Correction: The Joseph Mercola piece on fluoride first appeared in January. Last week was when I first learned he was a regular blogger for the Huffington Post, which in itself seemed worth a Tracker entry.
One of the things I like and will miss about newspapers is the systematic way they separate news...
Correction: The Joseph Mercola piece on fluoride first appeared in January. Last week was when I first learned he was a regular blogger for the Huffington Post, which in itself seemed worth a Tracker entry.
One of the things I like and will miss about newspapers is the systematic way they separate news and features from op-ed pieces. And while the op-ed pages give people a voice, they were distinct from the stories gathered by staff writers who were paid not to voice their opinions but to go out and check into things. And if you had an agenda or something you wanted to sell, you could pay to take out an ad.
Enter The Huffington Post, which featured this offering by Joseph Mercola: Harvard Study Confirms Fluoride Reduces Children’s IQ.
I first came across Mercola – apparently medical doctor - a few years ago when someone started...
People hate it when the doctors and medical reporters give them conflicting signals on what they should or shouldn’t eat. The press certainly met the public’s low expectations this week, with Healthday admonishing us that “Most Americans Should Eat Less Salt,” The New York Times...
People hate it when the doctors and medical reporters give them conflicting signals on what they should or shouldn’t eat. The press certainly met the public’s low expectations this week, with Healthday admonishing us that “Most Americans Should Eat Less Salt,” The New York Times reporting that there’s "No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet,” and The New York Daily News advising us to “Go Ahead and Order that Side of Fries.” All these, remarkably, stemmed from the very same Institute of Medicine report.
Many stories quoted “experts” saying they stand by old recommendations that we should aim for no more than 1500 mg a day, but the Times actually quotes the chair of the IOM report saying that some people may suffer risks if they get less than 2,300 mg a day. Those risks include “...
A paper released in Nature this week had all the elements of a good science story. An odd little plant called a carnivorous bladderwort was found to have almost none of the so-called junk DNA that makes up the bulk of other...
A paper released in Nature this week had all the elements of a good science story. An odd little plant called a carnivorous bladderwort was found to have almost none of the so-called junk DNA that makes up the bulk of other organisms’ genomes. The human genome is more than 98% noncoding “junk.”
This pretty little killer plant offered a nice hook for delving into what has become one of the more contentious debates in biology – what does all this noncoding DNA do, if anything?
I thought more people would pick up on the story, but the Nature press materials didn’t include it among the findings that got a blurb. At LiveScience, Tia Ghose covered it, and her story got picked up on a number of other news sites, including NBCnews.com.
But the story is...
Few creatures stir the imagination like the coelacanth. Scientists thought it had been extinct for millions of years, and then in the 1930s, a specimen seemed to have swum from the Devonian right into a fisherman’s net.
Now scientists have finally sequenced the genome of this elusive, primitive looking...
Few creatures stir the imagination like the coelacanth. Scientists thought it had been extinct for millions of years, and then in the 1930s, a specimen seemed to have swum from the Devonian right into a fisherman’s net.
Now scientists have finally sequenced the genome of this elusive, primitive looking creature to find out how slowly it’s really evolved, and to discern its relationship to those fish that dragged themselves onto land and became our ancestors. The news was announced in a paper in Nature.
At the LA Times, Eryn Brown covered the advance in this story, which told us that it was difficult to get DNA from this highly endangered fish but not how they finally did it. How does one go about getting a DNA sample from a five-...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Last week, an announcement went around about a new paper showing that women decline science/math jobs because we have more options. Right away I was eager to see how the press would cover it. As we learned from the Larry Summers incident a few years ago, discussing gender imbalances in certain technical professions...
Last week, an announcement went around about a new paper showing that women decline science/math jobs because we have more options. Right away I was eager to see how the press would cover it. As we learned from the Larry Summers incident a few years ago, discussing gender imbalances in certain technical professions can be politically explosive.
And the topic is close to home for me and probably many other readers of this site who turned away from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers in favor of journalism.
The study, published in Psychological Science, involved nearly 1500 college bound seniors who were first surveyed in high school and later at the age of 33. The researchers reportedly looked at SAT scores and surveyed their subjects about beliefs, values and occupations.
The conclusion: People of both sexes who...
A handful of pieces that ran last week describing the first proof of “reverse evolution” were so confusing and odd that I had to send them to some biologists I know for a reality check.
What I found weird was that the pieces described the loss of a previously adaptive trait as some sort of...
A handful of pieces that ran last week describing the first proof of “reverse evolution” were so confusing and odd that I had to send them to some biologists I know for a reality check.
What I found weird was that the pieces described the loss of a previously adaptive trait as some sort of shocker. In this latest case, scientists from the University of Michigan found that dust mites had gone from being parasitic to free-living, the change allegedly being surprising because the parasitic mites were thought to have evolved from a free-living ancestor.
The loss of a trait didn’t seems surprising to me, but maybe it was to biologists. It wasn't to the ones I consulted.
Scientists have understood since Darwin that evolution is not an ascent up a ladder – it’s a process of adaptation to local environments (and some random drift.) The notion of “devolution” doesn’t make much sense in light of our...
