(via), FLIP seems to be the world's weirdest laboratory:

The lab starts off as a regular ship but when it reaches its destination it 'flips' so that most of the ship sinks leaving the end of the ship standing above the water. Once flipped walls become floors and ceilings and whilst some furniture rotates during the flipping process others are built twice so that one of them is always in the correct position

It's meant to be used by scientists who "needed a more quiet, stable place than a research ship to study how sound waves behave under water":

When FLIP is in its vertical position it is both extremely stable and quiet. Since Drs. Fisher and Spiess completed their first tests, many other important data have been gathered using FLIP. The way water circulates, how storm waves are formed, how seismic waves move, how heat is exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere, and the sound made underwater by marine animals are just a few of the subjects studied using the amazing FLIP.