See also
Clarke's first law, and Asimov's corollary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
Arthur C. Clarke in the essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" (1962):
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Isaac Asimov, no cite:
"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion – the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right."
One also thinks of the claim - although it is doubtful that it's a claim ever seriously made, in any sense of "serious" - that scientifically, a bumblebee isn't able to fly. What isn't controversial is that scientists are still discovering new ways in which insect muscles are extra efficient, or their wings create special vortices in air, and so forth, that don't occur in passenger aircraft design, nor do you want them to so occur, really. For one thing, you would get aeroplane noise that is ten times more annoying than it already is, and it's a fairly rough ride...
In the present case, I expect the Japanese immediately to investigate whether these rare earths are also found concentrated in whale carcases.
Their "scientific" interest in whales - that's food science - seems to be undimmed in the light of discovering that since the tsunami and the nuclear incident, they're getting radioactive whales. It's only a little bit radioactive, and if the Japanese were as worried about radioactivity as that then they'd have had to leave, in 1945.