It would be a big surprise if a prominent journal published a study commissioned by the dating website eHarmony showing that people who met through online dating were more miserable than those who met through friends, work, bars, etc. Funny that such results rarely appear.
In fact, this week’s PNAS had...
It would be a big surprise if a prominent journal published a study commissioned by the dating website eHarmony showing that people who met through online dating were more miserable than those who met through friends, work, bars, etc. Funny that such results rarely appear.
In fact, this week’s PNAS had a paper on a study showing that online dating, (surprise!), allegedly leads to happier marriages. Not only was eHarmony behind the funding, but one author had been a member of the scientific advisory board and another had been the company’s director of research.
The potential conflicts of interest here were at least as interesting as the results of the study, which entailed a large survey of couples married between 2005 and 2012. Here’s how the PNAS press blub describes the result: “More than one-third of nearly 20,000 Americans surveyed in a study met their...
[Update, 6/10/13: On Friday, Julie Bosman at The New York Times reported that Jonah Lehrer had signed with Simon & Schuster. As...
[Update, 6/10/13: On Friday, Julie Bosman at The New York Times reported that Jonah Lehrer had signed with Simon & Schuster. As far as I know, nobody has disclosed what Lehrer was paid. The signing by a major publisher is, in my view, an affront to journalists who have been playing by the rules.]
The disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer, who has admitted to lying, fabricating quotes, and other mortal journalistic sins, is now shopping a book proposal--on love.
This news comes from Daniel Engber at Slate,...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Scientists from Europe, the US and Latin America are attending the 3rd World Summit on Evolution celebrated in Galapagos Islands. The University of San Francisco Quito hosts the event and announced the inauguration of a Center for the Study of Evolutionary Biology, which...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Scientists from Europe, the US and Latin America are attending the 3rd World Summit on Evolution celebrated in Galapagos Islands. The University of San Francisco Quito hosts the event and announced the inauguration of a Center for the Study of Evolutionary Biology, which will be directed by Antonio Lazcano, a well-known evolutionary biologists and science popularize from Mexico. During his speech and media appearances Lazcano said that 140.000 religious fundamentalists from the US are spreading creationism through the schools of the developing world and threatening the education of science. That’s the main message that local press picked from the summit. We haven’t read any story discussing the areas of research and projects that will take place in the Center for Evolutionary Biology.
From Brazil we read two stories saying that Amazon deforestation increased significantly during 2012, mainly due to mining...
Lots of people love wine. Anything new that explores deeply the artisanship and ancient history of viticulture and winemaking - and better yet that involves some solid science- can be expected to make news.
But I am stumped in one regard. A Balthazar-sized load of wine stories flowed...
Lots of people love wine. Anything new that explores deeply the artisanship and ancient history of viticulture and winemaking - and better yet that involves some solid science- can be expected to make news.
But I am stumped in one regard. A Balthazar-sized load of wine stories flowed today after a University of Pennsylvania-led team published in PNAS its analysis of some amphoras about 2500 years old. Archeologists excavated them from an apparent mercantile storeroom at an ancient port site called Lattara in France south of Montpellier. Evaporative deposits in their narrow bottoms carry strong evidence that wine once filled them. The site carries broader evidence of wine-making including remnants of vineyards and stone platforms suitable for stomping grapes into juice. A major focus of the PNAS paper is that the amphoras are made in the style of the Etruscan culture - which scholars already know for its winemaking - in what we now call Italy. The...
Thirteen universities in the UK have launched a site to publish "news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public."
Or, in other words: No journalists necessary. ...
Thirteen universities in the UK have launched a site to publish "news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public."
Or, in other words: No journalists necessary. Academics will write the posts.
Or most of them. The site has brought in what it calls "professional editors" to "unlock" academics' knowledge for the public. Or, in plainer language, to make sense of academic jargon and to write some of the posts.
This "new journalism project," as it inaccurately calls itself, is The Conversation. It is the offspring of a two-year-old Australian site with the same name and mission. It has laudable aims, including to "allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues." And it also hopes...
