Stem cell researchers recently found guilty of falsifying data and the South Korean cloning fraud
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Of course, there are serious cases of scientific fraud, such as the stem cell researchers recently found guilty of falsifying data and the South Korean cloning fraud. The following stories, however, are not so serious.Piltdown Man: In 1912, solicitor and amateur palaeontologist Charles Dawson "found" the Piltdown fossils, a skull and jawbone that appeared to be half-man half-ape, in Sussex. They were hailed as the evolutionary "missing link" between apes and humans. It was over 40 years later, in 1953, that the fossil was exposed as a fake. In fact, the skull was constructed from a medieval human cranium attached to the jaw of an orang-utan. Beringer's fraudulent fossils : Physician Johann Beringer was amazed when he was presented with fossils "found" in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1725, which depicted incredible scenes: the forms of birds, bees, snails, lizards, plants with flowers, frogs mating and insects feeding, not to mention comets, moons and suns. It turned out that he was the victim of an elaborate plot: envious colleagues of Beringer had planted the fossils. Unfortunately, Beringer fell for it hook, line and sinker, and even published a book to tell the world about the fossils. Rumour has it that once Beringer realised the hoax, he tried to buy up any unsold copies of his book. (See Johann Beringer and the fraudulent fossils) There are many more examples of fossil fraud, such as the fake "entombed toad" and the fake fossil fly in amber.The Sokal hoax: In 1996, American physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper loaded with nonsensical jargon to the journal Social Text, in which he argued that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. (Read Sokal's paper) When the journal published it, Sokal revealed that the paper was in fact a spoof. The incident triggered a storm of debate about the ethics of Sokal's prank.The spaghetti tree In 1957, the BBC show Panorama broadcast a programme about the spaghetti tree in Switzerland. It showed a family harvesting pasta that hung from the branches of the tree. After watching the programme, hundreds of people phoned in asking how they could grow their own tree. Alas, it was an April Fools' Day joke. Watch the BBC's spaghetti tree footageThe Upas tree An account was published in the London Magazine in 1783 by a Dutch surgeon named Foersch (his initials were variously given as NP and JN). It claimed the existence of a tree on the island of Java so poisonous that it killed everything within a 15-mile radius. Read the original account (scroll down to find it) This was the start of a legend. Even Erasmus Darwin wrote about it in a poem in 1791. A note to the poem read, "There is a poison-tree in the island of Java, which is said by its effluvia to have depopulated the country... in a district of 12 or 14 miles round it, the face of the earth is quite barren and rocky, intermixed only with the skeletons of men and animals; affording a scene of melancholy beyond what poets have described or painters delineated." You really can find the Upas tree in Indonesia. Though not as potent as legend would have it, the latex of the tree does contain a powerful toxin, which was traditionally used on arrow points. Read more about the Upas tree (PDF: go to page 8)The secret of immortality Johann Heinrich Cohausen, an 18th-century physician, wrote a treatise on the prolongation of life, entitled Hermippus redivivus. Amongst other secrets of longevity, it claimed that life could be prolonged by taking an elixir produced by collecting the breath of young women in bottles. Actually, Cohausen admitted in the last few pages of the work that it was a satire, so any gullible readers wouldn't have been duped for too longhttp://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/display/category/scientific_hoaxes/
10 Jan Hendrik Schön 
Jan Henrik Schön (pictured on the left), a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, had five papers published in Nature and seven in the journal Science between 1998 and 2001, dealing with advanced aspects of electronics. The discoveries were abstruse, but he was seen by many of his peers as a rising star.In 2002, a committee found that he had made up his results on at least 16 occasions, resulting in the public embarrassment of his colleagues, his employer, and the editorial staffs of both the journals that accepted his results.Schön, who by then was still only 32, said: “I have to admit that I made various mistakes in my scientific work, which I deeply regret.” Nature also reported him as adding in a statement, “I truly believe that the reported scientific effects are real, exciting and worth working for.” He would say no more. 6 The Tasaday Tribe 
In 1971, a Philippine government minister (Manuel Elizalde) discovered a small stone age tribe living in isolation on the island of Mindanao. This tribe, called the Tasaday, spoke a strong language, used stone tools, and exhibited other stone-age attributes. Their discovery made television 
headlines, the cover of National Geographic, and was the subject of a bestselling book. When anthropologists tried to get a better look at the tribe, President Marcos declared the land a reserve and made it off-limits to all visitors.When Marcos was deposed in 1986, two journalists visited the site and found that the Tasaday in fact lived in houses, traded with the local farmers, wore jeans and t-shirts and spoke a modern local dialect. The Tasadays explained that they had moved in the caves and behaved in a stone-age manner because of pressure from Elizalde. Elizalde had fled the country in 1983 with millions of dollars he had stolen from a foundation set up to protect the Tasaday people.
The Sokal Affair 
The Sokal affair was a hoax by Alan Sokal (a physicist) perpetrated on the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, he submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon to see if the journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”The paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was published in “Science Wars” that year. On the day of publication, Sokal announced (in a different paper,) that the article was a hoax. He said that Social Text was “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”. Much heated debate followed, especially regarding academic ethics.Another recent example of this same situation is the 2005 Rooter Paper; this was a paper randomly generated by a computer which was submitted – and consequently approved as legitimate – to a scientific conference. The Piltdown ChickenDate: October 1999Categories: Science, Paleontology, Scientific Fraud, 1990s 
The Piltdown Chicken (artist's reconstruction)The National Geographic Society held a press conference on October 15, 1999 to announce a major discovery: It had found a 125-million-year-old fossil in northeastern China that appeared to be the long-sought missing link between dinosaurs and birds. For over twenty years paleontologists had debated whether birds were descended from dinosaurs. This fossil seemed to provide conclusive proof they were. In addition to the press conference, held at the National Geographic's corporate headquarters, the Society simultaneously published a glossy article about the find in its well-known magazine. The fossil bird, when living, would have been about the size of a large chicken, or a turkey. But it would have been a turkey that bore the long tail of a dinosaur. It was this mixture of dinosaur and bird parts that made researchers believe they had found the dinosaur-bird missing link. As Christopher Sloan, author of the National Geographic article, enthusiastically wrote, "Its long arms and small body scream 'Bird!' Its long, stiff tail... screams 'Dinosaur!'" What Sloan didn't realize at the time, was that the body and tail together should have screamed 'Fake!' Xu Xing, a Chinese scientist who had initially helped to identify the fossil, eventually realized it was a fraud when he found a second fossil containing an exact, mirror-image duplicate of the Archaeoraptor's tail, but attached to a different body. Fossil stones, when taken from the ground, often cleave in two, producing two mirror-image sets of fossil slabs. Evidently someone had taken one of the slabs bearing the tail fossil and affixed it to a fossil of a bird, thereby producing a hybrid dinosaur-bird creature. National Geographic published an admission of its mistake in March 2000 and a fuller analysis of how it had been duped in October of that year. It admitted red flags had been raised about the discovery at various points, but that it had failed to see them. More seriously, it acknowledged rushing its find into publication before more scholarly journals had the chance to peer-review the data. U.S. News & World Report was the first to refer to the Archaeoraptor Liaoningensis forgery as the case of the Piltdown Chicken, alluding to the infamous Piltdown Man hoax of 1912.
Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography Date: 1887 (exposed in 1919) Categories: History, Science, Botany, Scientific Fraud, 1850-1899 When the six-volume Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography was published between 1887 and 1889, it was one of the first and most definitive works of its kind in America. It contained biographical information about thousands of people (some famous, some obscure) in American history. It was hailed as a valuable source of information for both scholars and students alike. But thirty years after the Cyclopedia's initial publication, questions began to be raised about its reliability. The botanist Dr. John Hendley Barnhart published a brief article in the Journal of the New York Botanical Garden suggesting some of the Cyclopedia's biographical sketches might be fictitious. He had specific doubts about fourteen botanists. He had never heard of these people, nor could he find references to them anywhere else. As other researchers began to fact check the Cyclopedia, more and more false entries were found. To date over 200 suspicious entries have been flagged. But due to the enormity of the work it's doubtful that all of the false information it contains will ever be identified. Almost all the false sketches found to date describe pre-nineteenth century European scientists who traveled to the New World to study its natural history. Some of these false biographies are more obvious than others. For instance, the biography of Charles Henry Huon de Penanster, identified as a French botanist, almost exactly parallels the real life of Nicolas Thiery de Menonville (whose biography also appears in the Cyclopedia). The biography of Nicolas Henrion, a French scientist, reports that he arrived in South America in 1783, just as the Asiatic cholera broke out there. However, epidemic Asiatic cholera first broke out in South America only in 1835. Miguel da Fonseca e Silva Herrera, a Brazilian historian, was said to have been presented with a gold medal by the historical institute of Rio de Janeiro in 1820, even though this society was not founded until 1838. Most of the false entries are fairly dry, but a few are more colorful, such as that of Jean Pierre de Vogué, a Flemish adventurer who apparently ended his days wandering through the Brazilian rainforest in search of the fabled "Mountain of Wealth," and the Spanish geographer Andres Vicente y Bennazar who reportedly published a map of the world clearly displaying both North and South America sixteen years before Columbus sailed to the Americas. The author (or authors) of the false entries is not known, but the motive for writing the pieces was probably financial since contributors to the Cyclopedia were paid by space, and the articles were generally checked only for form. The Cyclopedia can still be found in many libraries throughout America. It was republished in 1968 by the Gale Research Company. However, Gale did not remove any of the bogus biographies, nor did it print a warning stating that hundreds of the sketches were known to be fictitious. The Orgueil Meteorite Date: May 1864 Categories: Extraterrestrial Life, Geology, Scientific Fraud, 1850-1899 
Seed capsules embedded within an Orgueil meteorite fragment (arrow points to stem) On May 14, 1864 a meteor shower fell in southern France, near the town of Peillerot. The meteorites, which were composed of carbonaceous chondrite, were given the name 'Orgueil.' Samples of the meteor shower were collected and sent to the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle in Montauban, France. From there the meteorites were disseminated to other museums throughout Europe, but two of the meteorites remained in Montauban, where they were sealed inside a glass jar. Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life?
The Orgueil meteorites remained all but forgotten until the early 1960s, when researcher Bart Nagy examined samples of them and found curious microscopic patterns that resembled lifelike fossils. He published his work in Nature, touching off a debate that continues to this day concerning whether any meteorites contain evidence of fossilized microscopic life. Nagy's work inspired other researchers to look more closely at other samples of Orgueil, and when they did, they found something even more remarkable. A team of Chicago researchers found plant fragments (entire seeds) and coal embedded deep inside one of the meteorites that had been sealed inside a glass jar and stored in the museum at Montauban. The researchers immediately suspected the plant and coal fragments had somehow gotten attached to the meteorite and were not actually a true part of it. But x-ray analysis ruled this suspicion out. The plant fragments were definitely embedded in the substance of the meteorite itself. Furthermore, the entire meteorite was covered in a glassy fusion layer created by the heat of passing through the atmosphere. Plant seeds should not have been able to penetrate this layer. This raised the intriguing possibility that the plant seeds were an extraterrestrial life form. The Hoax Debunked The researchers soon ruled out the possibility that the plant seeds were extraterrestrial when they identified them as belonging to a rush indigenous to southern France. This left only one explanation for how the seeds had gotten inside the meteorite: human intervention. Orgueil grows extremely soft and clay-like when it comes into contact with water. Therefore, the researchers theorized that if someone had wet the rock, they could have then inserted the plant fragments inside of it, where they would have remained once the meteorite had dried. There was one problem with this hypothesis. If the meteorite had been soaked, manipulated, and then dried, why did it still have a glassy fusion layer? This question was answered when further tests on the rock revealed that this fusion layer was actually dried glue. They found pieces of the original fusion layer jammed within the meteorite. It became obvious that around 1864, before the meteorite had been sealed inside the glass jar, someone had gone to great pains first to embed plant and coal fragments inside of it, and then to coat it with glue to make it appear to have a fusion crust once again. Motive
