The Research

S cience is amazing, but it can involve doing some pretty weird stuff. Just in time for Halloween, here are seven science experiments that are creepy, scary, or just plain gross! 1.  Scientist lets insect live inside her The sand flea  Tunga penetrans , here in a scanning electron microscope several days after penetrating the skin. Eye of Science/Science Source The sand flea, also known as chigger flea, is pretty gross. It burrows permanently into the skin of a warm-blooded host—like a human—where it swells, defecates, and produces eggs, before dying 4-6 weeks later, still embedded in the skin. We know a lot about them, but until now, their sex lives have been shrouded in mystery. Not anymore: A researcher in Madagascar was so interested in sand flea development that she let one of the bugs live inside her foot for 2 months. Her intimate observations paid off: She figured out that the parasites most likely have sex when the females are already in...

From a simulated bioattack on London's Underground to scientists self-testing hydrogen cyanide, a book about science under wraps exposes numerous horrors...... THE 26 July 1963 is widely remembered for the devastating earthquake that killed thousands of people in the city of Skopje, then in Yugoslavia. Far fewer know it as the date of a secret military trial on the London Underground, which aimed to simulate another sort of catastrophic event: the release of anthrax in an enclosed public space. At around midday, a small box of powder was dropped from the window of a Northern Line train, just as it pulled out of the south London station of Colliers Wood. As the box smashed and released its contents, hundreds of men, women and children were exposed to spores of Bacillus globigii, unaware that they had just become test subjects in one of the largest ever field trials of a simulated biological attack. As Secret Science explains, B. globigii is considered a human pathogen wit...