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here are few things more stressful than waiting for exam results, hoping and praying that you get the grades you desperately want: an 'F' in every subject. Please please please please.

Yay! Prayer works. An entire college received the score I wanted them to get when academic results were announced last week: 'Distinctions: zero. Passes: zero. Fails: 100 percent.'

Done it again. The Junior Science College in the town of Jeerango in India's Orissa state has become mildly famous for failing to get a single student through the science exam since it opened in 2008. The just-announced 2013 score gives them five years of total failure, the Times of India reported. You have to admire their consistency.

Why celebrate? Because the college lacks certain useful facilities, such as electricity. This makes their computers less useful. The more headlines this school makes, the more likely the government will actually do something about it.

At almost exactly the same time, people in China had the opposite problem: too much functioning technology. An official exam invigilator in Zhongxiang, Hubei, refused to accept large stacks of banknotes in return for letting students use their iPhones to find answers, the Beijing News reported. A furious mob of parents and students accused him of the heinous crime of Not Behaving Like a Chinese Official. I guess they have a point.

Chinese officials can be naughty. While the government there was making its usual claims to have a free press, a journalist leaked a secret memo issued last week by the State Council Information Office about the wife of the President: 'All websites are asked to immediately find and remove images of Peng Liyuan taking a picture with her cell phone.' Why the panic? Peng has an iPhone 5, but you didn't read that here, since it's a secret. The authorities have a strict policy of verbally trashing all Apple products. No one knows why, but one reader has a theory that Samsung has secretly purchased the entire government of China as part of its marketing plan for the Galaxy S4. This is utterly unbelievable, so is probably true.

But going back to academia, did you read about that professor in Sri Lanka who claimed to have found a fossilized germ on a meteorite, proving that there's life in outer space? I was under the impression that this fact had already been confirmed by important pieces of scientific literature, such as Action Comics No. 1: The Origin of Superman. But what do I know?

On a related subject, the biggest scientific mystery of this year so far has just been solved. In February, a flock of char-grilled pigeons landed on a grassy bank in the UK countryside and set fire to it. Where did they come from?

A UK newspaper found a witness who revealed what had happened. A large flock of birds landed on an electricity cable. When the 615th pigeon landed, the wire touched the one below and the flock was instantly barbecued. You see, there's a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation for everything.

Such as the fact that trainee scientists won't achieve much with their computers if they have no electricity.

The writer is a columnist and journalist.