Many of us long ago stopped taking our vitamins – especially the antioxidants. The evidence for their benefit was lacking, and a number of disturbing studies suggested they could possibly increase the risk of cancer and heart disease. But what many of us didn’t recognize was the enormous journalistic...
Many of us long ago stopped taking our vitamins – especially the antioxidants. The evidence for their benefit was lacking, and a number of disturbing studies suggested they could possibly increase the risk of cancer and heart disease. But what many of us didn’t recognize was the enormous journalistic opportunity there was in addressing the gap between the scientific consensus on vitamin supplements and the general public’s continued faith in them.
Into that gapped has stepped Paul Offit, with a New York Times Sunday Review piece headlined, “Don’t Take Your Vitamins.” Offit is not a professional journalist – he’s chief of the infectious diseases division of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. And he’s best known for his books and articles debunking the vaccine-autism meme.
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In recent months, cancer has been cured twice--first by the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (CNN was an important collaborator), and then by...
In recent months, cancer has been cured twice--first by the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (CNN was an important collaborator), and then by Time magazine. And now Children's Hospital Boston has cured Type 1 diabetes! O frabjous day!
"Boston Children’s Hospital could be on the verge of curing type 1 diabetes," writes Melissa Malamut at Boston magazine. "Seriously. This huge news, which was announced today on their blog, could affect the 215,000 people in the U.S. younger than 20 who have diabetes (type 1 or type 2)."
Seriously.
"It will still be a few years before they...
19Jun 2013
I recently came across this term yet again after writing a Tracker item obliquely related to water fluoridation. After it ran, someone sent me a...
I recently came across this term yet again after writing a Tracker item obliquely related to water fluoridation. After it ran, someone sent me a blog post by Keith Kloor on the some subject. His post was more focused on tooth decay, however, and my interest was on decay of the media. I was concerned to see that alternative medicine enthusiast Joseph Mercola had his own festering abscess of a blog on the Huffington Post. (The whole site could use a good scraping and some serious flossing.)
But I was struck by Kloor’s headline, “Is Portland Anti-science?” What does he mean by anti-science?
It would make sense to use the term if there were real people out there who proclaimed themselves anti-science, the way some people...
In April, I wrote that Time magazine had violated advertising standards by placing an ad for the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center right in the middle of a story that extolled M.D. Anderson. Time assured me that it...
In April, I wrote that Time magazine had violated advertising standards by placing an ad for the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center right in the middle of a story that extolled M.D. Anderson. Time assured me that it had not violated standards, even though the evidence was there for all to see.
Now The Times in the UK has jumped on this money-making trend. A recent story on the discovery of Prince William's Indian ancestry featured a company called BritainsDNA, which did the genetic analysis. As Roy Greenslade of The Guardian reports, the story featured "a special readers' offer in company with none other than BritainsDNA." Readers "are urged to...
In a post on May 5, 2013, several days after the launch of the new science magazine Nautilus, I reviewed the magazine's website and its first issues. I wrote that I thought it was a flashy and promising...
In a post on May 5, 2013, several days after the launch of the new science magazine Nautilus, I reviewed the magazine's website and its first issues. I wrote that I thought it was a flashy and promising debut.
The magazine was established with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which funds a variety of projects on science and religion. John Steele, the publisher, would not tell me the amount of the grant, except to say it could keep Nautilus running for two years. My repeated requests to the foundation were met with promises that someone would be in touch, but the foundation never did tell me the size of the grant.
I wrote this about the Templeton funding:
I worry a bit about Templeton's agenda. Among its recent grants are $2.6 million for "Towards Medicine as a...
The sharp-eyed Antonio Regalado at Technology Review noted that the Wall Street Journal accompanied its story on the Supreme Court gene-patenting decision with a giant picture of DNA--backwards:
...
The sharp-eyed Antonio Regalado at Technology Review noted that the Wall Street Journal accompanied its story on the Supreme Court gene-patenting decision with a giant picture of DNA--backwards:
The Journal's right-tilted editorial page should be deeply offended that the picture shows a progressive, left-handed DNA. As any proud conservative should know, DNA spirals to the right, like a right-handed screw, making it, I suppose, a deeply conservative molecule.
