CNN reports that Japanese scientists have invented a microscopic bowl of ramen noodle soup.

Well done Professor Masayuki Nakao! This will really kick start the cure for AIDS!

What’s that you say? It won’t help in the fight against AIDS?

Oh. Well surely cancer! How about cancer?

No?

The flu? Baldness? Foot odor?

Huh. Apparently the “project was aimed at developing nanotube-processing technology”. Why we need nanotubes (pretending for a moment I even know what they are) and how processing them can help the world is not explained. It probably doesn’t mean anything. They probably just made those words up.

Why can’t they just be honest about it? Either Prof. Nakao got caught up in a bet, or his students tricked him into making it a school project. They probably thought it would be funny to spend their entire semester making a microscopic ramen bowl.

But it isn’t funny. There are a lot of starving people in the world, and turning their food microscopic is just rude.

What really amused me about this article, though, is CNN’s headline. “Microscopic ramen bowl believed to be world’s smallest”. “Believed“?

Are there lots of uselessly small ramen bowls being made?