An interesting blog post about the recent discovery that our galaxy “smells of raspberries” (and rum, though whether man rum or lady rum is unspecified).
The blog asks: given the irrelevance of that ‘fact’ to astronomy, should it have been reported? The German astronomers are quick to distance themselves from the raspberry herring: but if the angle doesn’t obscure the story (galaxy contains very complex molecules), then where’s the harm? The people who only take away the raspberry factoid probably wouldn’t have encountered – or absorbed much of – a drier, flavour-free story. They’re the informational equivalent of the people who download a track illegally which they would never have bought anyway: any loss they’ve caused is purely rhetorical.