guess so I

could see where they were going with that. But but I do see what you mean about him being a mad scientist, all right, But if you don't mind, I kind of want to transition away from the total crackpots and start talking about some of the scientists who are maybe I don't know, just a little misguided instead. And thankfully, I think I have the perfect person to help us make that leap, because he really does tow this line between those two types. And his name was Stubborn's Firth.

Isn't that a great name. It just seems like somebody that would tow those lines. All Stubbens. But in the early nineteenth century he was training to be a doctor in Philadelphia, and so during this time Stubbins began studying the effects of yellow fever, and that was, of course a disease that had laid waste to the area's population just a few years before this and he had noticed that the fever hardest hit in the summer months, and

then it would disappear almost entirely by wintertime. And so this led him to the conclusion that all these widely held opinions about yellow fever being contagious were completely false. So to him, it seemed much more likely that yellow fever was brought on by excessive heat and food and noise, and all of these things were much more abundant in the summer than they were in the winter. I like the idea of just a lot of noise causing yellow fever.

It does sound like this guy's heart was in the right place, Like I know, this doesn't feel like a sound theory about what goes on from here. Well, this is where Stubborns needed proof on this. So so the doctor in training began a series of self experiments to show that no matter how often he was exposed to

yellow fever, he would never catch it. And, not being the kind of guy to do anything halfway, Stubborns decided that his best chance to ensure he was properly exposed to the disease was to use This was the quote from this notebook, Fresh Black Vomit from yellow fever patients. So this is already disgusting and I'm pretty grossed out, but I do have to ask, like, what do you mean by he used it? He used to how well in all sorts of ways, and this actually gets even

more disgusting. But here the way. So first he tried to make small cuts on his arms, and then he would pour some of this vomit into his wounds. Next he DAPs some of the mess directly into his eyes. Then he heated some in a skillet and inhaled the fumes. And then lastly, as if those things weren't gross enough, he just went for it. And I'm not joking. I think you saw this coming. He just chugged some of the stuff, which makes me feel sick just hearing this.

But I mean, Stubbns never got sick, which, of course, and I don't know how he would know that he didn't get sick, because I can't imagine doing any of these things and not vomiting yourself. He took this all as proof for his theory, so I don't understand how any of that's possible. Like I thought yellow fever was contagious, so it definitely has I mean it's highly contagious. But as we know, the disease needs to come into direct contact with the blood stream in order to cause that infection.

And that's likely why Stubborns observed so many more cases of yellow fever in the summer. There were just more

mosquitoes around to spread the disease. So I get that, But why didn't Stubborns get sick when he was cutting himself in you know, like exposing that stuff to his cuts, And I mean that that had to get in his blood stream right, Well, normally, yes, but as it turned out in this case, most of the patients whose samples he used were in the late stages of yellow fever, and by that point they were actually no longer contagious. Though of course, you know Stubborns didn't know this. Well.

I mean, i'd say we're firmly in the realm of misguided experiments after that one. So I'm actually gonna keep the ball rolling with what I hope will be something of a palate cleanser. And this is this crazy study I found out about mating instincts of turkeys. I like how you're calling mating instincts of turkeys a a palate cleanser. But but tell me more here. Yeah, it's a turkey

and moose bush. So wild turkeys are notoriously difficult to hunt, which is why human hunters often resort to these lifelike decoy models of female turkeys. They use these to lure the bigger male birds to them, and the males don't seem to mind or even notice the difference. For the most part. They're actually perfectly content to mate with these phony birds. And that behavior is actually what caught the attention of these two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

