4

A Surgeon Claims He Can Transplant Entire Human Heads

The world's first face transplant was a miracle of modern medicine. But that was all the way back in 2005. What's the hot new thing? Why, transplanting entire heads!

(Warning: If pictures of animals with the wrong amounts of heads will ruin your lunch, you might want to skip this one.)

Dr. Sergio Canavero is a graduate of Italy's University of Turin, where he presumably got his degree in Practical Frankensteining. A successful neurosurgeon, Dr. Canavero had worked in a hospital in Turin, but left due to creative differences like "He won't shut the hell up about chopping people's heads off." That's because Dr. Canavero had decided that he would become the first man to ever successfully transplant a human head onto a different body. How well is that going? Well, let's ask his patients:

CNS Neuroscience and TherapeuticsPictured: definitive proof that two heads are not better than one.

After publishing dozens of research papers, Canavero and his decapitation-happy team started the HEAVEN ("head anastomosis venture") project by slappin' two heads on one mouse, as well as swapping a monkey head without reattaching the spinal cord. Then, in 2017 he finally announced they had successfully transplanted a head between two human ... cadavers. Surely a feat any of us could achieve with access to a morgue, a bone saw, and a strong stomach.

HEAVEN-AHBRAs well as other ... let's say, distinct character traits.

3

Andrea Rossi Claims To Have Invented Impossible Green Energy -- Twice

Garret Morgan invented both the traffic light and the gas mask. Tesla invented both alternating current and the induction motor. Leonardo da Vinci invented both the helicopter and the perfect five-alarm chili recipe. Great inventors have at least two marvels under their belt. To that list you can now add Andrea Rossi, but only if you don't mind that none of his world-changing inventions actually work.

In the 1980s, Rossi gained fame in Italy for a groundbreaking invention: a machine able to process garbage and industrial waste, then turn it into oil. In reality, the only oil he was selling was of the snake variety. Instead of healing the world, Rossi had been hiding all the toxic waste in leaky storage tanks, and when officials finally found him out, it cost the Italian government about $50 million to clean up 77,000 tons of toxic mess. But despite being under investigation for environmental crimes, Rossi didn't do any time for it, mostly because he was already in jail on unrelated gold-smuggling charges.

You'd think that being exposed as a waste-dumping gold smuggler would put a dent in your credibility as a scientist, but no! After lying low (being jailed) for a while, and then getting a shiny new engineering degree (from an American diploma mill), Rossi burst back on the scene in 2011, claiming he had cracked the Philosopher's Stone of modern science: cold fusion. He unveiled his energy catalyzer, or E-Cat, which appeared to generate power from thin air.

How does it work? Nobody knows! Like a shitty Vegas magician, Rossi has adamantly refused to let anyone see the internal workings of his invention, and only allows for demonstrations in carefully controlled environments. The fact that one Australian engineer has stated that the excess power his machines appear to create could easily be faked with some creative wiring is probably a coincidence.

Steve Featherstone/Popular ScienceLike every lunatic invention, this one involves a lot of tinfoil.

2

Congress Nearly Fell For A Fake Perpetual Motion Machine

In the early 1980s, some goofball named Joseph Newman claimed to have invented a machine that could produce infinite, clean, free energy. In his kitchen. His application for a patent was quickly rejected, but what Newman lacked in scientific credentials, he made up for with pizzazz. After a few publicity blitzes, his nonsense had become so widely accepted that the U.S. government decided they wanted in on the action after all.

Republican senators Thad Cochran and Trent Lott drafted bills to force the Patent Office to issue a "pioneering patent" for the "unlimited source of energy." Newman would have been set for life if it hadn't been for one other pesky senator: former astronaut and engineer John Glenn. Glenn easily demolished Newman's claims, leaving him "speechless," and the inventor slunk back into obscurity.

NASA"The only seemingly impossible feats of science I recognize are the ones on my resume."

1

A Famous Archaeologist Fooled Japan With Made-Up Discoveries For Decades

Shinichi Fujimura was a self-taught archaeologist who made some groundbreaking discoveries (technically all archaeological discoveries are groundbreaking, but you get the idea). He captivated the Japanese public, who gave him the nickname "The Hands of God" for his amazing -- some would say wildly implausible -- gift for unearthing miraculous finds on every single dig he went to.

But as unqualified as Fujimura was, and as unbelievable his finds were, Japan's overly polite scientific community wasn't able to properly fight back. A big part of that was that Fujimura's discoveries were crazy popular with the masses, and it's not hard to see why. He claimed that he had found man-made stone artifacts dating back 700,000 years, meaning the Japanese had entered the Stone Age roughly half a million years before the rest of the world. That's a pretty amazing head start, and a damning case that The Flintstones was blatantly whitewashing Asian prehistory.

Bjoertvedt/Wikimedia CommonsNot bad for people who would've been about four evolutionary steps back at the time.

Also not helping was the fact that Japan's scientific circles were about as hot on public criticism as they were on peer review -- that is to say, not at all. So although many actual experts personally believed Fujimura was a bag of hot air held together by a thin veneer of bullshit, few were willing to challenge him on record. But you know who has no problems making sweeping judgments of careful and nuanced scientific findings? Why, the media of course!

All along, journalists were watching the celebrity archaeologist like a hawk. And in 2000, they were finally able to catch old "God's Hands" burying fake artifacts for his team to find later. Because of his celebrity status, he had been present in some capacity at around 180 digs over the years, and everything found on any of those sites was now called into question. It set back an entire country's archaeology studies for decades. Oh hey, we've just discovered something interesting ourselves: Shinichi Fujimura sounds like kind of an asshole.

Taylor Daine is an Indianapolis-based writer and comedian who makes bad tweets at @turtledovejones.

E. Reid Ross has a couple books, Nature is the Worst: 500 reasons you'll never want to go outside again and Canadabis: The Canadian Weed Reader, both available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

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