Belfast Telegraph

Friday 26 December 2014

Science can make even cucumbers lose their cool

The cucumber is innocent. It was the bean sprouts that done it.

The Spanish cucumber can once again raise its sombrero-ed little head with pride after tests appear to have revealed that Germany's E.coli outbreak was down to homegrown bean sprouts.

In the time it has taken German authorities to come to this conclusion Spanish produce has been dumped wholesale, the country's vegetable industry has been badly hit and relations between the two countries seriously damaged.

"We are indignant, angry, furious and everything else imaginable," is how one Spanish farmer succinctly puts it.

Who to blame for the fiasco? Isn't science supposed to save us from this sort of confusion? Or is it now part of the problem?

Elsewhere in Europe, at CERN, HQ of the Large Haldron gadget, scientists are currently busy trying to trap anti-matter.

You might think this sounds like the sort of stuff you could get from diseased bean sprouts, but actually it is worse.

Much, much worse.

Anti-matter is the complete opposite of matter and apparently when the two meet they destroy each other.

It's like Jordan and Peter Andre, only even more explosive.

Bottle enough of this anti-matter stuff and we're all history. So let's hope the CERN staff know what they're doing.

Of course there may already be some small dollops of anti-matter already out there making its corrosive presence felt.

How else to explain Simon Cowell's droopy, dodgy eye?


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