Oh wow, so we're back in Pennsylvania again. Yeah, it's a hotbed of science. But anyway, these guys that you pen start wondering what was the minimal stimulus for exciting a turkey, and so to figure that out, they decided to gradually remove parts from a decoy turkey until the male inevitably lost interests. So first they removed the tail and the tail feathers, and then the feet and lastly the wings. But despite all of these missing appendages, the

males were still eager to mate with the decoy. I mean, I guess they just loved the personality and eventually the researchers were down to just ahead on a stick. And the strangest far is that the mail try keys were still interested. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. I have to admit I feel slightly scandalized and more than a little concerned about what the good people of Pennsylvania are doing with their time. All in the name of science, I guess. But alright, well, since you open the seal on weird

animal studies, there's one I've been dying to tell you about. Absolutely, But first let's take a quick break. You're listening to part time Genius and we're talking about some of the strangest experiments in the history of science. Now for better Whereas many of the weirdest projects do tend to involve animal test subjects, but rather than focusing on the more upsetting ones where animals come to harm, instead, I want to tell you the story of a young boy and

his adopted chimpanzee sister. And yes, I said it is adopted sister. Now, probably the most troubling aspect of this one is that the boy's father decided to carry out his experiment using his own son. But don't worry before I tell you about this the boy makes it through unharmed, or at least more or less unharmed. Anyway. The father's name was Winthrop Kellogg, and he was a psychologist who wondered what would happen if an animal was raised by

humans as a human. This was in the early nineteen thirties, so if you think about the time, then this is when you know the Tarzan books were all the rage, and there are also several real life accounts of feral children who had been raised by animals, And so Kellogg was inspired by these stories and he wanted to test the opposite case, like, if an animal was raised as a human, would it eventually act like a human too? Oh so it's like a bizarro jungle book or like

the reverse of Amogli situation. Yeah. So so that in Kellogg brought home a seven month old female chimpanzee named Gua, and he and his wife, who must have been this extremely patient woman, started raising the chimp alongside their ten month old son Donald. And the Kelloggs treated their two kids exactly the same. Donald and Gua were allowed to play together, they ate together. They also took part in

regular tests to track their development. For example, there was this one cookie test where the Kelloggs hung a cookie from a string in the middle of the room and then they timed how long it took the boy and the chimp to reach it. Okay, so I mean he was pitting a chimp against a baby, so the chip mop the floor with him, not surprising, it was no contest. In fact, Gan typically outperformed Donald on just about all the tests they took, except some of the ones that

involved language acquisition. So I know this is supposed to be like a non upsetting study, but constantly losing to a chimp couldn't have been good for a kid's self esteem, right, Probably not, But you know, one downside did become clear about nine months into the experiment, and and that was that baby Donald's own language skills were not as far along as they should have been. And looking back on this,

that's probably not such a big surprise. But while he sometimes did better than Gua on their language based test, it really wasn't by much, and so it started to look like, rather than Donald having a humanizing effect on Gua, he was actually starting to adapt some to her way instead. And the deciding moment came one day when Donald let his parents know how hungry he was by imitating the

barking sounds that Gua was making whenever she wanted. So when the Kellogg's heard the food bark coming from their human son, they decided then it was time to pull the plug on the experiment. But I like that it took that much to get them to realize maybe it wasn't a great idea. Yeah, it seems like a smart move. But strangely enough, the Kelloggs weren't the only scientists parents

to use their own kids as test subjects. So I was reading about this other psychologist from the ninet thirties named Clarence Luba, and he used his own kids to determine if people learned to laugh when tickled or if it's an innate response. I mean, this sounds more pleasant than being pitted against the chimp. But I mean, if you're going to use your own kids as test subjects, at least don't be creepy about it, you know. Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on your definition of creepy.

Because Luba decided that he shouldn't laugh or show a happy expression while he was tickling his kids because that might ruin the experiment. So you know, the the idea is that they might mimic his behavior or use it to infer the proper response is to laugh when tickled. So just to prevent that, Luba actually banned all unauthorized tickling in his household and he institute these clinical daily

tickling sessions instead. And during these designated tickling times, uh, Luba would hide his facial expressions behind a mask and then joylessly tickle his son. Oh, I take it back, man, this is the creepiest thing I've ever heard tickling sessions. And that's just I don't know, maga, It's just like

deeply unnerving. Yeah. And Luba even took this measured approach to how he tickled his son, like first he started with a light tickle and then he would like tickle more enthusiastically, and he always did the same order like he um. I think he started under the pits and then went to the ribs and then chin, neck, knees, feet, and uh. He kept this up for a full seven months, and then after that he repeated the experiment for another

seven months with his daughter when she was born. This is just I don't want to hear about this one anymore because I I guess I am curious though, So what were Louba's results? Well, in both cases, as you might guess, he found that his kids spontaneously laughed when tickled, even though they had never been shown that behavior before. So it would seem that laughing when tickled really is an innate response, and it only took weirding out a

couple of his own toddlers to figure that out. Well, I guess it's worth it in the name of science, except not at all. That is so creepy. All right, Well, since we're getting into this kind of psychological territory, I have to mention a series of studies carried out by Dr You and Cameron, and these were in the nineteen

fifties and sixties. Cameron was convinced that the brain could be reprogrammed by imposing new thought patterns on it, and his hope was that the method could be used to help patients with schizophrenia achieve them more clear and maybe positive way of thinking. So the way it was supposed to work was that the patients would wear a pair of headphones and then they would listen to these audio messages that were played over and over, sometimes for days

or or even weeks at a time. And this was something Cameron called psychic driving, because the idea was that repeated messages would be driven gradually into the patient's psyche. And the press gave the method a different name, though they actually called it beneficial brainwashing, which I mean, I guess sounds like good branding at least. Yeah, I mean,

it's a bit of an oxymoron of a name. But it didn't deter Cameron, so for over a decade he tested his method on hundreds of unwitting patients, many of whom didn't even have schizophrenia. In fact, even people with minor ailments would sometimes check into the clinic where Cameron worked, and before they knew it, they were drugged, strapped to a bed, and forced to listen to loop recordings of these aspirational messages. I mean, it's actually crazy to think

about some of these things. Yeah, it's terrifying. So what kind of messages were they made to listen to? Well, they were mostly your typical positive reinforcement kind of stuff, you know, like they would say things like people like you and need you, and and you have confidence in yourself.

It sounds a little bit Stewart small exactly well. But one time, though, Cameron put his patients into a drug induced sleep and then made them listen to the message that said, when you see a piece of paper, you

want to pick it up. That's all that's said. Then, once all the patients had woken up, Cameron drove them one by one to a gymnasium where a single piece of paper was waiting for them on the floor of the gym, and, according to report Cameron later wrote about the experiment, most of the patients, without any prompting, spontaneously

walked over and picked up the paper. Such a dum ex. Man, it feels like like you should test it with, like putting a piece of paper and a puppy in a box, right, right, right, that's a good one. You should be a scientist. Well, I basically am. But it doesn't sound like Cameron also had like the full consent of this aations. I mean, did his operations get shut down quickly like once people

caught onto what was happening. Well you would think so, but actually when the CIA found out what Cameron had been up to, it actually started funding his experiments in secret, and this move ultimately backfired. Though there was a group of Cameron's former patients that decided to sue the CIA

actually for supporting his work. I see. I eventually settled the matter out of court, and Cameron was forced to conceive that his brainwashing experiments, as as he called it, had been what did he say, said, a ten year trip down the wrong road. I guess that's one way to put it. Yeah, I guess it's putting it lightly.

But cameron story actually reminds me of another psychologist who tried to change the thought patterns with weird repeated messages and it didn't go as planned as you might have guessed. And I'll tell you about that in a minute, but first we gotta take another quick break. Okay, mano, let's hear it. What's the strange subliminal science project that you wanted to tell us about? Sure, so, I'm actually gonna set the mood for this one. So the years nineteen for you two. You're sleep in a cabin at a

summer camp in upstate New York. On all sides of you or other teenage boys also sleeping, and just a few feet away there's a man standing alone in the darkness. He speaks out loud to his unconscious audience. Again and again, he mechanically recites the same one phrase, my fingernails taste terribly bitter. My fingernails taste terribly bitter. Oh man, go, I gotta stop at these you found these weird experiments? Are you sure this is a science story and not

just a horror story? You're creeping me out today? I know from from what I can tell you really was in the name of the science. Uh. This guy's name was um Dr Lawrence Lession, and that night in the cabin he was actually conducting the sleep learning experiment. So all of the boys have actually been diagnosed with c like nail biting, and the hope was that they could be cured by you know, these nocturnal messaging. You know,

