New element discovered

Scientists Discover Most Boring Substance Ever

A team of researchers working at CERN, the European centre for nuclear research, are celebrating hardly at all following their recent discovery of "the most boring substance in the known universe".

Scientists have known for many years that some chemical elements possess far more interesting properties than others (Beryllium, for example, is widely regarded as "tiresome crap" by the professional chemists who work with it) though it's only relatively recently that "hyper-tedious substances" have become the focus of serious scientific research.

Image caption: Whatever...

Early attempts to synthesize such substances were hampered by the problem of containment: Exposure to just a few atoms of an HTS can result in a lab technician not being arsed to finish the experiment.

The researchers at CERN claim to have solved this problem by storing such substances inside a storage vessel constructed out of extremely interesting material such as Higgs bosons, super strings or whatever's currently happening on East Enders.

Though the exact details of the CERN experiment are too monotonous to recount in a family publication, we can reveal that it involved taking a sample of very pure Boron and bombarding it with a stream of highly unexciting particles known as tedions - over and over and over again.

The new element eventually produced (christened "Tedium" by scientists, when they could finally be bothered to think of a name) is said to be so boring that it cannot be seen by the naked eye.

According to Professor Saul Eggs, head of experimental tediology at Dronfield University, just one thousandth of an ounce of the new substance would be as dull as watching over two hundred cubic light-years of paint drying over a period of several aeons, or working for three years as a mainframe programmer for a well known insurance company.

Practical applications for the new element are likely to be few and far between but that hasn't stopped the American Department of Defense from apparently choosing to base their next generation of "stealth" weapons systems on hyper-tedious technology.

If a recently leaked document is to believed, the department plans to develop an aircraft which is perfectly visible to conventional radar but which no one can actually be bothered to shoot down.