Science & Medicine - Wikibri/x/

Medicine and Biology

Brown Dog Affair
Dancing Mania
Operation Whitecoat
Thalidomide
Tuskegee Syphilis Study
BZ (3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate)	An incapacitating agent affecting the nervous system. Causes stupor, confusion, and confabulation with concrete and panoramic illusions and hallucinations, and with regression to automatic "phantom" behaviors such as plucking and disrobing.
Alien Hand Syndrome	An alien hand sufferer can feel normal sensation in the hand, but believes that the hand, while still being a part of their body, behaves in a manner that is totally distinct from the sufferer's normal behavior.
Capgras delusion	A rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that an acquaintance, usually a spouse or other close family member, has been replaced by an identical looking impostor.
Chandre Oram	An Indian tea estate worker who lives in Alipurduar of Jalpaiguri, West Bengal. Believed to be an incarnation of the Hindu monkey demigod Hanuman because of his tail.
Charles Bonnet syndrome	Named after the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet. In 1760 he described a condition in which vivid, complex visual hallucinations (fictive visual percepts) occur in mentally healthy people.
Clinical Lycantrophy	A rare psychiatric syndrome which involves a delusion that the affected person can or has transformed into an animal.
Exploding Head Syndrome	A condition that causes the sufferer to occasionally experience a tremendously loud noise as if from within his or her own head.
Guided Rat	A rat with electrodes implanted in the medial forebrain bundle (MFB) and sensorimotor cortex of its brain.
Head transplant	A head transplant is a surgical operation involving the replacement of an organism's head with a replacement head.
Insular Dwarfism	The reduction in size of large animals – almost always mammals – when their gene pool is limited to a very small environment such as an island.
Isolated Brain	Keeping a brain alive in-vitro.
Lina Medina	The youngest confirmed mother in medical history, who gave birth to a son at the age of 5 years, 7 months and 21 days.
Mellified Man	A legendary medicinal substance from Arabia described by 16th-century Chinese pharmacologist Li Shizhen in his Bencao Gangmu.
MRSA	A strain of staph that's resistant to many drugs, very dangerous and unfortunately completely real.
Robert J. White	Robert J. White is an American surgeon, best known for his head transplants on monkeys.
Sonic Hedgehog	One of three proteins in the mammalian hedgehog family. Mutations in it cause problems like the girl pictured.
Spontaneous Human Combustion	When the body burns without any known cause, sometimes without even damaging the surroundings.
Stigmata	Wounds or feelings of pain corresponding to the wounds of Jesus when he was being crucified.
Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic	The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962 was an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness (MPI) in the vicinity of the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in the modern nation of Tanzania.
Trepanation	A surgery dating back to the Stone Age in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull.
Unit 731	Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, known for lethal experiments on people (including vivisection) and development of weapons of mass destruction.
Vladimir Demikhov	A Soviet scientist and organ transplant pioneer who did several transplantations in the 1930s and 1950's.
Whole-Body Transplant	A whole-body transplant or brain transplant is a theoretical operation that would move the brain of one being into the body of another.
Panspermia	Life did not evolve on Earth.

Physics & Mathematics

Maxwell's Demon
Multiverse	The hypothetical set of multiple possible universes - and perhaps, every variation of every universe that could ever occur.
Novelty Theory
Quantum Immortality	A theoretical way to cheat death - but only from the point of view of the observer.
String Theory	One of the possible explanations of the way our universe works. It's very complicated and essentially untestable.
Time Travel	All the ways it could be done, and the unfortunate downsides.
Black Hole	Space-time anomalies with the strongest gravitational fields in the universe and massive destructive power.
Exotic Star	A star composed of something other than the normal protons, neutrons & electrons. Currently theoretical only.
Non-Euclidean Geometry	Maths on curved surfaces. A triangle's angles don't always add up to 180 degrees...
Omega Point	Why God is destined to evolve, and all people will be emulated in a virtual after-life (maybe). The only problem? It can't happen until our universe is about to die.
Space Elevator	A tower reaching from the Earth to the sky... literally. Currently beyond our manufacturing capacity.
Time Dilation	Why going fast slows you down, and one of the reasons reaching lightspeed could be a problem.
Large Hadron Collider	The world's newest, largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. Might be capable of creating tiny black holes, but it's currently broken.

Technology

Y2K Problem	Lazy programmers cause huge amounts of theoretical damage. On the day, nothing much happened.
Year 2038 Problem	Similar to the Y2K Problem, *nix-based computers may have date problems — if any affected ones are still in use by then.
Self-replicating Machine	Grey goo notwithstanding, such machines could settle the entire galaxy and provide literally infinite returns for a tiny gain.
Weather Control	The act of manipulating the weather. Not entirely fictional.

Other Sciences

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudoscientific_theories

Pole Shift	North and South swap. It's happened before, it will happen again.
Ball Lightning	An atmospheric phenomenon, the physical nature of which is still controversial.
John Murray Spear	Clergyman John Murray Spear attempted to build a mechanical New Messiah in 1854 which ran on electricity. The "god machine" was supposed to transform humanity spiritually.
Polywater	Polywater was a hypothetical polymerized form of water that was the subject of much scientific controversy during the late 1960s.
Pykrete	A composite material invented by Max Perutz and proposed during World War II by Geoffrey Pyke to the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom as a candidate material for making a huge, unsinkable aircraft carrier.
STS-75	STS-75 was a United States Space Shuttle mission, the 19th mission of the Columbia orbiter that conducted the space tether experiment.
Global Consciousness Project	It might be possible to measure the effect of humanity. The reason? Data from devices is recorded which is usually completely random... but it's less likely to be random when something significant is occurring.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program

GOTO DISASTER

False Vacuum	One of the ways that the universe might end. On the upside, it would be instant and painless. On the other hand, we couldn't possibly survive and it would be impossible to see it coming, let alone stop it.
Grey Goo	Nanotechnology - self-replicating stuff, in particular - might go wrong and start eating everything. Or could it?
Technological Singularity	A proposal that the speed of technological advance will accelerate exponentially towards infinity.