An apparently despondent Julie Rovner of NPR posted the following on Facebook this afternoon:
The ...
An apparently despondent Julie Rovner of NPR posted the following on Facebook this afternoon:
The story she links to, which she wrote for NPR's shots blog, explains her despair.
Despite her efforts and those by a lot of others, the public, she wrote, "actually knows less about the law now than when it passed in 2010. Oh, and a lot of what people think they know just isn't so." Tough medicine for her and for the others who've been covering Obamacare.
I'm afraid we can't provide much help for Rovner here; we're not entirely sure what the law will do either. Perhaps she can take some comfort...
One's pet peeves can be so boring in the ears of others. Undaunted, onward I trudge...
The American Geophysical Union's press office this morning sent out two press releases with email alerts. The first email hit my inbox at 8:04 a.m. Pacific:
- AGU: Cosmic Rays Indicate...
One's pet peeves can be so boring in the ears of others. Undaunted, onward I trudge...
The American Geophysical Union's press office this morning sent out two press releases with email alerts. The first email hit my inbox at 8:04 a.m. Pacific:
- AGU: Cosmic Rays Indicate Voyager 1 Has Left the Solar System
Followed at 1o:27 by this version (its link goes to the press release behind the email):
I went nuts at the first one. However, I went off half-cocked too. As nearly all space writers know, astronomy press releases commonly have two delivery routes. One is directly from the host institution if one is on its contact list, and the second is via the American Astronomical Society's p.r.-forwarding service. Its pio Rick...
NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next...
NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next, as the site is called, invited me to review it. On Feb. 28, Tim De Chant, the editor of NOVA Next, welcomed readers by saying NOVA would bring to the web the expertise and passion displayed it displays in its television show. This is how he described the venture:
NOVA Next will be focused on big stories, the sort you’re used to hearing from NOVA. We’ll have some of the biggest names in science, technology, and engineering giving us the inside scoop on...
20Mar 2013
[Ed. note: For more on health claims such as those related to the contamination at Hinkley, see Deborah Blum's "An update to the Erin Brockovich update."]
Some twenty years ago, young law...
[Ed. note: For more on health claims such as those related to the contamination at Hinkley, see Deborah Blum's "An update to the Erin Brockovich update."]
Some twenty years ago, young law clerk named Erin Brockovich took on an apparently impossible cause - bringing utility giant PG&E to justice for poisoning ground water in a small California community (and covering up the danger). Her work on behalf of the residents of Hinkley, California, who were being sickened by a toxic metallic element in the water, led to a $333 million judgement against the company and a court order to clean up the water.
Both her unlikely crusade and her triumph were told in the Oscar-winning eponymously titled movie, released in 2000, in which actress Julia Roberts played Brockovich. This year, though, science...
Like many complicated concepts in science, the Higgs Boson is a challenge to explain, both for journalists and the scientists who try to help us. It would be a lot simpler if it were generally accepted that the Higgs Boson was important because it caused the big bang. If that were true it would seem almost...
Like many complicated concepts in science, the Higgs Boson is a challenge to explain, both for journalists and the scientists who try to help us. It would be a lot simpler if it were generally accepted that the Higgs Boson was important because it caused the big bang. If that were true it would seem almost justified to call it the God particle.
In a recent Tracker post I expressed surprise that CBS News made the big bang claim in this news story. I wondered where the author got this idea, since there was no direct attribution:
The Higgs boson is often called "the God particle" because it's said to be what caused the "Big Bang" that created our universe many years ago. The nickname caught on so quickly (even though scientists...
If you were as impressed and enlightened as I was by Steven Brill's article on American healthcare in Time magazine, you should take a look at...
If you were as impressed and enlightened as I was by Steven Brill's article on American healthcare in Time magazine, you should take a look at the conversation he had on March 7th with reporters and editors at ProPublica about the origins of the story, how he put it together, and how it came to be published in Time. It's a short course in the practice of journalism at the highest level.
The conversation--which you can listen to or read a transcript of--begins with ProPublica spokesman Mike Webb complaining, mildly, that Brill got a story that ProPublica would dearly like to have had. "We were a little jealous," he said. "After all, longform journalism is our bread and butter at...
(English intro to Spanish lanf post) Monarch butterflies are experiencing and steady decline, a new report says. Scientists surveyed their habitat in a Mexican Biosphere Reserve, and they found that the insects occupied 59% less land than the previous year (the smallest area recorded in 20 years). The report...
(English intro to Spanish lanf post) Monarch butterflies are experiencing and steady decline, a new report says. Scientists surveyed their habitat in a Mexican Biosphere Reserve, and they found that the insects occupied 59% less land than the previous year (the smallest area recorded in 20 years). The report suggests that the use of herbicides and the loss of favorable fields along their migration route are the main reasons of the decline, along droughts and high temperatures that can affect larvae. In their stories, some journalists preferred to blame the climate change and others the farming practices. Also in Mexico, scientific institutions have received a big amount of philanthropic money to foster biotechnological research on better corn and wheat crops. From Colombia we’ve read a great report about the poor health facilities in rural areas, and from Chile a really interesting story about the beauty and implications of the most common mathematics equations. We review...