I'm trying to think about this. So you said this was in the forties, and so I'm trying to think of how he would have delivered these messages. So, so did Lesson have to like creep over them and repeat this phrase, you know, all night long to them? That

just seems so weird. I mean, it's not like he could have used a phonograph or something like that, right, Yeah, Well, I mean it adds to the story but Lesson actually did start the study using a recorded message and he played it like three hundred times a night for the kids. But he had to take the task over himself when his phonograph broke, and it actually broke down five weeks into his experiment. Five weeks? How long was this study

is supposed to last? The whole summer? Apparently, like can you actually imagine these boys coming back to school and the first day and and uh and they have to answer these questions for the classmates about how they spent their summers and and you know, other kids would be like, oh, I went to Hawaii, or you know, I went to my grandparents and they're like, I spent eight weeks in a cabin with some weirdo telling me how bad my fingernails taste. Oh my gosh, So so I do have

to know. I mean, that sounds terrible, But was the experiment of success like that the kids stopped biting their nails kind of? I mean, at the end of the summer, Lession determined that the boys had been cured, which made it seem like his sleep learning techniques had some real merit, But unfortunately other researchers looked into it. And they tested

his method. And you know, one study in nineteen six track participants brain activity to make sure they were totally asleep before playing this anti nail biting message, and in that case, like the unconscious messaging didn't have any effect at all. So the whole idea was that, you know, those had probably kicked the habit because they were still someone awake during those readings. Yeah, yeah, but I guess beneficial brainwashing really does work. That's uh, that's interesting and weird.

Do you know one kind of weird experiment we haven't talked much about today are the government funded kind of experiments. And you know, we did cover some of these back in our episode on Bizarre government investments, but I can't across another one this week, and it's just too good not to share. And it's called Bird's eye bomb, and it was developed during World War two by the famous psychologist and behavior's named BF Skinner. Now, the idea here

amounted to what was basically a pigeon guided missile. And when you know what, the inspiration came to Skinner one day when he was watching a nearby flock of pigeons. As he later wrote of this sense and and he says, suddenly, I saw them as devices with excellent vision and extraordinary maneuverability. Could they not guide a missile? So? I mean, who hasn't seen a flock of pigeons and thought that? I had a little confused that, Like, how exactly is this

supposed to work? All right? Well, Skinner trained the pigeons to peck carefully at chosen images, like an enemy battleship, for example. And you know, once the birds had committed these targets to memory, Skinner would put them in these custom made missile nose cones. And so the makeshift cockpit included a little plastic screen and they used mirrors for this, and then there would be an image of the missile's

flight path that could be projected onto it. So by pecking at the screen, the pigeons were able to alter the coordinates, and basically by doing this, they would steer it toward a specific target. I mean, that's that's both ingenious and insane. And you know, this idea of like kama kaze pigeons sounds so ridiculous, But I mean, is

there any way it could really work? So? Surprisingly, yes, I mean, preliminary tests proved the pigeons were top notch pilots, and plenty of scientists endorsed the project in light of those early results, but in the end, the military just couldn't stomach the thought of funding such a silly sounding project. So the cut Skinner's funding completely in October of four. And it's just a shame because Top Gun could have been a totally different movie if you think about it.

