5

Sloppy Lab Work Accidentally Creates A Nonexistent Serial Killer

Deutsche Presse-Agentur

In 2007, German police had a real humdinger on their hands: A woman was tear-assing around the southern town of Heilbronn like a sophomore on spring break -- only instead of flashing her boobs and getting hammered, she was robbing shit, breaking into places, and murdering people. The case of the "Phantom of Heilbronn" had DNA linking her to over 40 different crimes; some from as far back as 1993. But other than her admirable work ethic, officials didn't know much about her.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur
"If you connect the dots between the crimes, it reveals her supervillain theme: random lines."

The police put a half-million dollar reward on her head, brought in criminal profilers from all over Europe and TNT, and even consulted psychics, which is good way of saying "we don't know what the fuck to do now." Due to the lack of evidence, all of them were at a loss to figure out how this woman was spraying bodily fluids all over her crime scenes like an ejaculatory calling card and getting away with it (except for the psychics; they were at a loss because they're useless sacks of crap). But then, right when all hope seemed lost, the culprit was finally found:

gvictoria/iStock/Getty Images
"You're getting the chair for this, you monster."

4

Scientists Are Surprisingly Clumsy With Deadly Diseases

John Foxx/Stockbyte/Getty Images

Medical professionals are trained to treat every used needle as though it's contaminated with Ebola or something. It's part of the protocol to always be super careful around the pointy little bastards, even when you know they're not dangerous. Therefore, it logically follows that when a needle does have Ebola in it, you should fuck around with it until you get stung.

Or at least, that's the impression we get from the recent case of a virologist in Germany (seriously, what is the deal with that country?) who was working in the lab when she "accidentally jabbed herself" with a needle contaminated with Ebola. Scientific American doesn't specify how it happened, but we have some theories.

deeepblue/iStock/Getty Images
*At-CHOO*

3

Scientists Accidentally Killed The World's Oldest Tree And Animal

James R. Bouldin

In 1964, treeology grad student Don Currey was wandering through the forest when he happened upon a Great Basin bristlecone pine tree. He decided to take some samples of the tree, but was thwarted when his borer (essentially a bigass corkscrew) got stuck in the trunk. Possibly worried about what his adviser would say about losing the instrument ("You're a loose cannon, Currey!"), he tattled on the tree to a park ranger. They both decided that since the tree wouldn't give up the borer, they'd simply cut the fucker down and get it out that way.

The tree thus slaughtered, Currey went back to determining how old it was. It was only then that he realized that he'd made a historic discovery: He had come across Prometheus -- at 5,000 years of age, the oldest tree ever recorded! And he'd killed it.

James R. Bouldin
Now it's a wonderful natural toilet.

Thanks in part to Currey's own future efforts, it's harder for something like that to happen today ... to trees, that is. Old animals should still be very afraid of clumsy scientists. In 2013, we told you about a 405-year-old clam found in Iceland, but we mentioned that there could be even older ones. We were right and wrong: Via a complicated process called "counting the rings outside its shell" (clams are the trees of the sea), scientists later determined that the clam was in fact 507 years old, making it the oldest non-spongey animal ever recorded. It was born just after Columbus set sail for America, but before Henry VIII started lopping off heads.

The problem? They'd already opened (and thus killed) the old timer.

Bangor University
They should have known something was up when lightning bolts shot out and "Princes Of The Universe" started playing.

2

Primatologist Gets Lost In The Jungle, Is Rescued By An Orangutan

KatePhotographer/iStock/Getty Images

Even though GPS hasn't been able to completely snuff out that one asshole friend who always insists they know a faster route, it has made various forms of travel a much safer endeavor. Twenty years ago, driving involved giant atlases, and going on a long hike was like waggling your dick in death's face -- and that's when you're wandering around good old North American forests with nothing scarier than bears and Gary Busey.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
Don't bother playing dead to protect yourself. He knows.

If you happen to get lost in a rainforest in New Bumblefuck, Indonesia, then naturally, your situation is somewhat direr. Primatologist Agustin Fuentes was doing research in the dense forest at Tanjung Puting when he decided to go off-trail in pursuit of a monkey so that he could primatologist-ize the shit out of it (we have no idea how primatology works). Not only did Fuentes not find the monkey, but he also managed to lose himself in the process.

University Of Notre Dame
File photo of Fuentes primatologizasing.

1

Journal Accepts Computer-Generated Nonsense

SCIgen

Peer-reviewed papers are the lifeblood of scientific advancement, selflessly keeping the wheels of progress in motion ... for a modest publishing fee. After getting dozens of spam emails requesting submissions for these allegedly peer-reviewed journals, grad student Philip Davis decided to see how good their editorial process was. He had a computer randomly generate a research paper (and you can, too!) so that the sentences would appear coherent when read but were, in reality, absolute nonsense. And just to drive his point home, he attributed his findings for the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or C.R.A.P. for short.

Vivek Mehra
As if "phrenology" alone wasn't stupid-sounding enough.

How did the publication react? By going, "Great! Now give us $800." Davis called them out on it, and the journal's editor resigned in disgrace (well, he resigned; we assumed the disgrace part). Even then, the company still claims that they knew it was a hoax all along, and that they only pretended to accept the paper in order to flush out the culprits from behind their pseudonyms. We're sure they would have also "pretended" to accept the $800, in the interest of science.

But it's not just these bullshit publications that are flooding the market with shoddy research. Several legitimate organizations have fallen prey to the random paper generator. Like IEEE and Springer, which had to remove 120 papers after someone pointed out that they were accepting garbage like this:

Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo, and Maxwell Krohn
We concur.

One automatically-generated paper was even accepted at a conference, and the authors were invited to speak about their findings. That is, the gibberish-making software. We've come across the dumbest possible robot apocalypse origin story ever.

When he's not organizing his lab coat and thermometer collection, Chris writes for his website and tweets.

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