Perhaps the Journal got the picture from another publication with a right-leaning editorial stance, Forbes, which veered left a couple of years ago:
There is a kind...
The twin-barrelled strategy for dealing with global warming has for decades not only included mitigation, as in not emitting nearly so much greenhouse gas, but also adaptation by armoring, retreating, economizing, and broadly learning to live on an increasingly unfit planet. For most of that time mitigation...
The twin-barrelled strategy for dealing with global warming has for decades not only included mitigation, as in not emitting nearly so much greenhouse gas, but also adaptation by armoring, retreating, economizing, and broadly learning to live on an increasingly unfit planet. For most of that time mitigation got top billing from technical experts and the general media. Many have felt that a spotlight on adaptation is a perilous step toward resignation, surrender, and steep decline for our species along with many of the rest of them here with us.
But it gives the trend toward adaptation a big stamp of approval when a leading science writer at the world's most dominant news agency presents a reflective piece on the slow pivot of recent years to it as the only thing that national governments seem willing to endorse. The message: with so many nations too paralyzed to take tough, low-carbon paths, the best bet for a quick and sane response is welter...
The Supreme Court's decision to deny patents on genes but allow patents on synthetic genes was perhaps not as clever as many commentators seemed to think.
On the surface, it makes sense: Patents shouldn't be awarded to genes any more than they should be awarded to a block of wood. Genes were not...
The Supreme Court's decision to deny patents on genes but allow patents on synthetic genes was perhaps not as clever as many commentators seemed to think.
On the surface, it makes sense: Patents shouldn't be awarded to genes any more than they should be awarded to a block of wood. Genes were not invented by anyone; they exist in nature. The other part of the decision seems to make sense, too: If researchers synthesize something in the laboratory, it's an invention, and it is as deserving of a patent as Edison's light bulb.
But did researchers at the biotech company Myriad Genetics synthesize the genes in question here?
What the researchers are doing is using a naturally occurring messenger RNA molecule--in which the non-working bits of DNA that don't contribute to the gene's function have been naturally removed--as a template to create a gene without the non-working parts. The results is called cDNA, or complementary DNA. The court said...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) A few weeks ago FAO published a report saying that insects have high protein, fat and mineral contents, they reproduce quickly, they are extremely low-maintenance compared with most livestock, so they could...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) A few weeks ago FAO published a report saying that insects have high protein, fat and mineral contents, they reproduce quickly, they are extremely low-maintenance compared with most livestock, so they could become a new way to fight against hunger. Mexico and China are the countries that consume more edible insects. Eating beetles, chapulines, larvae, or worms is quiet common in same Mexican regions, and El Universal published an extensive story giving lots of data about nutrients, production, and ways to process them. It’s fascinating to know that more than 600 species of insects are catalogued as edible only in Mexico, that they are cooked in biscuits, sausages or sautéed, and that there are scientists doing serious research about them.
Other stories: a GM dengue mosquito seemed to reduce 96% of mosquito population in an area of Brazil. In Panama,...
You heard, did you not, that China this week docked a Shenzhou capsule with a woman and two men on board to a small living habitat, a cramped space station named Tiangong 1 about the same size as the Shenzhou? The station's name by the way means "Heavenly Palace." While this cramped cylinder is...
You heard, did you not, that China this week docked a Shenzhou capsule with a woman and two men on board to a small living habitat, a cramped space station named Tiangong 1 about the same size as the Shenzhou? The station's name by the way means "Heavenly Palace." While this cramped cylinder is no palace China has ambitions to build a larger, Skylab-class space station by about 2020. The first Tiangong crew won't stay long. They are due back in a week and a half.This mission is a somewhat longer replay of a docking and crew return last year. China is practicing for something a lot bigger.
