Gary Schwitzer is confused, as he explains in HealthNewsReview.org. And I don't blame him; I'm confused myself. ...
Gary Schwitzer is confused, as he explains in HealthNewsReview.org. And I don't blame him; I'm confused myself.
Was this week's human cloning story a "major medical breakthrough," as Fox called it (the b-word!)? Or not?
Scanning the coverage doesn't help; you can find either point of view well represented.
First, FoxNews.com: "In a major medical breakthrough, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have for the first time ever successfully converted human skin cells into embryonic stem cells – via a technique called...
A strange kind of time shifting is going on at The New York Times, which I guess I'm not complaining about, because the result is more coverage of science.
Last week, the science writer Carl Zimmer began a weekly column in the Times, but not...
A strange kind of time shifting is going on at The New York Times, which I guess I'm not complaining about, because the result is more coverage of science.
Last week, the science writer Carl Zimmer began a weekly column in the Times, but not in Tuesday's Science Times. Instead, it appears on Thursdays, when it is less likely to be seen, I would wager. Last week's debut column concerned the 17-year cicadas, now appearing on fence posts and in trees in the Northeast and as far south as North Carolina. Today's is on some of the genes that were crucial in the transformation from wolves to dogs. The column leads the science page on the...
On Monday, the generic-drug-maker Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to federal drug safety violations and was ordered to pay a fine of $500 million to "resolve claims that it sold subpar drugs and made false statements to the Food and Drug Administration about its manufacturing practices at two factories in India,...
On Monday, the generic-drug-maker Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to federal drug safety violations and was ordered to pay a fine of $500 million to "resolve claims that it sold subpar drugs and made false statements to the Food and Drug Administration about its manufacturing practices at two factories in India," according to a story by Katie Thomas in The New York Times.
Thomas reported that Ranbaxy "acknowledged that it failed to conduct proper safety and quality tests of several drugs manufactured at the Indian plants, including generic versions of many common medicines, like gabapentin, which treats epilepsy and nerve pain, and the antibiotic ciprofloxacin."
That's disturbing, but it sounds like the kind of thing that can be corrected with proper oversight.
But I didn'...
(English intor to Spanih lang post) Researchers at Oregon University have successfully used cloning techniques to create human embryonic stem cells. Spanish newspapers classified the achievement as a scientific milestone, and it's been the main story in the front page of some print editions. Reporters made...
(English intor to Spanih lang post) Researchers at Oregon University have successfully used cloning techniques to create human embryonic stem cells. Spanish newspapers classified the achievement as a scientific milestone, and it's been the main story in the front page of some print editions. Reporters made a great job searching for opinions of Spanish scientists and comparing the possibilities of human embryonic stem cells with IPS cells. Everybody avoided yellow press about reproductive cloning and talked only about therapeutic cloning. We missed more detailed information about the methods used by the Oregon team, in order to understand why this time the cloning was successful. We’ve tracked the main Latin American newspapers. The story occupied the front page in Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Chile, and has not even appeared in other important outlets. In Spain, many reporters highlighted that one member of the Oregon team is a young Spanish...
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 “...
Last week, I chastised New Scientist for describing...
Last week, I chastised New Scientist for describing a blog post from the National Institute of Mental Health as "a bombshell."
Andy Coughlan and Sara Reardon wrote the following lede off of the post, written by the NIMH director, Thomas Insel:
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...
Yesterday, the actress Angelina Jolie, in a smart bit of public relations, revealed in an op-ed in The New York Times that she recently had a double mastectomy because she carries a gene known to...
Yesterday, the actress Angelina Jolie, in a smart bit of public relations, revealed in an op-ed in The New York Times that she recently had a double mastectomy because she carries a gene known to confer a particularly high risk of developing breast cancer.
It was smart because it allowed her to control the story, to reach doctors and healthcare groups, and to avoid public appearances. (Although I'm sure we're all eagerly waiting for the Oprah interview.) Jolie has attempted a tough balancing act. The public-health challenge here is to alert women to the importance of knowing their risks without causing undue concern or prompting some women to get treatment they don't need.
Her mother, she wrote (or somebody wrote under her name),"fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56." She then notes that she carried "a 'faulty...
With atmospheric CO2 bouncing along at the 400 ppm milestone, a level not seen in the geologic record for millions of years, a new report from a host of mainly European institutes called the Ice2sea consortium provides a timely additional news peg - a newly refined estimate of the range of likely sea level...
With atmospheric CO2 bouncing along at the 400 ppm milestone, a level not seen in the geologic record for millions of years, a new report from a host of mainly European institutes called the Ice2sea consortium provides a timely additional news peg - a newly refined estimate of the range of likely sea level rise for the rest of the century.
In a welcome development the press has widely varied first-reactions to the news. This is good. To see the press thinking for itself - it does happen often but not as often or as incisively as is should - is better than reading stories all taken slavishly from a limited number of press releases. On the other hand, the disparity in some cases is marked. Perhaps it is that reporters are making too much of a rather narrowly focussed report that extrapolated new, modified global numbers from an analysis of the behavior of glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica as they debouch from their fjords into the sea. It may also be that...
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...
14May 2013
Nearly two years ago, Andrew C. Revkin, author of the Dot Earth blog at The New York Times and one of the most respected reporters on the environment beat, interrupted his "nonstop journalistic pursuit of paths toward sustainable human progress to focus on sustaining...
Nearly two years ago, Andrew C. Revkin, author of the Dot Earth blog at The New York Times and one of the most respected reporters on the environment beat, interrupted his "nonstop journalistic pursuit of paths toward sustainable human progress to focus on sustaining myself." He went for a run in the woods with his son when, short of breath, he stopped to take a rest.
"Then I realize that through my left eye, the world appears paisley--as if I were looking through a patterned curtain," he writes. "Something is really wrong."
In a post on the Times's Well blog, Revkin narrates the story of that day during the July 4th weekend, 2011. In his telling, the partial loss of vision is the first in a series of events that unfold slowly and only gradually lead to the conclusion that he is having a...
Kaching! That's the sound of science - everywhere in the world. Basic discoveries with no obvious material benefit have often led to vast acceleration of innovation and economic productivity in the longer run . But what's happening in Canada may be short circuiting things while the governing party professes...
Kaching! That's the sound of science - everywhere in the world. Basic discoveries with no obvious material benefit have often led to vast acceleration of innovation and economic productivity in the longer run . But what's happening in Canada may be short circuiting things while the governing party professes to be trying to make them better. Thank you Phil Plait, of the Bad Astronomy blog at the Slate site, for pointing it out. Read his post in full, because Plait puts it as well as anybody could. KSJTracker will do its part by gathering up some examples of how Canada's media played this development last week.
But the short version is that the conservative gov't in Ottawa, via its National Research Council, will concentrate its in-house science budget on bottom-line...
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...
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.
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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...
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