Friday, June 5, 2009

In science we trust

Welcome back. Now that dust is settled - and mudslinging has started - with two of my favourite subjects – IPL*, this week I will analyze things that are happening in my other area of interest – scientific inventions, innovations and discoveries. We will look at few ground breaking discoveries that happened in recent past that couldn’t reach a larger section of humanity because of not being mentioned in popular news-analysis column like this blog**.

What I really like about scientists and researchers is that given a chance they will study and discover anything, including the fact that men will enjoy watching videos of hot women anytime, even while they are making important decisions on soda, candy, money etc. I’ve no doubt the discovery is a ground breaking one, except that I would add peanuts to that list of important things.

Here is another example - According to this study, women use more active head motion when conversing with each other than men use when they talk with each other. Now some of you – especially those with poor scientific outlook - might ask how this discovery will be useful to humankind. I would say the benefits are multifold. For example, it is now possible for us to find out whether we are talking to a man or a woman just by looking at their head movements. Had this been known earlier, such catastrophes could have been avoided.

The next research finding that I would like to bring your attention to is one that breaks all conventional theories on human evolution; again is on the same subject of men and women. Btw, from my observation, this is the biggest subject of study for researches after pathology. Pathology leads only because they use mice and guinea pigs as subjects of study, the only two species that can yield more useful and reliable results. Back to the subject. A study done recently shows that Women are not so picky when comes to choosing a mate. Very true. If they were, I’m sure human species would have been long extinct and somebody would have been riding on our fossil fuel by now.

Here is another snippet from the academic world - Panjab University is changing the name of Department of English to Department of English and Cultural Studies. Very good move indeed, of late the academia is noticing that those who get educated only in English take up jobs with TV news channels and are suffering from a syndrome known as ‘Severe Underexposure to Cultural Knowledge’(Abbreviate for convenience) which the university thinks can be eradicated through such cultural name changes.

But for me, none of the above qualify to be the most remarkable discovery in recent times, it’s that many of the scientific discoveries are fake. But I would say this one sure is not one of them.

* P for Cricket and Politics
** Current readership: 0000001

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