19 December 2004 Blog Home : December 2004 : Permalink
Through the usual pottering around looking at this and that I have discovered an excellent column in the Grauniad which is dedicated to the crap science that shows up in British newspapers. It has been added to my blogroll on the right (in the news section) and looks well worth a weekly visit.
This week they announced their awards for 2004. The result is both a tragic llustration of the sad state of scientific knowledge and sidesplittingly funny. Just a short teaser or two
Firstly the prize categories
And secondly the winner in the "Least Plausible Cosmetics Claim" category, which was not surprisingly one of the more hotly contested categories.
[T]he winner was a hair-straightening treatment by Bioionic, called Ionic Hair Retexturizing: "Water molecules are broken down to a fraction of their previous size ... diminutive enough to penetrate through the cuticle, and eventually into the core of each hair". Shrinking molecules caused some concern among the physicists at the ceremony, since IHR was available just 200 yards away, and the only other groups who have managed to create superdense quark-gluon plasma used a relativistic heavy ion collider. The prospect of such equipment being used by hairdressers was deemed worthy of further investigation.
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(I have spent some of the weekend listening to the original BBC Radio Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ... and now have the Sirius Cybernetic Corporations product jingle on the brain)