This might come as a surprise, given everything Cracked has written about them, but they acknowledge that not every scientist is evil. Instead, they say, most are just lucky idiots.
Imagine that you're a scientist, and you just thought of something really crazy, like an experiment that will only work if you irradiate half the planet. You obviously can't do that, or at least you can't get caught doing that. Your only option then is to look around to see if someone's already done the crazy part for you, to find some serendipitous accident of man or nature that left a perfectly designed experiment in its wake. Something like ...
...and then they discuss an article here on Science 2.0.
Namely testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, which had the minor side effect of spreading radioactive isotopes across half the world. Later, scientists realized that anyone alive in the era of nuclear weapons testing would have already eaten food massively irradiated with carbon-14. This has been used by forensic scientists to solve crimes. But the same hilarious bit of mass poisoning could also be used to study the life-cycle of human fat cells, by literally measuring how radioactive people's asses were.
Read 4 more hilarious examples: The 5 Luckiest Accidents That Scientists Passed Off as Skill
By Chris Bucholz - Cracked