I know, the animated Disney movie Top Gun would have been Okay. So you know you sneaked in another animal based study, and so I need to do the same and tell you about this fateful experiment that sent the first humble Tarte grade to space. All Right, I feel like I've seen tartar grades in the news or reported on a lot in recent years. But remind me of what that is because it rings a bell as an animal, but it also just sounds like something that might be

from like Doctor Who or something. Yeah. So, Tarte grades are these microscopic, eight legged potato looking things. They look like little monster potatoes. Sometimes they were called water bears or moss piglets, and you can actually find them in just about every habitat on Earth. You can find them on like mountaintops, rainforests. The bottom lags even even in Antarctica,

which is pretty incredible. But you know, speaking of doctor who, because you mentioned it, the team behind the study must have been fans, because they actually named their experiment tarte grades in space or tartis. Actually I just pulled up a picture and they do look both cute and freaky, and it's crazy that they're only like a millimeter big. But so he said, we shot these things into space

for some reason. Yeah, a team of European researchers wanted to test just how resilient these tartar grades really they are, because you can probably tell from that list of habitats that you know, they're hardy creatures and they can survive temperatures as low as negative three d twenty eight degrees

fahrenheit or as high as three hundred degrees fahrenheit. They can also stand up to pressures as powerful as six thousand times that of the Earth's atmosphere, and they can even survive doses of radiation that are thousands of times stronger than it would take to kill humans. So clearly they're super tough creatures, and it actually turns out there so tough they can even survive exposure to the vacuum

of outer space. Wow. So so researchers just flew a bunch of these what you what do you call them? I like the name of moss picklets. I think that was my favorite. So they flew these things into space and just like chuck them out the airlock or what Yeah, I mean the the approach was a little more nuanced than that. So first they dehydrated the targets and uh, you know, that makes them enter this state of hibernation where all their metabolic activity drops to about point one

percent of normal levels. And then once they're in this protective state, researchers exposed one group of water bears to the vacuum space and another to both the vacuum space and this immense radiation from the Sun. And after full ten days of this, right ten days, the targe grains were brought back to Earth and rehydrated, and amazingly, sixty percent of the targe grades exposed only to outer space survived, and even among the ones who were also exposed to

solar radiation, a handful were successfully revived. And the craziest part, some of these even went on to produce healthy offspring. So those things are pretty much unstoppable. But you know, I actually have my own weird space experiment to share, and I happen to think it blows yours away. Man, I just wanted to get heads up on this. And this.

This comes from when a two man crew took the Gemini three on a several trips around the Earth's orbit, and one of the astronauts on that mission, John Young, was apparently not a fan of the kind of the standard food from a tube that NASA was typically providing them, because once the pair reached orbit, Young revealed that he had smuggled aboard contraband corned beef sandwich into his back pocket.

I mean, I love the story. I know this story, but I'm not really sure you can call it an experiment. I mean it sounds more like a great anecdote about a hungry astronaut. I don't know, man, go actually, let let me help me read this transcript. I've got this for you. I want you to help me out here and you'll see what I mean by this. So I'm gonna be John Young, and you're going to be gust Grissome, the co pilot. Are you ready to do this. Yeah, I've got the script here, go go for it. It's

your line first. What is it a corn beef sandwich? Where did that come from? I brought it with me. Let's see how it tastes, smells, doesn't it. That's it. That's the whole The whole incident lasted like thirty seconds, including the script. I know, but it was worth it because you know, there was thirty seconds, and that included the time it took the nibble the sandwich before Young tucked it back into his flight suit. But see, they wanted to see what it tasted like. That's the experiment.

Does a corn beef sandwich taste and smell the same in space ace as it does on Earth? And Young suffered for his science too. After the mission. He was sternly chastised by his superiors at NASA, though I guess they didn't come down on too hard because he was still permitted to land on the Moon as part of the Apollo sixteen mission. Well, I am glad that an illicit sandwich incident didn't cost him his career. Well all right, well, I can tell from the smoke coming out of Tristan's

potato that we're running short on time. I do have a few more weird experiments I wanted to cover, though, well, thankfully that's exactly what the facts board. Why don't we start with an experiment by the Swedish playwright August Strenberg. Strendberg wasn't a scientist, but he certainly had some ideas, and one of those was his belief that plants had nervous systems and for some reason botanist had just overlooked it. Anyway, he was determined to show everyone that plants could feel things.

