It's been blamed on everything from high-pressure gas lines to low-frequency earth tremors to submarine communications, but so far researchers have been unable to pinpoint the source of a loud, mysterious humming sound that people around the world have reported hearing[1] .


Now science has an answer. Maybe.


Unofficially known as the Hum, the sound is a droning noise that has been heard from Southampton and Leeds in England to Bondi, Australia, and even Seattle, Wash[2] . While people in a few regions have complained about the intermittent humming for decades, residents in other places have only recently reported hearing it. And for some, the din is unbearable.


LISTEN: The Hum heard in Terrace, British Columbia. (Story continues below.)


"It's a kind of torture; sometimes, you just want to scream," Leeds resident Katie Jacques told the BBC[3] . "It's hard to get off to sleep because I hear this throbbing sound in the background."


The humming has also been driving residents of Southampton batty, prompting scientists there to search for a source, which has led to a new theory involving the male Midshipman fish that lets out a distinctive drone when searching for a mate[4] , The Telegraph reported.


LISTEN: The "humming" sounds of male Midshipmen.


Yet despite widespread media coverage, there is scant evidence to back up the hypothesis. The reports appear to be based on comments made last week by Dr. Ben Wilson, a Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) scientist who said only that it was possible that fish were causing the throbbing sound[5] .


"It's not beyond the realms of possibility," Dr. Wilson said, according to local publication the Daily Echo. "There are certainly 'sonic fish' in the north Atlantic and the approaches to the English Channel."


This theory is not without precedent. Researchers from the University of Washington's Marine Biology program said last year that Midshipmen fish were to blame for Seattle's humming problem[6] . Scientists speculated that the calls of the fish in Washington State could be reverberating off of boat hulls and buildings.


But while researchers in Seattle had studied the possible link between the fish and humming, no such research has yet been conducted in England. A statement released by SAMS on Friday attempted to clarify the quotation[7] :


Ben did suggest to the Daily Echo reporter how he might record the noises (by putting a microphone into a condom, sealing it and dropping into the water), but he hasn’t received an audio file yet. Perhaps someone would like to take up the task. Or perhaps a media organization would fly Ben and his equipment south to listen to the hum in situ. Fish might be then ruled in or out.


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  • Caffeine For Imprisoned Twins


    In the late 18th century, King Gustavus III of Sweden was rumored to have carried out a strange experiment to determine the harmful health effects of coffee. Two identical twins who had been condemned to death had their sentences commuted to life in prison on the condition that one would drink three pots of coffee per day, and the other three pots of tea, for the rest of their lives. The only problem was that the doctors assigned to monitor the cases died before either of the patients did, their observations lost--as the story goes, the tea drinker died first, and there's no record of the coffee-drinker's death. The experiment proved nothing, suffering from a lack of rigor (to say the least).

    Source: Uppsala University, "Coffee - rat poison or miracle medicine?"




  • Simulated Anthrax On The Subway


    In June 1966, the U.S. Army's Special Operations Division secretly dispersed harmless bacteria in the New York Subway system to model the effects of an outbreak of more harmful germs.

    According to Army reports, "Test results show that a large portion of the working population of New York City would be exposed to disease if one or more pathogenic agents were disseminated covertly in several subway lines at a period of peak traffic."

    Source: Deadly Cultures: Biological Warfare Since 1945. Wheelis, Rózsa, and Dando. Harvard University Press, 2006.




  • Weaponized Fleas In The Desert


    Operation Big Itch, 1954, was an attempt to discover the potential of weaponized fleas. The operation, part of the Cold War-era United States biological weapons program, took place at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

    According to "Using the flea as weapon," an article in the Army Chemical Review, "In the United States, the plague flea concept was competing against the use of mosquitoes, flies, ticks, and lice. Of these concepts, the United States put most of its energies behind weaponizing yellow fever in combination with the Aedes aegypti mosquito."




  • Food Through A Hole In The Stomach


    U.S. Army Surgeon William Beaumont (above) found an extraordinary patient in Alexis St. Martin, a Canadian trapper who was injured in a hunting accident and left with a hole in his belly that led directly into his stomach. Beaumont attached a string to various foods, including oysters and rare roast beef, and introduced them into the wound to observe the rates of digestion.

    Despite the unorthodox techniques, this research would later lead to the discovery of the importance of stomach acid in digestion, earning Beaumont the epithet "father of gastric physiology."

    Source: Experiments and observations on the gastric juice, and the physiology of digestion. Beaumont, Martin and Combe. Maclachlan & Stewart, 1838




  • Candy For Mental Patients


    In 1945, Sweden's new National Dental Service commissioned research, now known as the Vipeholm experiments, in which researchers gave subjects large amounts of sticky sugary candy in order to study the development of cavities. This might not have been so controversial, except that the subjects couldn't give consent to their participation:

    "The use of mentally handicapped subjects was criticized in the Swedish press and all studies on mentally handicapped individuals were stopped in 1954," according to Topics In Dental Biochemistry by Mark Levine (Springer, 2010).