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Adorn your refrigerator with these cute scientist finger puppets and magnets ($5.95) from the NeatoShop … or we’ll just have to ask Nikola Tesla (shown above) to experiment on his death ray with you!
Scientists have done some really strange things in the name of science – and some really gone the distance: they’ve become their own guinea pigs!
Eleanor Harris of New Scientists has a list of 8 scientists who subjected themselves to their own funny (and gross) experiments. Take, for example, German surgeon August Bier who did this experiment in 1898 while working on spinal anesthesia:
To find out, Bier decided to be anaesthetised himself. But things didn’t go as planned for Bier – or for his hapless assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt.
Hildebrandt was supposed to administer the cocaine but, thanks to a mix-up with the equipment, Bier was left with a hole in his neck from which cerebrospinal fluid began to flow.
Rather than abandon the effort, however, the two men switched places. Once Hildebrandt had been anaesthetized, Bier stabbed, hammered and burned his assistant, pulled out his pubic hairs and – presumably eager to leave no stone unturned in testing the new method’s efficiency – squashed his testicles.
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If Little Green Men are one day discovered they’re certainly not going to speak fluent English. Scientists fear this may make any alien contact impossible to understand and could create some very awkward circumstances for the rest of us.
Leeds Metropolitian University’s Dr. John Elliott has devised software he believes will decipher the structure of any alien’s language which would be the first step in understanding what the potential invader of Earth may be saying, declaring or demanding. Elliott’s program is
designed to compare an alien language to a database of 60 different known languages in the world and search for ones that have similar structure.
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