Apparently the brain is not the only organ that’s somewhat larger in human beings than in other apes. I knew when I saw a press release from PNAS announcing a new study on penis size and female preference that this research would get some attention.
Speculation goes back at least to Jared...
Apparently the brain is not the only organ that’s somewhat larger in human beings than in other apes. I knew when I saw a press release from PNAS announcing a new study on penis size and female preference that this research would get some attention.
Speculation goes back at least to Jared Diamond’s early book, Why Sex is Fun, in which he ponders why the human member is bigger than necessary to do its job.
Biologist Brian Mautz decided it was finally time to investigate, suspecting that it had something to do with sexual selection driven by female preference. So he exposed Australian female subjects to computerized images of male figures, varying in height, body shape and penis size. They found bigger was more attractive, though there was a point of diminishing returns, and body shape was a more important factor.
Online stories appeared in...
In a little more than a week, two interesting things have turned up in the news regarding cable TV and the Internet. Yesterday, the FOX network said it would stop broadcasting its shows over the airwaves if it lost a court case involving the tech company Aereo...
In a little more than a week, two interesting things have turned up in the news regarding cable TV and the Internet. Yesterday, the FOX network said it would stop broadcasting its shows over the airwaves if it lost a court case involving the tech company Aereo. That was news because last week, a court sided with Aereo in the latest legal decision.
Now what court case was that, exactly?
In a nice, concise story by Joe Mullin yesterday, arstechnica reported that this case and other recent decisions are turning against the cable giants in favor of the upstarts. The story referred to last week's case as "the appeals court decision ruling that Aereo doesn't infringe copyright." The rest of the story said more about FOX's threat...
Sam Ting to the rescue of an intellectual legacy for ISS?
For years - since well before 1998 when the International Space Station finally started coming together in orbit thanks to heroic work by engineers and astronauts - many including yours truly have scoffed at it as a...
Sam Ting to the rescue of an intellectual legacy for ISS?
For years - since well before 1998 when the International Space Station finally started coming together in orbit thanks to heroic work by engineers and astronauts - many including yours truly have scoffed at it as a waste of money. Just to design and build it (marvelous USA Today graphic) cost around $100 billion. I can't lay hands on the operating budget, but it cannot be small. It's a waste, at least, if one scores it on scientific merit rather than as a display of mostly-US aerospace engineering prowess and dominance. Just maybe, the worm is turning. Not that this complex of solar panels, pressurized modules, and docking ports for space freighters devoted mostly to keeping a few people alive inside to run the place will go down as an entirely sensible investment. But even if automated...
Gary Schwitzer of HealthNewsReview.org has pointed me to an incisive and entertaining post by a Canadian writer who makes toast of Gwyneth...
Gary Schwitzer of HealthNewsReview.org has pointed me to an incisive and entertaining post by a Canadian writer who makes toast of Gwyneth Paltrow's new cookbook, "It's All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great."
The blogger is Julia Belluz, the senior editor at The Medical Post. The blog is Science-ish, a joint project of the Canadian publications ...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Big Pharma received several critical views in Spanish media in the last few days. The most significant one was from a popular TV program, which denounced the dishonest practices that led Spain to be Europe’s most overmedicated country. The program interviewed medical...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Big Pharma received several critical views in Spanish media in the last few days. The most significant one was from a popular TV program, which denounced the dishonest practices that led Spain to be Europe’s most overmedicated country. The program interviewed medical doctors, pharmacists, drug company salesmen, members of Spanish health care system, and representatives of the industry. It concluded that the system is not well regulated and facilitates medical doctors to prescribe unnecessary drugs, which costs millions of euros to the government. Other critical views derived from the publication of the Spanish version of Goldacre’s book “Mala Pharma”. We read remarks on issues like the hiding of negative results, marketing expenditure, conflicts of interest, and so on. These problems have been more discussed in English speaking press, but not so much in Spanish speaking countries. A third focus of criticism came...
Science News's Andrew Grant has the goods on the great NIF, which stands for National Ignition Facility which in turn is, we all know, a gigantic laser complex at the Livermore National...
Science News's Andrew Grant has the goods on the great NIF, which stands for National Ignition Facility which in turn is, we all know, a gigantic laser complex at the Livermore National Laboratory. It cost $3.5 billion dollars or so and so far has done everything (the lasers are stupendously competent) except live up to its name. Grant's cover story does not dance around the abject failure of this monster squeeze box to roundly crush hydrogen isotope- filled targets down so hot and tiny they transmute to helium and a whole lot of energy. Instead of making small spheres of instant star stuff, the lasers huff and puff perfectly as engineered but the targets smoosh and squiggle and evade the mighty machine's blow sufficiently to dance far, perhaps irredeemably far clear of fusion.
This has the whiff of scandal. Not the...
