Slanted Science

Archive for the ‘Good News For Bad People’ Category

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 »

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 »

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’re not sure why, but everybody is reporting today on the Dutch scientists who have created meat within a lab culture system. First as always, we reported this in November last year. So here’s a re-post for ya:

Great news for vegetarians who miss the taste of meat: in a few years, you may be able to chow down on a slice of bacon or two with a clean conscience. Scientists report today the first ever production of a piece of meat grown entirely in vitro.

Where next with this? May we suggest co-culturing a piece of pork with a pair of pigeon wings? Hey presto: flying pigs. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientific breakthroughs have traditionally been announced to the world at serious, prestigious conferences to an audience of bookish old men dressed in tweed.

So kudos to Douglas Hines, who last week made his big proclamation at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, presumably to an audience of sweaty perverts wearing heavily-stained underpants.

And his revolutionary scientific advance? Why, only a life-sized robotic girlfriend with artificial intelligence and the ability to speak.

What? It was hardly going to be a cure for cancer, now was it? Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes scientists test our faith in their infallibility: see the mess of Climategate for a recent example. Other times, we read a story which makes us want to find the nearest boffin and give them a big old hug.

A sloppy, leering, drunken hug. Read the rest of this entry »

A large collaborative effort has sequenced the entire genomes of two of the most common cancer types: skin (‘melanoma‘) and lung (‘small-cell lung cancer)’. The scientists involved report tens of thousands of mutations in the tumors’ genomes, and speculate that their work may expedite the development of specific drugs to treat these diseases.

Hoorah!

Read the rest of this entry »

These are strange times. On the one hand, mankind is photographing individual molecules, smashing space rockets into the moon and flinging together sub-atomic particles in the hope of observing the most fundamental units of our universe.

And on the other: they’re barring a guy from taking elected office in the USA because he doesn’t believe in gods.

Jesus, as they say, wept. Read the rest of this entry »