When researchers first proposed that athletes suffering repeated head blows might face a real risk of long-term brain damage, both players and athletic associations dismissed the idea. But over the last few years, an ongoing wave of deaths, injuries, and evidence (such as...
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When researchers first proposed that athletes suffering repeated head blows might face a real risk of long-term brain damage, both players and athletic associations dismissed the idea. But over the last few years, an ongoing wave of deaths, injuries, and evidence (such as this 2009 report revealing a consistent pattern of damage in the brains of dead athletes) has begun to erode such resistance.
It's in the context of the attitude shift that I want to call attention to an outstandingly good set of stories on the subject in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, home paper to a city that is home of a football team famed for its aggressive style of play. The series, by the paper's senior science writer, Mark Roth, is called The Tragedy of CTE (which stands for chronic traumatic...
Update 5/22: Frank Palmer, a retired government physicist and a Tracker reader, sent an email to the Canadian Medical Journal, pointing out this post and asking for a comment. Dr. John Fletcher, the editor in chief, said, in full:
Thank you for your interest in our journal. The...
Update 5/22: Frank Palmer, a retired government physicist and a Tracker reader, sent an email to the Canadian Medical Journal, pointing out this post and asking for a comment. Dr. John Fletcher, the editor in chief, said, in full:
Thank you for your interest in our journal. The paper didn’t slip through. We debated it long and hard and made sure we added an editorial to explain why we published it. I’m glad it piqued your interest.
---
When the science writer Christie Aschwanden spotted a study last week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal saying that treatment with naturopathic medicine "shows reduction in cardiovascular risk factors," she decided to take a close look at it.
"This would be big news if it were true,"...
Curtis Brainard, the science-news critic at the Columbia Journalism Review, is among several editors laid off or being threatened with layoffs following the departure of the magazine's editor, according to a report at...
Curtis Brainard, the science-news critic at the Columbia Journalism Review, is among several editors laid off or being threatened with layoffs following the departure of the magazine's editor, according to a report at capitalnewyork.com. Brainard directs and writes for CJR's The Observatory, which describes itself as "a lens on the science press."
AOL's Chris Grosso announced last Thursday in a blog post that Cyndi Stivers, CJR's editor, would become editor-in-chief of AOL.com. Joe Pompeo of...
10May 2013
“What if news organizations confronted the reality that nearly all media will be ‘social media’ a decade hence?…What if news organizations acknowledged this — or even got out in front of it, ahead of the curve this time — and organized themselves as platforms for...
“What if news organizations confronted the reality that nearly all media will be ‘social media’ a decade hence?…What if news organizations acknowledged this — or even got out in front of it, ahead of the curve this time — and organized themselves as platforms for talent?”
So begins a post at the Nieman Journalism Lab in which John Wihbeyin of the Harvard Kennedy School talks to Nicco Mele about his new book, "The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath." Mele, a lecturer at the Kennedy School and the Internet operations director for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential...
In a terrific recent piece, Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard takes apart the history of media coverage of false claims linking vaccination to development disorders such as autism. Brainard doesn't mince words about the...
In a terrific recent piece, Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard takes apart the history of media coverage of false claims linking vaccination to development disorders such as autism. Brainard doesn't mince words about the frequently shoddy coverage of the issue: "The consequences of this coverage go beyond squandering journalistic coverage on a bogus story. There is an evidence that a fear of a link between vaccines and autism, stoked by press coverage, caused some parents to either delay vaccinations for their children or deny them altogether."
In his four-page piece, Brainard acknowledges the central role of researchers, such as the now debunked work of Andrew Wakefield, whose (now retracted) 1998 Lancet paper is often considered the starting point for the recent wave of anti-vaccination fervor. But he doesn't let Wakefield's own behavior excuse that of...
A careful and important blog post about a new research initiative at the National Institute of Mental Health has become,...
A careful and important blog post about a new research initiative at the National Institute of Mental Health has become, in the hands of New Scientist, a "bombshell" that "denounced" the forthcoming update of the psychiatric diagnostic manual.
This histrionic description seems out of character for New Scientist, which is ordinarily a very good science magazine. Here's the lede:
The world's biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry's "bible" – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, questioning its validity and stating that "patients with mental disorders deserve better." This bombshell comes just weeks before the...
In a page-one story on sharply rising suicide rates in middle-aged Americans, Tara Parker-Pope blames "years of economic worry and easy access to prescription...
In a page-one story on sharply rising suicide rates in middle-aged Americans, Tara Parker-Pope blames "years of economic worry and easy access to prescription painkillers" for making baby boomers particularly vulnerable.
From 1999 to 2010, she reports, "the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7," and "the most profound increases were seen among men in their 50s, among whom suicide rates jumped by nearly 50 percent, to about 30 per 100,000."
Before we get to the speculation about the reasons for this, let's look at the numbers. Why write "nearly 30 percent" when it's shorter and more accurate to write "28.4 percent," which is what the CDC reported in...
3May 2013
In On Science Blogs this week, Tabitha M. Powledge goes viral, wrapping up comments and insights into the H7N9 virus, the new SARS-like coronavirus, the seasonal flu in the U.S., and even a bit about why these viruses cause such alarm.
She points to...
In On Science Blogs this week, Tabitha M. Powledge goes viral, wrapping up comments and insights into the H7N9 virus, the new SARS-like coronavirus, the seasonal flu in the U.S., and even a bit about why these viruses cause such alarm.
