Guardian readers can have little idea how dreadful the general coverage of science stories is in the British press. All distinction vanishes between chemists, social scientists, particle physicists, snail taxonomists, people who chop the heads of little chickens with giant scissors - they're all "scientists".

All 'scientists' have one task. The Daily Mail subscribes to a radically simplified version of the atomic theory and everyone else tries to follow. According to this theory everything in the world is made from two kinds of basic substance: those that cure cancer, and those that cause it. The job of a scientist is to go through the world classifying everything into one category or the other. Every time something is identified as made of one sort of atom or the other, we have a story, preferably a scandal.

NP: Cafe Del Mar Volume 1