The saying 'necessity is the mother of invention' doesn't really hold true for all people. For some, it's the urge from within to make something new. For some others, it's the tag of 'inventor' being attached to their name, something that'll be remembered as their product. One will never know what exactly drove the following people to do what they did, or how they even fathomed such. One thing is for sure though, whatever they did, makes for one bloody hilarious read.
1. Wilhelm Reich tried to find out how sex affects the weather.
Weather and sex! Of course. It was right there, how did we miss it? A psychoanalyst from the '40s believed that mankind's libido had its own kind of energy. He named it 'Orgone''. He built orgone accumulators, boxes made of metal, steel, wool and various other pulled-out-of-his-ass materials so that people could sit inside and absorb all those sexy orgone vibes that he and the machine had to offer. No, we are not talking about sex toys here, pay attention. The radiation from the Orgone caused plants around Wilhelm's lab to die, and menacing clouds to form. We are not even kidding right now. Anyway, to combat the deadly Orgone, Wilhlem did what any rational man would do - he built a "cloud buster," a bunch of tubes that had cables leading to water. He pretty much just got crazier from there. But to think that you can create energy from one's erection is quite something.
Believe it or not, he even got Albert Einstein to check 'Orgone' out. ;)
2. Hwang Woo-Suk tried cloning the wooly mammoth.
Quite a story. The man on the right, Hwang Woo-Suk, is a Korean scientist who made earth-shattering breakthroughs in stem cell research. In 2006, he was also labelled as a massive fraud. Oh well! Rather than blowing all his money up on booze and babes, he spent over half a million dollars trying to clone wooly mammoths (go figure)! While this might be bad enough, Hwang broke the charts of 'what-the-f*ck-were-you-thinking' when he got the Russian mafia involved. He gave a chunk of that donated cash to the Russians in exchange for some organised crime-related extinct animal cells.
3. Kevin Warwick is trying to become the Terminator.
I get it, we all loved Judgement Day, and can watch it time and again, but this is just too much. Kevin Warwick, a British scientist and professor of cybernetics, is a part of a few crazy experiments currently still in progress through the world. This guy is so turned on by the concept of robots, that he's on his way to becoming the first person ever to become a cyborg! Warwick had a chip implanted in his arm that allowed him to control small, mostly uncool things around his home. He could turn on lights and open doors. Basically the kind of shit one finger will allow you to do now, but lazier.
4. Duncan MacDougall could accurately guess the weight of your soul!
You read that right. This tantrik, who has also got an M.B.B.S degree, is possibly the shadiest doctor you'll ever come across. MacDougall took six patients "in the process of dying" and weighed them. There isn't concrete evidence on who these people were, or how they were dying. MacDougall also took the time to replicate his experiments with dogs - fifteen dogs, in fact, apparently uncooperative when it came to dying of natural causes. So MacDougall had to help them along towards doggy heaven. According to his experiment, while humans lost anywhere from no weight, because they died too quick for him to adjust his scale to several ounces at death, dogs lost nothing and therefore have no souls. Does the weight of your soul increase when you have gas? Your guess is as good as mine.
5. Michael Persinger
Michael Persinger is a cognitive neuroscience researcher who just got bored with all that (duh!), and put all his energy into turning a scooty helmet into a passage to God. Rightly named the 'God Helmet', the helmet basically plays with your head using magnetic fields in your parietal and temporal lobes. The result is the feeling that God is right around you, coming down to hang with you. Not kidding, but more than 80 percent of participants reported feeling an ethereal presence in the room which they said was either God or a loved one who had passed away. Persinger has gone on to try to explain damn near all unexplained phenomenon as being caused by the same kind of electromagnetism. As you might expect, he came to the conclusion that UFOs were caused by seismic faults. It seems that the helmet creates electromagnetic fields which gets us to hallucinate, which is why people see what they see.
6. Do herring communicate with each other with farts?
Not one, but two countries, Britain and Canada, have conducted this study. Why they are interested in fish gas is a mystery, because we still haven't figured out what we try to communicate after a Rajma-Chawal meal. The two teams carried out this research project. One studied Pacific herring in Bamfield, British Columbia, while the other focused on Atlantic herring in Oban, Scotland. It was found that herring create a mysterious underwater noise. It later turns out that the high-frequency sound was created because of the release of air from their respective buttholes. The noise was always accompanied with a fine stream of bubbles. Researchers believe that the bubbles help the fish form protective shoals at night.
Here's the fun bit: researchers named the phenomenon Fast Repetitive Tick, which makes for a rather interesting acronym, FRT. Scientists say unlike the human version, these FRTs are thought to bring the fish closer together. Like they say, sometimes, you don't need words to communicate.
7. Warren Thomas got an elephant on acid!
Some really bizarre experiments have taken place but this one is right up there. To study an elephant's behavior, the genius that Warren Thomas was, injected Truko the elephant with 297 mg of LSD. That's 3000 times more than what a regular user would take. Experimented at the Lincoln Park Zoo, Oklahoma City in 1962, it was done to figure if LSD could trigger a temporary state of madness in elephants called 'musth', where male elephants become overly aggressive. Because of Warren's stupidity though, the poor elephant overdosed, and died an hour later.
Have you heard of anything weirder than these?