Complex Numbers

It's Hard Not To Scare

This Cracked article might have been better to post before Halloween, but remember, tomorrow is Election Day here. Scary stuff is still in our future.

    Scientific Studies That Sound Like the Beginning of a Horror Movie  
Two words: Spider goats

I have often looked at articles about what some scientists are doing and think: "You fools! Have you never seen a horror movie?"

Animal testing is an unfortunate but necessary part of certain scientific fields — that is, until the scientists decide to go all Dr. Moreau on some rats. Then it’s just weird. It’s like they’ve never seen a single monster movie.

See? I'm not the only one. (Sometimes, "horror" gets replaced with "science fiction," but usually, horror is still a subgenre.)

5 The Spider Goat

Spider silk is super useful for a lot of different things, but there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of spider farms.

I saw a video recently on how silkworms do their thing. Silkworms are larval moths, and generally unpleasant to look at, but they lack the visceral horror of arachnids. Still, spiders are cool... from a distance.

In 2012, Utah State University geneticists rectified that problem by splicing spider DNA into goat embryos, who eventually grew up to lactate spider silk.

Friendly neighborhood spider-goat.

4 The Man Mice

In 2013, scientists at the University of Rochester implanted human glial brain cells into the brains of newborn mice, who became much smarter and learned faster than other mice as a result.

"What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?"

Also, anyone who has ever seen a horror movie should have implored them to stop.

3 Acid Elephant

In the ‘60s, experimenting with LSD was all the rage, in both the scientific and “hanging out in your friend’s cousin’s basement” senses of the word. By 1962, scientists at the University of Oklahoma had run out of ideas until one of them asked, “What if we gave an elephant a thousand doses?”

Which makes me wonder: if we see pink elephants, what do elephants see? Gray humans?

2 Magnetized Cockroaches

“Can you turn a cockroach into a magnet?” is a question you only ask after you’ve been seriously scientifically jaded...

...or on a serious acid trip.

1 Zombie Dogs

Believe it or not, we do know how to bring once-living creatures back from the dead.

Thus shifting the definition of "dead." Used to be: heart stopped = death, but then CPR came along, and now doctors have to pretty much guess when the point of no return occurs.

Cornish hoped to try his method on humans, specifically a recently executed prisoner, but the government forbade it not out of any fear of a zombie apocalypse but because they weren’t sure how double jeopardy laws applied to a revived corpse.

Seems like an important legal loophole to fix.

Add to this mix the penchant of certain scientists to revive millennia-old bacteria found in ice cores, and you definitely have the makings of a horror movie. But still not as scary as tomorrow's election.