She points to a useful guide on how to read the news about these bugs, posted by Maryn McKenna at her Wired magazine blog, Superbug.
If all of that is too much for you, she also sends you to a post with instructions for making a model of DNA out of licorice whips and jelly babies--and if you don't know what they are, you haven't been watching Dr. Who.
-Paul Raeburn
At the National Association of Science Writers' annual meeting in Pittsburgh in 2005, Kendall Powell, a young freelance writer, was "soaking her conference-sore feet with three other writers in a huge jet-tub in the hotel's honeymoon suite" while they did one of the things...
At the National Association of Science Writers' annual meeting in Pittsburgh in 2005, Kendall Powell, a young freelance writer, was "soaking her conference-sore feet with three other writers in a huge jet-tub in the hotel's honeymoon suite" while they did one of the things writers do best: complain.
"I complained that while I met so many interesting colleagues at conferences, and always loved talking shop with them, it was difficult to keep up that camaraderie once we headed home," she writes. Online groups, she thought, were too impersonal. But would a small, more intimate group "serve as a virtual jet-tub"?
Out of that reverie came the birth of an online group known as SciLance, which has grown to 35 members, and out of SciLance came a very good guide to science writing--The Science Writers' Handbook, published this week.
The book, written by the members of SciLance,...
A classy new science magazine called Nautilus makes its debut this week, with the first of what will be monthly single-topic issues released serially in "chapters" each Thursday.
According to its press release...
A classy new science magazine called Nautilus makes its debut this week, with the first of what will be monthly single-topic issues released serially in "chapters" each Thursday.
According to its press release on PR Newswire, Nautilus "weaves leading-edge science, culture and philosophy into a single story told by the world's leading thinkers and writers." It will include "reported features, narrative non-fiction, essays, blog posts and interviews--as well as fiction, graphic stories, and interactive widgets and games," the release says.
"Nautilus connects science to our lives, one mind-expanding topic at a time," the release says. "Join us." It is being launched with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which funds a variety of projects on science and religion.
So far,...
2May 2013
We've received several messages asking what happened to the daily Tracker email alerts.
Yes, they're gone, lost in a move to a new server. We're working to get them up and running again as soon as possible.
Well, that's not quite right. None of us at the Tracker...
We've received several messages asking what happened to the daily Tracker email alerts.
Yes, they're gone, lost in a move to a new server. We're working to get them up and running again as soon as possible.
Well, that's not quite right. None of us at the Tracker is doing anything except to periodically send short notes to the computer people deep within MIT, who say they are "actively working on this issue."
Wish us luck. And thanks for noticing.
-Paul Raeburn
Johns Hopkins has closed its graduate science-writing program, alerting alumni in an e-mail that there will be no class next year. The program's director, ...
Johns Hopkins has closed its graduate science-writing program, alerting alumni in an e-mail that there will be no class next year. The program's director, Ann Finkbeiner, has resigned from the university.
The program has long been recognized as one of the top science-writing graduate programs in the country, along with others at NYU, Boston University, UC Santa Cruz, Columbia, and MIT. Finkbeiner told me in an email that she began teaching there about 1988 and became the program's director around 2000, although she was never a full-time Hopkins employee.
Finkbeiner told Michael Price...
1May 2013
We surely live in remarkable times, when, only a month after Time magazine won the war on cancer, The Telegraph has now cured HIV.
"Researchers believe that there will be a...
We surely live in remarkable times, when, only a month after Time magazine won the war on cancer, The Telegraph has now cured HIV.
"Researchers believe that there will be a breakthrough in finding a cure for HIV 'within months,'" the paper screams under the headline "Scientists on brink of HIV cure."
Danish scientists "are conducting clinical trials to test a 'novel strategy' in which the HIV virus is stripped from human DNA and destroyed permanently by the immune system," writes Jake Wallis Simons. Well, we can't ask for any more than that--HIV permanently destroyed.
The idea, Simons reports, is to release HIV from "reservoirs it forms...
Sexual harassment by researchers during field expeditions is surprisingly common, with 21 percent of women in a new survey reporting that they had experienced "physical sexual harassment or unwanted sexual contact."
Kathryn Clancy, a bioanthropologist at the University of Illinois, has been...
Sexual harassment by researchers during field expeditions is surprisingly common, with 21 percent of women in a new survey reporting that they had experienced "physical sexual harassment or unwanted sexual contact."
Kathryn Clancy, a bioanthropologist at the University of Illinois, has been using her Scientific America blog (where she goes by Kate) to report confidential interviews with women who say they've been sexually harassed in the field and generally told that any attempt for redress against the perpetrators could destroy their careers. Most have chosen not to name names.
Most recently, she spoke at an ethics panel at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists about a survey in which she and her colleagues found alarming rates of sexual harassment occurring during field research. Clancy...
It's a useful exercise to try to figure out why the Tsarnaev brothers did what they did at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, but to Joel Breuklander, such efforts...
It's a useful exercise to try to figure out why the Tsarnaev brothers did what they did at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, but to Joel Breuklander, such efforts can too easily sound like sympathy for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, or "a conservative parody of mush-headed liberal thinking." As the subhed on Breuklander's post says, "Pressure from an older brother is no excuse for murder."
But at On Science Blogs, Tabitha M. Powledge is not letting Breuklander get away with this. "Some of the ideas that so exasperate Breuklander might qualify as scientific hypotheses about what lay behind the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath," she writes. Pressure from an older brother is...
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