Compared to dark energy or fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, dark matter is not quite so daunting to explain.  It is indirectly detected through its gravitational pull on visible matter – stars and galaxies. There's a lot of it and we don't know what it's made of but scientists have their theories. And so there was some fanfare made over the results of an experiment called AMS meant to detect positrons that would theoretically be emitted if antimatter takes a particular form, called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), and these said WIMPs collide.

The experiment is also interesting because it was conceived by particle physicist Sam Ting, and because it’s flying on the International Space Station. The results were not definitive, but there was enough to work with.

I was disappointed to see little if any explanation for why the experiment flew on ISS and not some unmanned craft. Or why it was so atronomically...

[Updates with observation that Time Warner owns CNN and that a Time reporter spoke about the cancer cover story on CNN.]

Time magazine's April 1 cover story entitled "How to Cure Cancer," which I critiqued in an earlier post, praises the work of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Here are some of the things that reporters Bill Saporito and Alice Park had to say about it:

Dr. Ronald DePinho, president of MD Anderson Cancer Center, is adopting a similarly collaborative approach around what the world-renowned institute calls its Moon Shots program, assembling six multidisciplinary groups to mount comprehensive attacks on eight cancers: lung, prostate, melanoma, breast, ovarian and three types...

On Monday, The New York Times published a front-page story saying that "nearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age children over all have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," according to data from the government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The story, by Alan Schwarz and Sarah Cohen with reporting contributed by Allison Kopicki, did not say that the figures came from an announcement or publication by the CDC. It said that the Times had "obtained the raw data from the agency and compiled the results" itself.

That's tricky. The CDC could make a mistake compiling and interpreting its own data; such things...

(English intro to Spanish lang post) India’s Supreme Court rejected Novartis’s patent claim on a modified version of anticancer drug Gleevec, arguing that it is a minor modification of the original imatinib drug, and that Gleevec “fails in both the tests of invention and patentability”. The resolution has been celebrated in all Spanish speaking media as a protection to the production of generic (and affordable to poor Nations) medicines in India. We’ve read plenty of stories in Latin America and Spain. Many mention the tactic known as “evergreening” (to extend patent life by making minor modifications to the drug). Only a few of the stories include opinions from Big pharma representatives. The best reporting is from El Pais, which a set of three stories giving a great context to the case and showing...

On Saturday, The New York Times published an obituary for Yvonne Brill, 88, a scientist famed as a pioneering woman in the United States' rocket system programs and as the inventor, in the 1970s, of a critical propulsion system to keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

The lead, however, didn't mention any of that. It read: "She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise children. 'The world's best mom,' her son Matthew said.' And in case you - like so many of us - found that wrong-headed in the extreme, that's also a lead that's disappeared. If you call up that obit today, you won't find that opening paragraph. The stroganoff bit has been replaced by a different description, that of 'brilliant...

Jane Goodall reportedly plagiarized much of her new book, “Seeds of Hope” and, worse still, included quotes from an interview that the interviewee said he doesn't remember.

The coverage of the scandal was mostly deferential. The Washington Post broke the news in a story by Steven Levingston, who wrote that problems with the book came to the paper’s attention through a botanist commissioned to review it. A few other stories followed, and then at the Daily Beast, Michael Moynihan took an unsparing look at the book and at his fellow journalists for failing to state clearly what was wrong with it. (I believe this must be the same Michael Moynihan who pointed out Jonah Lehrer’s fabricated Bob Dylan quote.)

In the Post story, Levingston noted some passages...

[Disclosure: I am on the board of the Science Friday Initiative, which produces Science Friday, and I am a guest on the program from time to time.]

NPR announced this morning on its blog that it is canceling its 21-year-old afternoon news program Talk of the Nation, effective July 1. But host Ira Flatow and Science Friday, which fills a Talk of the Nation time slot, will continue to broadcast at the usual time--from 2-4pm Eastern time on Fridays, according to a statement.

"We see this is a terrific opportunity for us," said Danielle M. Dana, executive director of the Science Friday Initiative, in an email to the organization's board members. "We’ve spent 22 years making excellent, award-...