THE IMPOSSIBLE LAB: INSIDE THE DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED ANOMALOUS SCIENCES
By Rachel Lin, PopSci Weekly, April 5th 2025
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On the outskirts of Baltimore, tucked between a disused industrial park and a suburban sprawl, sits a nondescript gray building with no signage. To the average passerby, it looks like an office complex that might house an insurance firm or maybe a tech startup that never quite made it. Inside, however, is one of the most ambitious—and perplexing—scientific institutions in the world: the Department of Applied Anomalous Sciences, or DAAS.
Founded in 2011, the Department of Applied Anomalous Sciences (DAAS) emerged in response to a growing reality that science could no longer ignore: Brain-type superhumans were breaking the laws of physics—and doing so in ways that produced tangible, usable results. Unlike other superhumans whose abilities were mainly limited to their own bodies, Brain-types created gadgets and materials that defied known science, tools you could hold in your hand and use yourself.
The Brain-type category doesn’t just include ESPers or people with telescopic vision—it spans individuals with super-intelligence, hyper-accelerated sensory processing, and, most significantly, those with intuitive, hyper-specialized knowledge in specific fields. These superhumans were crafting devices that shouldn’t function, forging materials that contradicted chemistry, and achieving results that traditional labs couldn’t replicate.
DAAS was founded with a simple yet daunting mission: to understand the impossible.
A LAB FOR THE ANOMALOUS
Walking through DAAS feels like wandering into a science fiction novel mid-chapter. On one floor, a researcher in safety gear studies a sheet of textile that seems to ripple and twist on its own, as if caught in an invisible breeze. On another, a team is huddled around what looks like a medieval cannon, except this one apparently fires two projectiles from a single shell—without breaking conservation of mass.
But the most fascinating part isn’t the gadgets themselves—it’s the people who make them. DAAS employs some of the most specialized superhumans in the world, primarily Brain-types with a hyper-intuitive understanding of a single scientific field. There’s Dr. Marisol Vega, who can design self-healing polymers in her sleep but struggles to explain how they work in conventional terms. Or Frankie Yoon, whose innate grasp of fluid dynamics allows him to create liquids with selective densities, yet he couldn’t tell you the boiling point of water.
Alongside these hyper-specialized geniuses, DAAS also recruits a select number of Employ-types—superhumans who can imbue objects, people, or locations with new properties—and Create-types, who can conjure objects or substances from thin air. The materials produced by Create-types, known as Anomalously Originated Material (AOM), often defy traditional chemistry and physics. DAAS prioritizes recruiting Employ and Create-types with the most scientifically intriguing powers, hoping their abilities can help bridge the gap between impossible inventions and usable science.
“They’re not omnidisciplinary geniuses,” says Dr. Alan Reeve, director of DAAS. “They’re savants in extremely narrow fields. One of our top researchers can create alloys that shouldn’t exist, but he can’t fix a leaky faucet.”
THE "MICROSCOPE BREAKER" PROBLEM
The core issue DAAS grapples with is the so-called “Microscope Breaker” phenomenon. Many of the materials and gadgets created by Brain-types exhibit properties that defy analysis. Put them under an electron microscope, and the readings come back scrambled—or worse, entirely blank. Chemical assays often fail to register expected elements, and mass spectrometry data can loop endlessly, unable to process the sample.
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“It's like trying to read a book written in a language you know, only every time you look at the page, the letters rearrange themselves,” says Reeve.
This makes traditional reverse-engineering impossible. Instead, DAAS relies on a hybrid approach: pairing superhuman researchers with baseline scientists who attempt to translate intuitive creations into functional, reproducible science. Sometimes, they get lucky. A Brain-type specializing in textiles might develop a self-repairing fabric, and while the exact mechanism remains elusive, baseline chemists can extract enough insight to create more durable materials for public use.
Other times, they hit dead ends. “We have a device in storage that can teleport anything one inch due east seemingly instantaneously,” Reeve admits. “We have no idea how it works, no idea how to shut it off, and it is currently busy eating dust particles, because the last time we tried to move it, something exploded, and we're not quite sure how that happened either.”
PHYSICS COLLISIONS AND SYNTHESIS
One of DAAS’s more experimental projects involves orchestrating pairs of superhumans from different specializations to see if their fields overlap in productive ways. The hope is that two conflicting anomalies might cancel each other out or, better yet, result in a stable, usable technology.
In one recent success, a Brain-type specializing in ceramic materials collaborated with a fluid dynamics expert. The result? A new form of non-Newtonian fluid that remains malleable under pressure but hardens instantly upon impact—a breakthrough now being tested for next-generation body armor, and is cheaper to reproduce than comparable fluids, with more commonly available materials.
But such successes are rare. More often, these collaborations result in devices that behave unpredictably. There’s an entire wing of DAAS known as the “Zoo”, a containment area for unstable artifacts: a perpetual motion machine that only works when no one is observing it, a mirror that reflects objects that don’t exist, and a vial of liquid that evaporates and recondenses elsewhere in the building at random.
Due to the properties of objects produced by superhumans, many of the devices in the Zoo degrade in functionality anywhere from hours to years after their production, never remaining functional forever, but cleaning this immense warehouse of the strange is a daunting task - you never know when that pair of boots might literally jump out and bite you.
THE BUREAUCRACY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Running a place like DAAS isn’t just a scientific challenge—it’s a bureaucratic nightmare. Every new creation has to go through rigorous safety testing, even if no one fully understands what the device does. There are entire teams dedicated to assessing the liability risks of gadgets that could implode, explode, or cause localized time distortions.
Legal issues abound as well. Who owns the rights to a device that can’t be replicated? Can patents be filed for gadgets that defy known laws of physics? For now, most DAAS creations fall under a legal gray area, classified as “non-replicable anomalous artifacts”, which shields them from standard intellectual property laws.
WHY IT MATTERS
Despite the chaos, DAAS has produced tangible benefits. Advances in materials science, energy efficiency, and even medical technology have emerged from partial understandings of Brain-created artifacts. While no fully reproducible “impossible” technology has yet made it to market, the insights gained have rippled outward, inspiring new lines of research in more traditional fields.
Dr. Reeve remains optimistic. “Science has always advanced by studying anomalies—things that didn’t fit our models. DAAS is just doing that on a much bigger scale.”
For now, the impossible remains just that. But in the sterile, humming labs of DAAS, the boundary between known and unknown is thinner than anywhere else on Earth—and if there’s a place where the rules of reality might finally crack open, it’s here.