There are a lot of stories of bad scientific research and downright fraud in this story from The Guardian, but this was my favorite:

But the winner was a hair-straightening treatment by Bioionic, called Ionic Hair Retexturizing: "Water molecules are broken down to a fraction of their previous size ... diminutive enough to penetrate through the cuticle, and eventually into the core of each hair". Shrinking molecules caused some concern among the physicists at the ceremony, since IHR was available just 200 yards away, and the only other groups who have managed to create superdense quark-gluon plasma used a relativistic heavy ion collider. The prospect of such equipment being used by hairdressers was deemed worthy of further investigation.

Yeah, I'd really love to know how they can take two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom, and then shrink them into a smaller version of themselves...

[via Slashdot]