Slanted Science

Great news for people who have difficulty tying their shoelaces!

Great news for people who need those extra straps to let them fasten their airplane seatbelts!

Great news for people whose gigantic folds of flabby skin are home to unknown species of bacteria, insects and small mammals!

Great news for Oprah Winfrey! Possibly. We’re not quite sure if she’s currently in a fatty phase or a skinny phase. Either way, it’s guaranteed to be good news for her at some point in the future.

See, British scientists have researched the WeightWatchers diet program and found that it significantly increases the amount of weight shifted by fatties. And now they’re calling for the country’s National Health System (NHS) to make it available free to all grotesque, amorphous blobs. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s one of those little scientific factoids which everybody knows: sharks can smell a single blood cell from approximately thirteen-thousand miles away, and are able to navigate their way towards it with terrifyingly implacable ease.

Less well known has been the mechanism by which they detect the direction from which the scent is coming. It was theorized that they, and other animals, used concentration of scent molecules as a means of assessing exactly where a smell is coming from.

But now scientists are declaring that in fact, it is the small- but-detectable time-lag between the stink hitting one nostril and then the other that provides the directional cue. Read the rest of this entry »

We have a list of all the people we would go to for medical advice if we were struck down by some catastrophic illness.

Anybody at Johns Hopkins – right down to the janitorial staff – is at the top.

Our list then moves onto the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, and continues all the way down to the West Mississippi Regional Center For Acupuncture And Mystical Healing (great place, lovely people).

After that, the list gets a little more personal : next up is Dr Phil, then Dr Oz, then Dr Dre.

Thousands of entries later, after Charles Manson, after the guy who plays a one-stringed guitar at 3 in the morning in our neighborhood park, and after a bag of roasted peanuts, comes our very last resort for medical advice: Mr Ozzy Osbourne.

Well, it seems that we may need to rethink this list: a British newspaper has just hired the rock legend as its new health columnist.

What a shame. We had $5 on them hiring the guy who cleans tables at our local Olive Garden. Read the rest of this entry »

Food scientists are claiming they’ve made a huge leap in making soy products taste and feel something – anything, just one tiny iota – like chicken.

This revolutionary news is being greeted with street parties and mass group hugs in cities throughout California, where consumers have been quoted describing the advance as “Like, OMG! This is like sooo amazing, because all the, like, chickens and whatnot – you know, the pigs and everything? – will be sooo happy because now people can eat, like, meat? But it’s, like, not meat? OMG, that is so awesome!!!!!!!1″

A more level-headed review after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

SlantedScience believes that the best way to wake up on a cold and desolate Monday morning is to a bit of tongue.

Always willing to help you be the best that you can be, we once again give you the tongue… Read the rest of this entry »

If cartoons have taught us anything, it’s that household pets have an innate sense of their place in the animal hierarchy.

It’s dogs, then cats, then mice, then – at the bottom of the heap and liable to be picked on by anyone else – insufferably cutesie-cute little canaries.

But you, like us, may have often wondered how, out there in the real world, these various critters become aware of what they need and needn’t be scared of. It can’t be by experience for example: a mouse who stuck around the first time a cat comes calling would would be nothing more than a sad sack of skin on somebody’s doorstep by the second feline visit.

No, there must be some in-built mechanism, some evolved kind of interplay between the two. Turns out there is just such a thing, and it provides a lovely example of the “evolutionary warfare” between predator and prey.

And it’s all about the urine… Read the rest of this entry »

1960s cartoon show The Flintstones showed us many of the ways in which stone-age man lived.

Technologies such as bird-beak record players, pterodactyl airplanes and rock-breaking brontosauri were abundant at the time. Somehow, we lost our ability to use them, taking thousands of years to rediscover different ways of reproducing them.

And today we have news of another way in which stone-age man was way ahead of his time: the discovery of an ancient stone phallus which was used for striking flints and…you know.

As a “treat-seat” for the ladies. Read the rest of this entry »

Cheer up, smokers!

Yes, you will almost certainly die from a condition related to smoking.

Yes, your breath is noxious and it makes your reflection wince when you get too close to a mirror.

Yes, in England they call cigarettes ‘fags’, so effectively you have a fag between your lips 20 times a day and that is hilarious.

BUT, your selfless efforts would appear to be crucial in preventing future oil spills like the one heading towards the Gulf coast at the moment.

So next time you light up and someone nearby starts with the fake coughing and the dramatic hand-in-front-of-face waving, tell them you’re doing it to save the environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Great news for boozers: scientists have announced that they have discovered why we get hangovers the morning after a great night out.

Well, in between our usual slurps of vodka and cranberry juice. Obviously. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know that humans can’t go on making all sorts of their daily detritus from plastic.

Which has left that guy on the left feeling rather smug. Read the rest of this entry »