Wednesday, April 11

Chemistry news: Santorum (St) reaches melting point

Rick Santorum surprised America by dropping out of the Republican race to the presidential election in November, in which he was been losing ground to Mitt Romney. It's almost a law of physics: the more you repeat ‘no’ the closer you are to say ‘yes’. The hardness of moral principles is not enough to make a solid person, no matter how harsh and uncompromising they are, and the chance of losing at home in Pennsylvania can scare any elephant. As for multimillionaire Romney, he can finally take a deep breath and stop pretending to care about moral issues, the poor and all that humanitarian crap. He has made quite an effort to appear to have a heart; we even feared he might suffer a wallet stroke.

New iPhone app lets you talk to extraterrestrials

Kepler telescope moves on the Earth’s orbit since 2009 trying to find habitable planets in other solar systems, and it already found around 2300 candidates. Users of iPhone and iPad now have a free available app that allows them to come into contact to these distant worlds. With the extraordinary power of the Internet and social networks, we might expect that now we will know not only whether there is life on these planets or not, but also what aliens eat for breakfast, what they do on weekends, what brands of clothing they wear, etc. Yes, because scientists can build the communication devices, but they’re unable to have a normal conversation, even with human beings who live next to them every day.

Monday, April 9

Pope’s technique to spread peace is to put everybody to sleep

Being conservative has the great advantage of never having the work of creating new ideas and thinking on a new discourse. In his Easter speeches, year after year, the Pope urges countries at war to make peace, in a repetitive clockwork style. Last year was Libya, this year is Syria and Mali, next year will be Israel and Iran, and so on. Reporters love this, as they may use the reports from the previous year, changing only the names, without even listening to the speech. Of course this practice reduces the impact of the Pope’s intervention to nothing, but it has the advantage of not distracting people with ideas, when they’re trying to contemplate the decor of St. Peter's Square and the clergymen’s beautiful outfits.