The press in my country is simply pathetic. I think 99% percent of the articles are copies from those reported by agencies. The worst part is that journalists just translate and transpose the articles into the paper (normaly with a lot of mistakes). They never take five minutes to call some expert to corroborate what they are writing. In Chili journalits study as minimum 5 years!!!! I wonder what the hell did they do during that huge lapse of time?!!!
This time, the source of my anger is an article appeared not long time ago in almost all newspapers . The funniest headline said something like: “Scientists found a neuron that responds only to the beauty of Jennifer Aniston” (ok, that newspaper is not the best example of the source in which you are going to look for real information, but the headlines of the more “serious” newspapers pointed in the same direction ).
I mean, Holy cow! We are in front of something really big here. God created a neuron for recognize Jennifer Aniston!!! That is the best probe of creationism… Evolution doesn’t now Miss Aniston, therefore God is the only one who could prapare our brains for the arrival of this talented actress!!!
Being a little more serious, I strongly support the idea of leaving more space for science. Actually, scientists are usually looked like bizarre humanoids behind thick glasses, and science like some kind of “too-complicated-thing” to even think to watch it on tv. Science is most of the time interesting and could be funny (ok, the recomendation is a little biased ), but no in that way. Usually media caricature science and don’t take the knowledge popularization as something serious. It is really important showing to the people what scientsts are doing because two main reasons; the first one ,most of the funds for sciences come from the citizens taxes, and second, when you know a little more about biology or physics an universal truth is revealed to you, and that is simply fantastic.
In countries like France or USA you cand find amazing tv documentaries made by really noted scientists and they have big audiences. Why in my country they can’t try something better? I remember las time I watched a good chilean scientific tv show it was ‘World 84′ (yes, in the same year!).
It was not the aim of this post to comment the research behind `jennifer’s neuron, I promess there will come soon another post about Dr. Quiroga ‘s work with Aniston face.
