Science Gone Wrong

Unit mix-ups, whale explosions, radioactive tonics — when good intentions met bad outcomes.

22 stories

• The Weedkiller That Made New Zealand's Trousers Explode
• The Superheavy Element That Only Existed in One Scientist's Data
• The Thirty Men Who Ran Back and Forth Across a Warship to See If It Would Tip Over
• The Time a Falling Space Station Got a $400 Littering Ticket
• The Time Oregon Blew Up a Whale With Half a Ton of Dynamite
• The Toad Australia Released to Fight a Pest — and Turned Into a Bigger One
• The Sea Monster Rebuilt With Its Head on the End of Its Tail
• Piltdown Man: The Fake Fossil That Fooled Science for 40 Years
• The Radioactive Tonic That Dissolved a Millionaire's Jaw
• The Manhole Cover a Nuclear Test Fired Into the Sky — and the Single Camera Frame That Caught It
• The Molecule So Foul a Waitress Sprayed Deodorant at the Chemists Who Made It
• The Most Expensive Hyphen in History Was Not a Hyphen
• The Flake of Chipped Paint That Made a
  .5 Billion Telescope Nearsighted
• The Day a 25-Foot Wave of Molasses Flooded a Boston Neighborhood
• The 'Demon Core': The Plutonium Sphere That Killed Two Scientists
• The Drilling Rig That Pulled the Plug on a Lake — and Then Got Sucked Down the Drain
• The Fake Fossils Carved to Humiliate a Professor — Who Then Published a Book About Them
• The Chemist Who Put Lead in Gasoline and Holes in the Ozone
• The Copper Tools That Scraped History Off the Parthenon Marbles
• The Unit Mix-Up That Doomed a Mars Probe
• The 23 Cats the RAF Parachuted Into Borneo to Fight a Rat Plague
• Galloping Gertie: The Bridge That Taught Engineers to Fear the Wind

← All series