Question: What’s the strangest thing that you have found in science?

Melissa Upjohn answered on 23 Mar 2026:

When I was doing my PhD I worked with horses and their owners in a remote part of southern Africa, where people don’t have access to lots of the medicines that we take for granted here in the UK. When I asked owners about how they treat their horses for internal parasites, like worms, they told me that they can’t buy the types of deworming medicines that we use, and so instead they feed washing powder to their horses because they believe that this will kill the worms (I’ve not done any experiments to test this out, but I’d be surprised if this works, I’d be worried that it might make the horses unwell, imagine what would happen if you or I swallowed washing powder)