So during his walks around town, he would take out some morphine and you know, away we all carry morphine, I guess in our back pocket, so that he inject whatever he saw to see how it would react. And one day he was arrested for injecting an apple with the drug. But when he explained he was just trying to get the apple high in the name of science, the officer figured he was just a sweet lunatic and not someone trying to go around poisoning the city and

let him go. So, you know, I've always heard that thing about how a soul weighs twenty one grahams, which is odd, like, why does it have to be in the metric system we live in America. That the about it, right, It should be like three forts of announced. But anyway, I was curious where the idea came from, and apparently it goes back to to this Massachusetts doctors, this guy named Duncan McDougal, and so this actually comes from Discover magazine.

But to figure it out, McDougall made this bed fitted with scales, and then he convinced a bunch of terminally ill patients and this is pretty crazy, that they should make it their literal deathbed. And then he was actually pretty meticulous about it. So this is from the magazine quote. He recorded not only each patient's exact time of death, but also his or her total time on the bed, as well as any changes in weight that occurred around

the moment of expiration. He even factored losses of bodily fluids like sweat and urine and gases like oxygen and nitrogen into his calculations. Of course, you know the conclusion right like after the soul escaped the body, the people

weighed twenty one grams less. Okay, I've got one about a guy named Hitting Brand and he really wanted to get wealthy, and he believed he had a Scrooge McDuck wade to kind of get there, and that was through p Now in sixteen sixty nine, the German olcomist apparently had stalked about fifteen hundred gallons worth of urine in his basement. That is just so weird, but growth he

was convinced he could spin it into goal. Of course he couldn't, but his experiments did lead to one interesting discovery. After boiling one sample, he noticed a bit of unusual glowing liquid, which is how he ended up discovering phosphorus. Oh that's amazing. So you'll be happy to know that I didn't just look up turkeys are attracted to I also looked into chicken preferences and according to one study,

chickens don't like ugly people. And basically the scientist Dr Stephano Garlanda at the Zoology Institution of Stockholm University, he was trying trying to understand whether physical attraction is inherited due to jeans or learned. So he tested it the

way any of us would. He took some I guess libidinous chickens, and these birds were just hot to trot or what, Yeah, they were definitely uh quote excited and and uh He showed them photos of people to see which ones they wanted to meet with and which ones they had pecked. So here Landa took photos of thirty five males and females and these are humans, and they mashed them into these digital picks of these very average looking people and male birds mostly pecked photos of women.

Hen's mostly pecked photos of men. And then Geir Landa gave them this other task. Right, He created another set of more faces, and this time he asked college students to rate the faces on attractiveness. So percent of the time the chickens actually pecked the more attractive face. Oh wow, that's pretty interesting. Or well, here's a story I learned from Cracked, and it asked the important question what happens when you get leeches drunk? You know, we've all wondered this.

The idea is that you can actually improve the rate that leeches suck blood if you can just get them a little bit loose beforehand. So researchers from Norway dipped a bunch of leeches in guinness and also smeared some in garlic and others in sour cream. Such a weird experiment, and I'm guessing it wasn't just the leeches drinking during this experiment, So what happened, Well, the drunk leeches are not good at sucking blood. I don't know why this

would come as a surprise to anybody. They just kind of wiggled and couldn't focus. They fell off the arms, which is just I wish I had a video of this experiment because it just sounds so weird. The sour cream leeches fared better with slightly better sucking abilities, and the garlic coated leeches, like any good vampire, garlic was

their kryptonite. They actually died. That's pretty amazing, and I'm actually glad we started with rats on cocaine and ended with leeches on a bender because science is great and drunken science might even be better. But I'm gonna give you today's uh today's trophy. Well, thank you, it's an honor. Now. I'm sure there's so many great experiments. There were many we couldn't include that we had looked into, but we'd love to hear from you if there are ones that

you guys want us to hear about. Feel free to email us part Time Genius at how stuff Works dot com. You can also call us on our seven fact hot line that's one eight four four pt genius or has always hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. But thanks so much for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does

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good review for us. We do. We forget Jason Jason, who