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.
---
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...
I am among many with a specific sort of OCD - habitually fetching up the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado for the latest measure of Arctic sea ice extent. Sometimes I hunt further, to check estimates of the volume of the sea ice up there...
I am among many with a specific sort of OCD - habitually fetching up the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado for the latest measure of Arctic sea ice extent. Sometimes I hunt further, to check estimates of the volume of the sea ice up there. Those latter measures are scarier, but have bigger error bars. The maps of extent are from real data, from satellites, with only enough modeling to translate the percentage of grid squares that have ice on them into a sharp-edged map of the ice's expanse. They are easily read, whereas maps of ice thickness, however more disturbing, are messy things (The Polar Science Center at U. of Washington keeps such data).
Why bring this up? There is no objective news reason to round up media stories on the Arctic's climate markers rght now. But...
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...
Ed Yong, one of the more followed and respected of science bloggers, stopped by the Knight Science Journalism program via Skype the other day and chatted with the Fellows. I think the talk was illuminating enough to post on our site....
Ed Yong, one of the more followed and respected of science bloggers, stopped by the Knight Science Journalism program via Skype the other day and chatted with the Fellows. I think the talk was illuminating enough to post on our site. Take a look.
Phil Hilts
David Corcoran, the editor of Science Times at The New York Times, got a break when he opened an email with the first draft of "...
David Corcoran, the editor of Science Times at The New York Times, got a break when he opened an email with the first draft of "In Pursuit of an Underwater Menagerie," this week's lead story in Science Times.
The story was written by C. Drew Harvell, a Cornell scientist who had not written for the Times before, and Corcoran wasn't sure what to expect. What he found was a lovely description of Octopus ornatus, "a foot-long creature in an amber shade of orange with bright white spots and dashes along all its arms." The story continued:
It sat stolidly in the light of the camera, 30 feet below the surface, unfazed by the attention. I reached out a...
It's been seven years since the conservative Canadian government led by prime minister Stephen Harper started to put muzzles on federal employees who stray from the script when talking to the media. This prominently includes scientists and other researchers who might have opinions on interesting things,...
It's been seven years since the conservative Canadian government led by prime minister Stephen Harper started to put muzzles on federal employees who stray from the script when talking to the media. This prominently includes scientists and other researchers who might have opinions on interesting things, such as the nation's energy policies, wildlife and land management, climate trends, medical research priorities, and some things that are interesting just because they are interesting including odd animal behavior or astronomy or autocratic psychological syndromes.
Nonetheless it remains a shock every time when reading again how deeply into its government institutions has penetratede the fervor to put barriers between scientists and reporters or other members of the public. Knight trackers have of course taken note of the disarray in scientists' freedom to talk directly with the Canadia public before (including posts by Deb Blum (...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Argentinean La Nación published and extensive report acknowledging the state of the biotech industry in the country. It highlights the connection between researchers and industry, it describes specific examples, and it says that 124 companies export to more than 120...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Argentinean La Nación published and extensive report acknowledging the state of the biotech industry in the country. It highlights the connection between researchers and industry, it describes specific examples, and it says that 124 companies export to more than 120 countries. In Folha (Brazil) we read that patents will gain value in researcher’s academic cv. Peruvian and Brazilian governments are disputing the use of the '.amazon' domain with online retailer Amazon, arguing the name should be used to promote the protection of the Amazonian rainforest. Colombia launched a $300 million plan to protect its biodiversity, and El Tiempo wrote an enthusiastic editorial about it. Chilean El Mercurio published also a great story about biodiversity, and SciDev reviewed an article comparing the health inequalities in different Latin American Countries (Cuba is the country with less disparities, Haiti has the most). Spanish news...
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