Note to scientists: Don’t make witty remarks at the ends of your serious papers without being sure any press release writer that chews on it doesn’t get thrown too far off course. Also, if you the author happens to be permitted to write the press release yourself check with an experienced press officer to be sure you didn’t get taken away with your own humor. One of those alternatives apparently happened here…
This morning ksjtracker received from a reader a note exclaiming this is the most misleading press release that he had ever seen ever emitted by a respectable organization :
- American Chemical Society: Could ‘advanced’ dinosaurs rule other planets?;
Please know that the dinosaur japery comes up as a tag line on the paper. Its body deals entirely with sober discussion of hypotheses to explain why life on Earth relies on a certain common orientation in such biomolecules as amino acids – which chemically are as happy having a so-called left handed as a right handed ‘chirality’ in how their parts are strung together. On Earth left-handed is the norm. Of course it’s not so in baseball, handwriting, and such things as that. Being a lefty has made that a personal matter for me.
This looks to me to be a misdemeanor at most. A misstep yes, but an amusing one. I cannot find any outlets other than mindless aggregators that took this angle seriously as the way to deliver the news – unless the news is the angle itself, not the science. Here are a few outlets that, while not so well known, did see the joke for what it is.
Stories:
- TG Daily: Claim: Advanced dinosaurs may rule other planets ; Somebody there notes that Exactly This Scenario did happen! On Star Trek’s USS Voyager shows.
- The Awl – Choire Sicha: Do Super-Intelligent Dinosaurs Roam Space? One Scientist thinks so ; In which one finds this immortal line : “Okay, scientists, now you’re just screwing with us…”
- io9 – Cyriaque Lamar (with credit to The Awl) : Dinosaurs: This is the greatest closing paragraph to a scientific paper ever ;
Grist for the Mill: Full Paper: Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth ;
– Charlie Petit
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