The following are the top ten bizarre experiments issued by the British "New Scientist " Weekly:
1.Elephants on LSD
In 1962,American researchers inject an elephant with LSD, which is about 3,000 times the typical human dose. As a result, the elephant first screamed loudly, then wallowed on the road, and was dead less than an hour later.
2.Terror in the Skies
In an experiment of the 1960s , ten soldiers on a training flight were told by the pilot that the aircraft was disabled, and about to ditch in the ocean. They were required to fill in insurance forms before the crash. From the insurance forms which were written in a hurry, we can conclude that fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual.
3.Tickling for learning to laugh
In the 1930s, Clarence Yeuba, a Professor of Psychology at Antioch College in Ohio of America, put forward the hypothesis that people learn to laugh when tickled. He tested it on his family——stipulating the family was forbidden to laugh when tickled in his prensence. Leuba’s wife, however, was caught some months later dandling child to laugh.
4.Headless rats and painted faces
In 1924, Carney Landis, of the University of Minnesota, set out to investigate facial expressions of disgust. He drew lines on volunteers’ faces with charcoal, before asking them to smell ammonia, listen to jazz, look at pornography or place their hands in a bucket of frogs. He then asked each volunteer to decapitate a white rat. All volunteers were reluctant to do first, but most people bowed to authority in the end.
5.Raising the dead
In the 1930s, Robert Cornish, a scientist of the University of California, placed corpses on a see-saw to circulate the blood, while injecting adrenalin and anticoagulants. He waited a condemned prisoner, Thomas McMonigle, to become a human guinea pig. The state of California, however, refused the permission of this experiment, for fear that it would have to release McMonigle if he resurrected.
6.Slumber learning
In 1942, Lawrence LeShan, of the American College of William and Mary attempted subliminally to influence boys into stopping biting their fingernails. While they were asleep, he played them a record of a voice saying: “My fingernails taste terribly bitter.” When the record player broke down, he repeated the phrase himself. It seemed to work: by the end of the summer, 40 percent of the boys had stopped biting their nails. someone, however, has another explanation: "'If I stop biting my nails,’ they probably thought, ‘the strange man will go away.’”
7. Turkey turn-ons
In the 1960s, Martin Schein and Edgar Hale, of American Pennsylvania State University, discovered that the male birds are not choosy. Taking a model of a female turkey, they progressively removed body parts until the males lost interest. Finally even all that remained was a head , the male turkeys remained turned on.
8.Two-headed dogs
Vladimir Demikhov, a surgeon of the Soviet Union, created a two-headed dog in 1954. The head of a puppy had been grafted onto the neck of an adult dog. The second head would lap at milk. Despite both animals soon died because of tissue rejection, but that did not stop Demikhov from creating 19 two-headed dogs.
9.The vomit-drinking doctor
During the 1800s,an Amerian doctor,Stubbins Ffirth , formed the hypothesis that yellow fever was not an infectious disease. He first poured infected vomit into open wounds, then drank the vomit. He did not fall ill, but not because yellow fever is not infectious. Because infection occured when yellow fever viruses injected directly into the bloodstream, typically through the bite of a mosquito.
10. Sleeping with eyes wide open
In 1960, Ian Oswald, an expert on sleep issues of an English University of Edinburgh, taped open volunteers’ eyes, while placing a bank of flashing lights in front of them, and attached electrodes to their legs that administered electric shocks. But the electroencephalogram showed three subjects were able to fall asleep within 12 minutes.