The closest thing to utopia the world has ever seen might have existed in a Maryland barn for a couple of years during the late 1960s: a complex built for rodents as part of a science experiment.

In the 1960s and 70s, the American ethologist and behavioural researcher John B. Calhoun conducted an experiment with mice to ...

People predicting the end of world generally make those predictions without scientific evidence to support them. So when an animal-behavior researcher ran experiments in the 1960s that described ...

The focus of the experiment was “what would happen now ... renowned behavioral researcher John B. Calhoun created what you might think of as a “Garden of Eden” for mice.

John B. Calhoun loved rats ... to tweak these colonies to create a rat utopia or a mouse paradise. In an experiment that lasted from 1965 until 1973, he built a mouse colony with 256 “apartments ...

The understanding of John B. Calhoun’s research that circulated in the 1960s and ... Calhoun’s project is often framed as an experiment in utopia building, something like a generous welfare state—one ...

John Calhoun stood ... even these inhabitants would be dead. Calhoun wasn’t the survivor of a natural disaster or nuclear meltdown; rather, he was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental ...

John B. Calhoun had designed quite a few mouse environments ... where people had space and life was peaceful and natural. Today, the experiment remains frightening, but the nature of the fear ...