Like many complicated concepts in science, the Higgs Boson is a challenge to explain, both for journalists and the scientists who try to help us. It would be a lot simpler if it were generally accepted that the Higgs Boson was important because it caused the big bang. If that were true it would seem almost...
Like many complicated concepts in science, the Higgs Boson is a challenge to explain, both for journalists and the scientists who try to help us. It would be a lot simpler if it were generally accepted that the Higgs Boson was important because it caused the big bang. If that were true it would seem almost justified to call it the God particle.
In a recent Tracker post I expressed surprise that CBS News made the big bang claim in this news story. I wondered where the author got this idea, since there was no direct attribution:
The Higgs boson is often called "the God particle" because it's said to be what caused the "Big Bang" that created our universe many years ago. The nickname caught on so quickly (even though scientists...
Update/Correction: Physicists Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler have pointed out that one physicist out there does claim that the Higgs Boson caused the big bang. That's Michio Kaku. Strassler and Carroll both disagree with Kaku's claim, as do several other physicists consulted for this post.
...Update/Correction: Physicists Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler have pointed out that one physicist out there does claim that the Higgs Boson caused the big bang. That's Michio Kaku. Strassler and Carroll both disagree with Kaku's claim, as do several other physicists consulted for this post.
For anyone following physics, it sounded odd to hear that the particle announced with much fanfare last summer is likely to be the long-sought Higgs Boson. After all, AAAS and other list-makers declared the discovery of the Higgs to be the breakthrough of 2012. And now they’re telling us it’s the Higgs as if that’s news?
There really was some news. Further work at CERN has shown the particle that’s very likely to be the Higgs is behaving as predicted. That came out at a meeting in Italy on March 6 and last week in a...
President Obama was apparently doing more than just posturing in his last state of the union address when he talked up brain science and some sort of a brain mapping mega project that promises to be as ambitious and expensive as the $3 billion Human Genome Project. If there was ever an issue calling out for...
President Obama was apparently doing more than just posturing in his last state of the union address when he talked up brain science and some sort of a brain mapping mega project that promises to be as ambitious and expensive as the $3 billion Human Genome Project. If there was ever an issue calling out for clear science reporting, this would be it.
What, exactly, would this brain project entail? Why does it have to be so expensive? We got more information last week in a New York Times story by John Markoff, Obama Seeking to Boost Study of the Human Brain.
As Markoff described the project in the second graph, it would be a ...."concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness." By the end I was still not...
After joining the Society of Environmental Journalists, freelance science writer Peter Byrne was surprised by the content of an email that was apparently sent to members of this organization:
Hello again from Nissan.
We want to share with you some exciting news...
After joining the Society of Environmental Journalists, freelance science writer Peter Byrne was surprised by the content of an email that was apparently sent to members of this organization:
Hello again from Nissan.
We want to share with you some exciting news about the 2013 Nissan LEAF. Now in its third model year, the LEAF boasts some electrifying enhancements, AND a major price reduction.
The vehicle is expected to offer improved range through incremental aerodynamic and energy management improvements, and reduced 220V charging time through an available 6.6 kW onboard charger.
Also, the SV and SL models now feature an all-new, custom-designed Bose® Energy Efficient Series sound system that delivers powerful, high-quality audio through six lightweight speakers.
The message goes on to further extol the virtues of this vehicle.
Why, Byrne wondered, would SEJ be trying to convince him to...
Within a day or so of last week’s asteroid explosion over Chelyabinsk, there was a blast of press releases from various groups seeking money and/or public support for projects to monitor and study the asteroid “threat”.
The impact of the news was magnified by the weird coincidence that this...
Within a day or so of last week’s asteroid explosion over Chelyabinsk, there was a blast of press releases from various groups seeking money and/or public support for projects to monitor and study the asteroid “threat”.
The impact of the news was magnified by the weird coincidence that this meteor shattered windows and injured people in Russia the same day as a predicted flyby of a larger asteroid. Charlie Petit covered the next-day coverage for the Tracker here. Over the weekend, a nicely-written story appeared in the Washington Post, by Joel Achenbach, Brian Vastag and Will Englund. The lede shows the power of simple, clear language:
It was a day when the Earth was caught in a cosmic crossfire. The big rock came from the south, the...
What reader could resist clicking on a headline about a mad scientist trying to find women to carry Neanderthal clones? It sounds like something from the old supermarket tabloid the Weekly World News, but this latest whopper is loosely based on a real statement by a real scientist.
In his book,...
What reader could resist clicking on a headline about a mad scientist trying to find women to carry Neanderthal clones? It sounds like something from the old supermarket tabloid the Weekly World News, but this latest whopper is loosely based on a real statement by a real scientist.
In his book, Regenesis, written with Ed Regis, Harvard researcher George Church really did say that it might be possible to clone Neanderthal babies using the Neanderthal genome sequence reconstructed with synthetic biology. And the kicker: A cloned embryo of our extinct cousin could be gestated by an “adventurous” woman. (On the plus side, the first volunteer would be shoe-in to get her own reality show.)
There wasn’t much reaction at first. The statement was buried pretty deep in the book, which was something of a slog to read.
But then the German magazine...
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