Science Gone Wrong
Experiments, inventions and discoveries that should have stayed in the notebook. From Mary Shelley's era to the ice-core lab, these stories are about what happens when curiosity outruns caution.
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The Body Snatcher Classic
In a country inn, the drunken Fettes recognises a famous London doctor, and the sight stirs memories of their student days in Edinburgh.
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Bed Three
I'm a night technologist in a hospital sleep lab. I watch people sleep on infrared video and read their brainwaves off a screen. The man in Bed Three was dreaming two dreams at once, and one of them was talking to me.
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The Premature Burial Classic
A man with a medical condition that mimics death becomes consumed by the fear of waking up underground.
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Novel of the White Powder Classic
A young woman watches her studious brother take a tonic from the local chemist and change, slowly, into something other.
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The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain Classic
A curious gentleman, his servant and his dog spend a night in a London house that no tenant can endure.
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The Sand-Man Classic
A student is haunted by the memory of the sinister lawyer he believed, as a child, was the Sandman who steals children's eyes.
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The Mortal Immortal Classic
A man who has lived for over three centuries explains how he came to drink half of an alchemist's potion.
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Ancient Air
I work in an ice core lab. When we melt Antarctic ice in a vacuum chamber, it gives up tiny bubbles of air that have been sealed since before people painted caves. Our new pressure sensors are sensitive enough to record what that air was carrying. Sound.
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The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar Classic
A mesmerist wonders what would happen if a man were put into a trance at the very moment of death, and finds a willing subject.
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The Horror of the Heights Classic
A pilot's bloodstained notebook, found in a Sussex field, records his attempts to fly higher than anyone ever had.
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How Love Came to Professor Guildea Classic
A cold, rational scientist who despises sentiment finds himself the object of an invisible creature's devotion.
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Cool Air Classic
A man renting a cheap room in a New York boarding house discovers that his upstairs neighbour, a brilliant doctor, needs his apartment kept very cold.
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The Inmost Light Classic
An amateur detective of London's odder corners glimpses a face at a suburban window that he will never forget.
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The Birth-Mark Classic
A brilliant scientist marries a beautiful woman and becomes obsessed with removing the tiny hand-shaped mark on her cheek.
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The Diamond Lens Classic
A young man obsessed with the microscope will stop at nothing to obtain the perfect lens, and through it he sees a world in a drop of water.
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The Mask Classic
A sculptor in Paris discovers a chemical solution that turns living things to marble, and his friends begin to worry about what he plans to do with it.
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The Flowering of the Strange Orchid Classic
A timid bachelor who longs for something exciting to happen buys a strange orchid at auction, the last find of a collector who died in the jungle.
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Rappaccini's Daughter Classic
A student in Padua looks down from his window into the garden of a famous scientist and falls in love with the beautiful daughter who tends its strange flowers.