Carl Zimmer has a nice piece leading off Science Times today at The New York Times in which he explores the...
Carl Zimmer has a nice piece leading off Science Times today at The New York Times in which he explores the curious phenomenon of "situs inversus," in which normal anatomy is reversed, becoming a mirror image of normal.
Zimmer's tale begins in 1788, in a medical school in London, when students, aghast after opening a cadaver, rushed to tell their teacher what they had found. "It is so extraordinary as scarcely to have been seen by any of the most celebrated anatomists," their teacher later wrote. The cadaver's organs were all on the wrong side; yet it was otherwise perfectly normal.
Zimmer segues neatly from this Sherlockian opening to the scientific importance of situs inversus--namely, the mutations that cause it...
A May 13th opinion piece in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine could be, with just a little massaging, a nice piece of journalism on the treatment of mild high blood pressure. (Sadly, it's available only to journalists...
A May 13th opinion piece in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine could be, with just a little massaging, a nice piece of journalism on the treatment of mild high blood pressure. (Sadly, it's available only to journalists registered with the AMA and to subscribers). Written by Iona Heath, a British general practitioner, it brings us up to date on current recommendations for treatment of mild high blood pressure (up to 159/99, for those keeping score) and even details the role of pharmaceutical companies in establishing treatment guidelines.
Gary Schwitzer at HealthNewsReview.org called attention to this piece recently, noting that he "could not find one mainstream news organization that...
Before you buy any real estate on Mars, you might want to consider some new measurements taken by the Curiosity rover on its way to over. Scientists long knew radiation can pose a serious health hazard to human space explorers, and these new results, published in last week’s...
Before you buy any real estate on Mars, you might want to consider some new measurements taken by the Curiosity rover on its way to over. Scientists long knew radiation can pose a serious health hazard to human space explorers, and these new results, published in last week’s Science, give us a better handle on potential exposures during the trips to and from the red planet.
Kudos to those science writers who recognized the importance of the paper. The Curiosity mission has gathered mountains of data, but this finding stands out since it has big implications for the future of human space flight. Still, there were a couple of questions that went unanswered.
Most stories reported the estimate that a round trip would expose astronauts to 662 millisieversts. Many repeated this number as if it should mean something to the person on the street. Like we’re all now counting our millisieverts...
The question of whether alcoholism or drug abuse fuel creativity is a complicated one.
But not for The New York Times, which assumes that songwriters work best when "loaded."
In...
The question of whether alcoholism or drug abuse fuel creativity is a complicated one.
But not for The New York Times, which assumes that songwriters work best when "loaded."
In an article on the alt-country singer and songwriter Jason Isbell, the Times book critic Dwight Garner and his editor, Adam Sternbergh, want us to believe that Isbell is the fortunate counter-example who can be creative and sober at the same time. The article is entitled, "Unloaded: Sobriety isn't always a songwriter's friend, but it has brought out the best in the former Drive-By Trucker Jason Isbell." And it begins, "If you want to know how to cure a hangover, ask a musician..."
This would all seem to put the issue of alcoholism and creativity at the center of the story. I was...
Was the FDA right to require new drug applications for experimenters who want to try fecal transplants for treating disease? Are fecal transplants drugs?
Tabitha M. Powledge of On Science Blogs reports that...
Was the FDA right to require new drug applications for experimenters who want to try fecal transplants for treating disease? Are fecal transplants drugs?
Tabitha M. Powledge of On Science Blogs reports that fecal transplants are one of the few therapies for any disorder for which "no adverse effects or complications have been seen," according to the American College of Gastroenterology. Preliminary studies have shown they are far more effective than conventional treatments of Clostridium difficile infections.
Her survey of opinions suggests that caution is in order, but not necessarily regulation. And she points to directions for anyone who wants to try a DIY fecal transplant.
