25 Scariest Experiments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq06D0xRWmc]

Warning: This video contains actual footage of a severed dog head, kept alive. Watch at your own peril.

[Annalee] over at io9.com has gathered together the 25 scariest science experiments.  There are some truly frightening pieces, like the cyborg beetles which we’ve seen before, all the way to silly stuff like the guy who re grew his thumb using pig powder. Next time you’re thinking of admonishing someone for creating a flamethrower, or a super fast scooter, consider for a moment that they’re not burning peoples nasal passages to stop masturbation or creating zombie severed dog heads like the one in the video above.

113 thoughts on “25 Scariest Experiments

  1. I don’t particularly care whether or not this is political propaganda, some sort of weird science experiment, a complete fake, or something else. Nobody is forcing anyone to watch this video. So, should someone find this video offensive, then that person (or, from the looks of it, those people) can simply stop watching the video and go to a less offensive hack.

    (note: I attempted to phrase this in the most polite manner that I know of.)

  2. this is deff. fake stuff like this has been done but this video is deff. fake. back in this time the ussr showed alot of videos like this 1 to show the world that communism is “better” than capitalism and that they where better at everything. who ever says this is real needs to buy some glasses. the reasons its fake include

    1. the dogs hed moves updown left and right which could not be done with a severed hed

    2 have u ever tried to swallow with your mouth open, its hard to do now try it with no organs and a huge whole in the bottom of your head it would cause tremendous pain and musle contractions

    3. in order to get it working they would need a constan supply of none reproducing body fluids
    to keep the body from going into shock

    4 the time it would take to get this set up would leave the dog brain damaged and in most cases dead (if u lose oxygen for 5 min to your brain it causes irreversible damage).

    5. if this was done in 1940 then wth happened over the past 70 years shouldnt we be able to create more useful body part replacements or do a “head transplant ” on a person wo has cancer using a “body donation” if this actually happened in 1940 than we would live forever today which we dont

    6. if it was authentic they would have showed the device hooked up and more camera angles

  3. I finally got around to seeing the movie “X Files”. Same premise. Same fakeness. I would be upset if the little doggie was hurt. In the movie, they have a two-headed dog (a Duoberus?) but unless they grafted the two spines together, it wouldn’t work, and if they did, they’d still need to connect both brains to the spine, which wouldn’t work. Same here. Folks, if anyone is worried, it was faked. Both the dog and the scientists are living happily in retirement, and they regularly go to EuroDisney. Together.

    Now, being given dominion over the animals is better than being an animal. Dogs = smarter than rats, rats = smarter than cockroaches. Dogs = cute and cuddly. Rats = not really cute, and not really cuddly. Cockroaches = “eww, you’re cuddling a bug that’s pooping on your face”. In many parts of the world, cockroaches = food, but also rats and dogs = food.

    Who’s to choose whether dogs are better than rats? I’ll step up. I choose. Dogs are better than rats. Rats have less “right” to live than dogs. Satisfied? I am. Now let’s go out for Chinese food. No, not like the Japanese had Chinese food during the invasion of Nanking… I mean like “dogs”.

    P.S. We just had to put our 15 y.o. dog down. It was sad. I cried. I would put a rabid dog down. I would cry if I had to put a murderer down, too. But I would do it. Not necessarily because his/her rights are “less”, but because mine and everybody else’s are “more”.

    Can we get back to hacking things?

  4. This is basically a video showing isolated perfused organs. It became very common to do experiments using isolated perfused organs in academic science during the 1980s and early 1990s, albeit with mice and rats instead of dogs. Many labs still use these sorts of systems. The major advantage is that more detailed mechanistic work can be done in models like this. For example, if one wants to determine whether a reactive metabolite of a chemical with lung toxicity is produced by metabolism in the liver, one can isolate the lungs outside the body and see if perfusing the lungs with a solution containing the drug causes similar toxicity in the isolated organ or if the injury only occurs after the same solution is perfused through an isolated liver. Very simple and elegant experiments.

    Whether or not keeping the head alive in this video is real, I can’t say. But I’m certain the other organs are quite real. Also, it could be noted that JBS Haldane was a very well respected biologist and very famous. I don’t know if it is actually him in this video, but it does look like him.

    Qualifications: PhD candidate in Toxicology.

  5. In response to Infidellic:

    You are correct that lungs fill with air because of muscles: the diaphraigm muscle moves down. The pleural sac around the lungs has a fluid inside and the surface tension of the fluid causes the very thin-walled lungs to cling to the pleural sac. The pleural sac is connected to the diaphraigm, so that when the diaphraigm moves down the pleural sac comes with it. Because the lungs cling to the pleural sac, the lungs expand too. Of course, moving from a crumpled up sac to a fully expanded sac opens up space, so air from the outside naturally flows in to fill the space. When the diaphraigm relaxes, you exhale.

    However, that does not mean that pushing air in from the outside (rather than pulling it in from the inside) cannot inflate the lungs. It can. If you isolate the respiratory tract from a rodent, you can actually pull the trachea around the end of a syringe and use the plunger to push in air. The lungs will inflate just like they do in this video. Similarly, physicians somtimes perform alveolar lavage to make diagnoses based on the lavage fluid which they aspirate back out. This can also have the effect of inflating the lungs from the outside. All you need is a pressure differential, and that can be achieved in many ways.

    Qualifications: PhD candidate in Toxicology.

  6. By the way, these organs are isolated and PERFUSED. The solution with which they are perfused typically contains glucose and necessary adjuvants, has physiological pH (~7.5), has physiological osmolarity, and has oxygen bubbled in. An organ seperated from the body can survive for a while this way.

    Qualifications: PhD candidate in Toxicology.

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