Twelve news stories you might have missed from the science pages this week…
Most Animal Extinctions Suicides
ANIMALS are wantonly killing themselves say scientists working at Nizhny Novgorod State University in Russia.
‘We realised something was up when thousands of mink raided a chemist in Murmansk in North Russia, and consumed every Zolpidem pill they could get their paws on’, said Dr Evgenia Chubarova, head of Zoology, ‘but since then we have discovered that blue-throated macaw are flying head-first into the ground, populations of salamander are rolling around in stolen salt and herds of wild water buffalo are just walking bleakly into the ocean’.
‘Human activity is to blame’, said Dr Chubarova, ‘but it seems that when animals arrive at a critical point, they reach a collective conclusion that it’s better to just have done with it all’.
A suicide note left by the last Sumatran Orangutan seemed to confirm Chubarova’s assessment. Scratched in the sand where it had run itself through with a sharpened stick were the words ‘sod it all, and sod the bloody lot of you’.
Gene Found for Slight Anxiety About Clothes Moths
A HUGE NUMBER of new genes have been discovered by biologists working at Harvard’s Department of Genetics. These include a gene which indicates a propensity for publicly belittling one’s partner, a gene for being unlikely to meet mortgage repayments, a gene for being unable to pick up hints that the conversation is over, a gene for making specious arguments to defend one’s mediocre tastes, a gene for being irritated by any conversation that threatens to veer into existential realms one has a mortal terror of entering, a gene for interpreting sex one regrets as ‘rape’, a gene for not washing enough, a gene for being unable to bleed your radiators and, ironically enough, a gene for blaming all your weaknesses, faults and vices on genes.
Numbers Emerge from Biscuits
SCIENTISTS this week discovered that rearranging the atomic structure of biscuits in a certain way gives rise to numbers. ‘We don’t yet know how it happens’, reported Seth Trandle of Edinburgh University, ‘but it undoubtedly follows the same principles as mind being an emergent property of body and complex ethics spontaneously erupting from some brands of mayonnaise’.
Professor Trandle plans to build a life-size model of the Velvet Underground in clay, in order to see if he can make it record another decent album.
Particle Discovered that Means ‘Rich Should Have it All’
PARTICLE-PHYSICISTS working at Imperial College, London, have discovered that extreme social inequality is literally written into the fabric of the universe.
‘Darwin taught us that sublime art, altruism and love are illusions and that, at the end of the day, only selfish groupthink and naked power really matter’, said top-man Professor Bim Feegle, ‘but now we have discovered, by analysing tiny bits of quantum particles, that the universe itself is a giant Ponzi scheme that funnels money into the pockets of CEOs, shareholders, bankers, senior managers, wealthy rock-stars, landlords and elite-educated professionals’.
The top 10% of wealth-holders, on hearing the news that their lives accord with the fundamental nature of reality, ran leaping into the streets, pumping the air with their fists, shouting ‘yeah! yeah! yeah!’
Triangles Feel Pain
NORWEGIAN scientists have proven that shapes are at least partially conscious. Thor Birkeland and his team at the NTNU have found that triangles are touchy, easily angered, passionate and cerebral, circles are passive, nurturing and given to guilt and self-doubt and squares are stubborn, practical, ambitious and have insatiable appetites, for both food and sex. Experimenters will turn their attentions next to rhomboids and composites.
Torturing Babies Makes Them Cry
IF YOU TORTURE babies, they cry, and if you subject them to enough pain, they scream, so scientists working at Cambridge University have discovered in a landmark study. ‘This confirms what we’d already suspected,’ said Fergus Stanmore, ‘but had yet to confirm in the lab.’
Stanmore, whose previous papers demonstrate, beyond all doubt, that baby mammals separated from their parents become depressed, monkeys allowed to self-administer cocaine become crazed, smartphones make people unhappier, nature reduces your stress levels and a poor diet makes you ill is currently seeking to experimentally verify whether people living in a collapsing civilisation have a tendency to go completely doolally.