In 1864 a major focus of scientific debate concerned the possibility of spontaneous generation. This was the idea that life can spontaneously come into existence inside of inanimate substances. On April 7, 1864 Louis Pasteur delivered a famous lecture at the Sorbonne debunking this concept. On May 31, shortly after this lecture, another French scientist, Cloëz, examined samples of the Orgueil meteor shower and detected in it the presence of materials resembling humic acid. He suggested that this implied the existence of life on the meteorite's parent body. It could be that someone decided to play a joke on the French scientists by placing plant and coal fragments inside of the meteorite, hoping the fragments would soon be found and interpreted as evidence of spontaneous generation within the meteorite. If this is the case, then the carefully planned hoax backfired, because the meteorite was sealed inside a glass jar and forgotten until 1962, almost a century later. Even though one of the Orgueil meteorites had obviously been tampered with, the researchers stressed that this did not have any bearing on whether the other Orgueil meteorites contained microfossils. That debate continues to this day. 6. Dressed to shoot. As an 18th-century woman, Deborah Sampson couldn't travel alone and couldn't stand the husband-to-be Mom had picked out for her. What she could do, it turned out, was fool the Army of the American Revolution into thinking she was a man, satisfying her need for adventure. Sampson bound her breasts, deepened her voice, took the name Robert Shurtlieff, and joined the Army in May 1782. Through several battles with the British and a couple of injuries, Sampson kept up her charade. Wounded in the thigh, she dug the bullet out herself to avoid a doctor's scruti ny. It wasn't until April 1783 that a physician treating her for fever discovered her secret; she was honorably discharged in October 1783. Two years later, she married Benjamin Gan nett, a farmer. They had three children.Going in circles. They appeared like magic in the middle of the night–hundreds of huge geometrical patterns in the middle of English wheat fields. To some, the mysterious circles that first made headlines in 1980 were proof of alien visitors. Self-styled crop-circle experts claimed the precise shapes were the result of energy from spaceships that flattened the wheat as they hovered. "Cereologists" devoted books to the wheat- field wonders, and curious tourists flocked to see them–until Sep tember 1991, when two 60-something artists came forward to show how they had created the circles at night with lengths of rope and flat boards. The con that baffled the world for more than a decade had been cooked up over a pint in a local pub.
Back in the day, when we ate mammoth meat off the bone and didn't floss afterward, our teeth tended to fall out. Therefore, when those reserve molars, aka "wisdom teeth," came in they were welcomed. Nowadays, fluoride and dental plans have just made them a huge pain.
Darwin claimed the appendix was useful for digestion during our early plant-eating years; it's dwindled down to little since we started eating more digestible foods. Male Nipples Tonsils
More useful as a game-winning Scrabble word than part of the anatomy, the coccyx, or tailbone, is several fused vertebrae left over from the olden days when we had tails. Drake's Plate of Brass, accepted for 40 years as the actual plate Francis Drake posted upon visiting California in 1579Bananadine, a fictional drug made from bananasStephen Glass's falsified articles for The New RepublicMars hoax, a yearly hoax, started in 2003, falsely claiming that at a certain date Mars will look as large as the full moonProven hoaxes of exposure"Proven hoaxes of exposure" are semi-comical or private sting operations. They usually encourage people to act foolishly or credulously by falling for patent nonsense that the hoaxer deliberately presents as reality. See also culture jamming.
Possible hoaxes
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n August 25, 1835 the New York Sun announced the discovery of life on the moon. It explained that the discovery had been made by the famous British astronomer Sir John Herschel, who had invented a new telescope "of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle." Over the course of the next week the Sun printed details about the moon creatures Herschel had supposedly spied with his telescope. These creatures included lunar bison, fire-wielding biped beavers, and winged "man-bats." The public was fascinated by the reports. Papers throughout the nation reprinted the Sun's articles. But over time, as word from Europe failed to arrive corroborating what the Sun claimed, people realized they had been hoaxed. For the remainder of the 19th century, the term "moon hoaxy" 
r. Johann Beringer was a professor at the University of Würzburg. In 1725 a curious set of fossils came into his possession that displayed, in sharp three-dimensional relief, images of plants, insects, birds, snails, hebrew letters, and even astronomical objects. Beringer thought he had made a remarkable discovery. However, it turned out the stones had been created by two fellow professors as a hoax. This was revealed, much to Beringer's embarrassment, after he had authored a book about the stones. Beringer sued the hoaxers in court and won a conviction against them. 
n 1971 a small group of extremely primitive, leaf-wearing, "Stone-Age" people was discovered living in a remote region of the Philippine rain forest. Called the Tasaday, after a nearby mountain, these people had apparently never had contact with the outside world.
n 1968 Carlos Castaneda, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), published 
