The great boom in crappy ideas

This week I have great news for those among you who think that science sucks I know yoursquore out there because you didnrsquot get vaccinated you pop Ivermectin and you donrsquot wear masks Well you win Science is not doing very well at all it has been in decline for quite a while You were just among the first to realise itHow do I know this Because apparently there just arenrsquot that many new ideas coming up through research these days The good old days when something mindblowing in a scientific paper would reveal something nobody knew and lead to a slew of stunning breakthroughsmdashwell those days are disappearing fastTo come to this conclusion three scientists Michael Park Erin Leahey and Russell J Funk analysed six decades of data covering 45thinspmillion papers and 39thinspmillion patents They ranked papers on a scale of whether they were Consolidative reconfirming what was already known or Disruptive upending existing knowledge replacing old rules with new ones Einsteinrsquos General Theory of Relativity was disruptive So was Watson and Crickrsquos discovery of the structure of the human DNABetween 1945 and 2010 the disruptiveness of scientific papers fell 919 per cent in the Social Sciences and 100 per cent for Physical Sciences New patents dropped 787 per cent for Computers and Communications and 915 per cent for Drugs and MedicalAlso Read Aussies lack spine and prideWhy Because therersquos just too much knowledge around Google and ChatGPT know everything Finding something new that no one knows requires too much education and expertise and too much fundingDrowning in instant knowledge scientists everywhere are wading through the same millions of papers scrabbling to find something unresearched A bit like trying to decide which Netflix movie to streamSince a scientific paper is evaluated by the number of times it is cited itrsquos safer to confirm old knowledge than to rock the boat with new knowledge There are more incentives for incremental science rather than highrisk projects that ldquoare more likely to fail but which are the fuel for future breakthroughsrdquo according to a 2020 studyDonrsquot get awed by recent discoveries like the COVID19 vaccines and nuclear fusion technology Theyrsquore outliers in a world of diminishing research the bulk of todayrsquos science is warmed up leftoversYoursquore probably wondering what trivial pointless crap theyrsquore studying these days Here are some peeks into some recent wingdingersThe bigger a doorknob the more fingers you will need to grab it Japanese industrial design researchers discovered this mindbending fact by asking 32 participants to turn 47 assorted doorknobs Who knewVanilla essence can be extracted from cow pats In what can only be described as a breathstopping victory for cowworshippers a group of Japanese scientists found that vanillin the flavouring and aromatic compound extracted from the vanilla bean can be extracted just as easily by cooking cow poop The boffins took a gram of cow pat with some water and heated it in a reactor up to 300degC under high pressure for 60 minutes analysing the chemical composition of the sludge with a gas chromatograph At 200degC they hit gold and detected vanillin A single gram of cow dung is good for 50 micrograms of vanilla Great successFour hundred and twenty seven different species of bacteria live and thrive on chewedup chewing gum on the streets of Singapore This is a stunning win for that city making it a world leader in bacterial colonisation of chewing gum The research involved collecting eight different kinds of chewedup chewing gum from the streets of Greece France Spain Turkey and Singapore and extracting genetic information from an advanced sequencing processIf the earth was made of blueberries things would go badly This planetchanging research comes to us from Oxford Universityrsquos Future of Humanity Institute If our planet was somehow replaced in an instant with an equal volume of closely packed but uncompressed blueberries physics as we know it would come unhinged In the drastically reduced gravity of Planet Blueberry yoursquod weigh about 87 per cent less While you rejoiced the berries would collapse under their own weight squeezing out the interberry air The berries would implode eventually creating a planet of blueberry jam that would heat up to 143degC as the collapse continued Oceans of boiling jam would form turning the atmosphere fruity and blueMore gems mdash People who think they have smelly feet do and those that donrsquot donrsquotKnives made of frozen poop donrsquot work very wellUranus smells like rotten eggsMy favourite research breakthrough is in a league by itself the kind of topic only a complete geniusmdashor unutterable idiotmdashcould have thought of Logitech launched a Global Remote Control Trends study spending tens of thousands of dollars to probe the number one question that haunts us all where is that darned remote The findings were eyepoppingTherersquos a nearly 50 per cent chance that your TV remote is stuck between the sofa cushionsYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper