Science Gone Wrong

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

38 stories

• The 3,300-Year-Old Golden Beard That Got Glued Back On With Epoxy
• The Astronomer Whose Escaped Caterpillars Are Still Eating America
• The Colonel Who Opened the Great Pyramid With Gunpowder — and Got His Drill Stuck in the Sphinx
• The Founding Father's Laxative That Found Lewis and Clark's Toilet
• The Navy That Swapped Lemons for Limes — and Forgot How to Cure Scurvy
• The Particle Accelerator That Could Tell When the Train to Paris Left
• The Space Tomato That Vanished for Nearly a Year — and the Astronaut Accused of Eating It
• The Ten Tons of War Sodium the Army Rolled Off a Cliff Into a Frozen Lake — Then Shot at Until It Exploded
• The Weather Satellite That Fell on Its Face Because 24 Bolts Were Missing
• The Minister Who Sold Gold From Seawater — With a Diver Hiding Under the Wharf
• The Wobbly Bridge That Closed Two Days After Opening — Because People Walked on It
• The Mongooses Hired to Hunt Rats — Who Worked the Day Shift
• The Skyscraper That Melted a Jaguar — and Fried an Egg on the Pavement
• The Rat-Tail Bounty That Turned Hanoi Into a Rat Farm
• The Turkey Benjamin Franklin Tried to Electrocute — and Shocked Himself Instead
• The Woodpeckers That Grounded a Space Shuttle — and the Plastic Owls NASA Sent to Guard It
• The Thirty Men Who Ran Back and Forth Across a Warship to See If It Would Tip Over
• The Drilling Rig That Pulled the Plug on a Lake — and Then Got Sucked Down the Drain
• The Flake of Chipped Paint That Made a $1.5 Billion Telescope Nearsighted
• The Manhole Cover a Nuclear Test Fired Into the Sky — and the Single Camera Frame That Caught It
• The Most Expensive Hyphen in History Was Not a Hyphen
• The Sea Monster Rebuilt With Its Head on the End of Its Tail
• The 23 Cats the RAF Parachuted Into Borneo to Fight a Rat Plague
• The Fake Fossils Carved to Humiliate a Professor — Who Then Published a Book About Them
• The Molecule So Foul a Waitress Sprayed Deodorant at the Chemists Who Made It
• The Weedkiller That Made New Zealand's Trousers Explode
• Galloping Gertie: The Bridge That Taught Engineers to Fear the Wind
• The Unit Mix-Up That Doomed a Mars Probe
• The Chemist Who Put Lead in Gasoline and Holes in the Ozone
• The Copper Tools That Scraped History Off the Parthenon Marbles
• The Day a 25-Foot Wave of Molasses Flooded a Boston Neighborhood
• The 'Demon Core': The Plutonium Sphere That Killed Two Scientists
• Piltdown Man: The Fake Fossil That Fooled Science for 40 Years
• The Radioactive Tonic That Dissolved a Millionaire's Jaw
• The Superheavy Element That Only Existed in One Scientist's Data
• 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

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