Tabitha M. Powledge collects samples of skepticism and enthusiasm regarding the administration's new BRAIN initiative in this week's On Science Blogs.
One reason it's hard to know whether to be enthusiastic or skepical is that nobody yet knows exactly...
Tabitha M. Powledge collects samples of skepticism and enthusiasm regarding the administration's new BRAIN initiative in this week's On Science Blogs.
One reason it's hard to know whether to be enthusiastic or skepical is that nobody yet knows exactly what the initiative will do, so one must rely on faith. I'm going to betray myself as an enthusiast, for two reasons. One, I think that more research is better than less research, and I don't buy the claims that big science is damaging to small science, any more that it was with the human genome project.
And the second reason is that I don't buy the now fashionable claim that neuroscience has been hyped and has been disappointing. All kinds of science gets hyped, and research is often disappointing--until it isn't. That is, nobody cares much about a monk...
As I pointed out in a recent post, Time magazine's April 1 cover story, "How to Cure Cancer," is sure to raise false hopes among people grappling with cancer. It must also be devastating to those who...
As I pointed out in a recent post, Time magazine's April 1 cover story, "How to Cure Cancer," is sure to raise false hopes among people grappling with cancer. It must also be devastating to those who have just lost someone to cancer, and who might now think that their lost loved one just missed being cured.
In a second post, I wrote that Time violated industry guidelines by running a full-page ad for M.D. Anderson in the middle of the story--a story that extravagantly praises the work of M.D. Anderson. The guidelines, devised by the American Society of Magazine Editors, specify that an ad should not run next to editorial copy that touts the same things touted in the ad. More importantly, I wrote, Time's ad placement created the impression that it wrote the story...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) NYT had a story yesterday about Peruvian glaciers melting due to the rise of global temperatures. Interestingly, in Peruvian press we read stories covering a study done by the Peruvian Institute of Geophysics suggesting that tourism is the main cause of the ice loss of a...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) NYT had a story yesterday about Peruvian glaciers melting due to the rise of global temperatures. Interestingly, in Peruvian press we read stories covering a study done by the Peruvian Institute of Geophysics suggesting that tourism is the main cause of the ice loss of a specific glacier in Huaytapallana Mountain. The hypothesis is interesting. We’ve sent a quick email to an expert on glacier’s melting and said that ice fragmentation by tourism –especially if there’s motor activity involved- could indeed influence the speed of ice loss. The study probably deserves to be analyzed carefully, and opinions of other researchers are needed. But unfortunately Peruvian reporters have been very simplistic in their coverage. We think that they didn’t realize how interesting the topic could be, and that they missed the opportunity to write a solid story about it.
We comment also in two controversial...
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...
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...
On Tuesday, President Obama announced in the East Room of the White House that he would propose investments in what he's calling the BRAIN initiative, "giving scientists the tools...
On Tuesday, President Obama announced in the East Room of the White House that he would propose investments in what he's calling the BRAIN initiative, "giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be -- will be -- transformative." Such a project could also "explain all kinds of things that go on in Washington," he cracked. "Maybe we could prescribe something."
In making the case for the BRAIN initiative--"BRAIN" is an acronym for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies--Obama said, "E...
[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,...
[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...
When I was looking for my first journalism job, I did my best to scrape together a clip here and there. Every time I got a new one, I sent it with my resume to all the suburban papers around Boston, where I lived at the time. For the first couple of years, nobody replied.
Then I got a call from a fellow who...
When I was looking for my first journalism job, I did my best to scrape together a clip here and there. Every time I got a new one, I sent it with my resume to all the suburban papers around Boston, where I lived at the time. For the first couple of years, nobody replied.
Then I got a call from a fellow who identified himself as the city editor at the Lowell Sun. He invited me in for an interview. Why? "We had five copies of your resume in the file, and we decided we had to either hire you or get rid of you. We don't have any more room."
I did get hired, but not on the staff. I was given a halftime position with no benefits, at a rate of $100 per week. I was told that if I worked 40-50 hours a week in my "halftime" position, and if I did a spectacular job, they might--might--hire me as a regular staffer. It took me about a year to get hired.
It has always been tough to break in to journalism. And it's tough...
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...
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...
On Sunday, March 31, The New York Times published a dramatic indictment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Written by Ian Urbina...
On Sunday, March 31, The New York Times published a dramatic indictment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Written by Ian Urbina, the story revealed OSHA to be essentially powerless in dealing with working conditions that threaten workers' health and lives. Much of the story dealt with Royale Comfort Seating in North Carolina, and its unwillingness to stop using a dangerous chemical known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB.
Dean Starkman, who runs The Audit, the business-news section of the Columbia Journalism Review, found the series "magisterial" and "a great example of agenda-setting public-interest reporting of a kind that, sad to say, is becoming increasingly scarce among mainstream business news outlets...
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