One of the punchier stories is in Time Magazine, where veteran newsman and science writer Michael D. Lemonick got the news up under a fine hed, "Beijing, We Have a Space Program." It's more essay than news account, and thus gets some...
*UPDATE: Post below originally ran on May 29. An element that got some mention in several among the original burst of stories, including the one by AAAS Science's journalist Michael Balter, got an...
*UPDATE: Post below originally ran on May 29. An element that got some mention in several among the original burst of stories, including the one by AAAS Science's journalist Michael Balter, got an update and expansion from him a week later. The problem arises from the enormous trade in phony or significantly altered fossils on the Chinese market. The latest proto-bird specimen sits in the shadow of that cloud until it gets much closer scrutiny, he reports, for it was bought from a private trader. This is something for reporters to keep in mind when writing more about this fossil as well as others for which dramatic conclusions are making news. Original post follows.
A small kerfuffle over a small extinct bird-like creature from the famed Tiaojishan fossil beds of Liaoning province in China illustrates one of the most insoluble...
The folks at the science-illustration program at California State University, Monterey Bay apparently have time on their hands, which turns out to be a good thing for the rest of us.
They have been turning out...
The folks at the science-illustration program at California State University, Monterey Bay apparently have time on their hands, which turns out to be a good thing for the rest of us.
They have been turning out some of the weirdest imaginary hybrid creatures you could ever, you know, imagine, and they're calling them "critter combos we'd love to see in the wild (from a safe distance)."
Nadia Drake at Wired has enabled these starving artists by reproducing their illustrations at her Wired. She writes that she "was inspired by our readers, who seem to be very interested in everything we write about spiders or sharks." Thus, the spidershark:
If that isn't enough for you, try the dinoflagellate...
You've seen the news on Twitter and elsewhere at the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships site, but I thought it would be nice to mention on the Tracker that MIT's first Journalism Project Fellowship has just been awarded to the...
You've seen the news on Twitter and elsewhere at the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships site, but I thought it would be nice to mention on the Tracker that MIT's first Journalism Project Fellowship has just been awarded to the journalist and blogger Maryn McKenna. (McKenna is a friend of mine, so if you're looking for an objective report, you've come to the wrong place. I was not, however, involved in the selection process.)
She will spend some time at MIT in Cambridge next year, to participate in seminars with the other Knight science journalism fellows, and otherwise will be free to roam in pursuit of her story. She was awarded the fellowship for a project on food science and food production that will lead to a book-length manuscript and a series of multimedia stories by May, 2014.
McKenna is the author of Superbug:...
This morning's New York Times business section features what I'd call a style story entitled, "E-Cigarettes Are in Vogue and at a...
This morning's New York Times business section features what I'd call a style story entitled, "E-Cigarettes Are in Vogue and at a Crossroads," by Liz Alderman. It's a story about a new fashion, which might be more at home in the living section than in the business pages. But wherever it shows up, and whatever its approach, it owes readers a fair and full accounting of its subject, just as it would be obliged to tell us about the comfort and durability of a new line of jeans or men's suits.
The key questions about electronic cigarettes, in my view, are: Do they cut the increased risks of cancer, heart disease, and many other ailments associated with smoking? And do they help people quit?
What we learn from Alderman's story is that e-cigarettes are now...
A surprising story by Danielle Elliot in The Atlantic about children with autism begins with an anecdote that is so disturbing you might be inclined to stop reading. But you...
A surprising story by Danielle Elliot in The Atlantic about children with autism begins with an anecdote that is so disturbing you might be inclined to stop reading. But you shouldn't.
The anecdote is about a 12-year-old boy who is scratching and picking at his face, gnawing on the side of his thumb, and tearing cuts on his stomach, causing such severe damage that his parents were ready to move him to a residential facility; they couldn't protect him at home.
Before they made that move, they were referred to a pediatric gastroenterologist at Columbia, who recalled that when she saw him "there was blood everywhere," and that the boy screamed and paced around the room during his visit. Rather than attacking the symptoms directly with psychiatric drugs, she treated him for constipation. "Research is showing...
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