It's odd, isn't it, that the FDA would regulate something that each of us carries inside us? And here's a story tip for anyone interested in writing a...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) According to a German newspaper an spokesman announced last Friday that Monsanto gave up its fight for GM plants in Europe. A few outlets in Spain discussed the decision and Europe...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) According to a German newspaper an spokesman announced last Friday that Monsanto gave up its fight for GM plants in Europe. A few outlets in Spain discussed the decision and Europe’s position against GM. But a reporter said that’s a minor thing and wrote a fabulous story about publicly funded GMO research in countries like Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, India, and China. The story criticizes the dogmatic positions for or against GM technology, and defends that “developing countries should take their decisions based in scientific criteria”. It’s an extensive work with lots of data and examples, that should be read by all Latin-American science writers.
On a different note, we highlight also a great story about a new...
Never mind the extraordinary cases of academic fraud; journalists should "go beyond the high-profile scandals to reveal an under-reported aspect of contemporary research--the low-level misconduct that corrodes the scientific enterprise."
So writes Declan Fahy of American...
Never mind the extraordinary cases of academic fraud; journalists should "go beyond the high-profile scandals to reveal an under-reported aspect of contemporary research--the low-level misconduct that corrodes the scientific enterprise."
So writes Declan Fahy of American University in a post at Columbia Journalism Review's The Observatory. The headline and deck on the post are, "Rooting out bad science: Big scandals grab headlines, but journalists can do more to expose misconduct."
Fahy offers a very nice collection of links related to scientific misconduct, many of which are worth clipping and saving for the next time some crackpot researcher or brilliant deceiver is exposed as a fraud. He gets a bit further afield when he links to such things as the familiar John Ioannidis...
Care for premature infants can put enormous strain on hospital resources, and I wouldn't have been surprised to read that doctors with appropriate expertise, say, would sometimes be in short supply.
It's shocking to read, however, that neonatal intensive care units across the country are suffering...
Care for premature infants can put enormous strain on hospital resources, and I wouldn't have been surprised to read that doctors with appropriate expertise, say, would sometimes be in short supply.
It's shocking to read, however, that neonatal intensive care units across the country are suffering from acute shortages of basic nutrients to feed the children, and that in some cases children are dying for lack of these nutrients--in effect, starving to death in the intensive care unit.
Alexandra Robbins makes that case persuasively in Washingtonian, in an article entitled, "Children are Dying."
"Our patients are starving because of drug shortages. How can this happen in this country?” Jay Mirtallo, a professor of clinical pharmacy at Ohio State University, tells Robbins.
The technical phrase for...
Covering the environment comes with a sensible presumption that most stories will be about fights over regulations, about threats to this or that species (including humans and their health), pollution, and other unpleasantries and bad trends. Once in awhile however a reporter comes upon something that seems...
Covering the environment comes with a sensible presumption that most stories will be about fights over regulations, about threats to this or that species (including humans and their health), pollution, and other unpleasantries and bad trends. Once in awhile however a reporter comes upon something that seems to be turning out better than feared. Such as, we have our bald eagles back! But what needs a turn for the better in the public image department than the northern snakehead? The big scaly immigrant, native to China, was all over the news a few years ago. It was condemned as a dreadful mischief maker and decimator of North American ecosystems. It is ugly to boot. It can crawl right out of the water and flip flop across the road if it needs to get to the other side, breathing air the whole while. Then, there's the slime...
We would still be a lot better without them but here's a switch.
Even when research shows that stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall given to children with ADHD do nothing, Alan Schwarz at The New York Times finds a way to slam the drugs once again.
In...
Even when research shows that stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall given to children with ADHD do nothing, Alan Schwarz at The New York Times finds a way to slam the drugs once again.
In a story in yesterday's Times, Schwarz reports that a new study has found that children with ADHD who take stimulants "do not have a lower risk over all for later substance abuse." This, he reports, contradicts "the longstanding and influential message" that the drugs "tend to deter" later abuse of other drugs.
Note the negative message: The drugs, thought to deter later drug abuse, do not do so.
Indeed, Schwarz argues, the drugs actually encourage later drug abuse. He writes that prescribing...
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