[Update: Includes mention of Carl Zimmer's excellent cover story in the current National Geographic, which I missed on my first go-around. Also, see Zimmer's Twitter stream, @carlzimmer, for a lot of discussion.]
An interesting day-long conference Friday with...
[Update: Includes mention of Carl Zimmer's excellent cover story in the current National Geographic, which I missed on my first go-around. Also, see Zimmer's Twitter stream, @carlzimmer, for a lot of discussion.]
An interesting day-long conference Friday with a lot of glittering scientific and environmental presenters got only a smattering of coverage, as far as I can tell. I was surprised; the conference promised not only to include a lot of interesting science, but also to raise a lot of tricky scientific and ethical issues. And it was webcast live all day Friday by its host, National Geographic, meaning reporters could have easily covered from anywhere.
Some might have been put off by the name, as I was. "TEDxDeExtinction," with its speed-bump capitals and slashing x's, works better as a graphic...
Reporters who cover science and medicine often make the mistake, early in their careers, of reporting that somebody who has responded to a treatment has been "cured," or that some medical advance or other is a "breakthrough." After we've made a mistake such as that, or more than one, we...
Reporters who cover science and medicine often make the mistake, early in their careers, of reporting that somebody who has responded to a treatment has been "cured," or that some medical advance or other is a "breakthrough." After we've made a mistake such as that, or more than one, we generally learn that many, many things called "cures" or "breakthroughs" are anything but.
Medicine generally advances in incremental steps, not breakthroughs. And there are many treatments that improve the lives of patients but don't wipe out illness in the way that we might call a cure.
So it's notable that scientists have used the word "cure" twice in recent weeks in regard to treatments for AIDS, something we've generally been told is likely to be, at best, a chronic, manageable disease--but not one that can be cured. Many people with AIDS are now living reasonably healthy lives thanks to a cocktail of...
Update/Correction: Physicists Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler have pointed out that one physicist out there does claim that the Higgs Boson caused the big bang. That's Michio Kaku. Strassler and Carroll both disagree with Kaku's claim, as do several other physicists consulted for this post.
...Update/Correction: Physicists Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler have pointed out that one physicist out there does claim that the Higgs Boson caused the big bang. That's Michio Kaku. Strassler and Carroll both disagree with Kaku's claim, as do several other physicists consulted for this post.
For anyone following physics, it sounded odd to hear that the particle announced with much fanfare last summer is likely to be the long-sought Higgs Boson. After all, AAAS and other list-makers declared the discovery of the Higgs to be the breakthrough of 2012. And now they’re telling us it’s the Higgs as if that’s news?
There really was some news. Further work at CERN has shown the particle that’s very likely to be the Higgs is behaving as predicted. That came out at a meeting in Italy on March 6 and last week in a...
Three days ago the NYTimes's Kenneth Chang wrote up in solid style NASA's latest microscopic iteration of its endless parade of water-on-Mars-and-ain't-we-...
Three days ago the NYTimes's Kenneth Chang wrote up in solid style NASA's latest microscopic iteration of its endless parade of water-on-Mars-and-ain't-we-having-astrobiological-fun? press accouncements. At which, after reading not only that story but the 200-plus comments that the Times deemed fit to print that follow it, I find myself shaking head in wonder and dismay. What a stupefying mix of brilliance, dementia, waggish remark, and inability even to recognize humor that this fine newspaper's readership is cabable of generating by the torrent!
The news is of course worth covering even if the rover Curiosity on Mars has, far as I can tell, not yet profoundly changed the scientific view of Martian astrobiology. Its gist, as Chang summarizes things, is that maybe Mars has or had...
[Note: Emily Anthes and Dan Fagin are friends of mine, and Anthes and I share the same book editor. That would disqualify me as a reviewer, so please consider this merely a notice of books you might find interesting--not a review.]
GloFish, transgenic goats that secrete drugs in their milk, and an...
[Note: Emily Anthes and Dan Fagin are friends of mine, and Anthes and I share the same book editor. That would disqualify me as a reviewer, so please consider this merely a notice of books you might find interesting--not a review.]
GloFish, transgenic goats that secrete drugs in their milk, and an FDA that doesn't seem quite sure what it should do about a new Noah's Ark of exotic, genetically engineered animals are all characters in the new book by Emily Anthes entitled Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts.
Anthes catalogues the wide variety of beasts that might soon become commonplace if the government, animal activists, and the public can somehow decide what should be allowed and what shouldn't. Using monkeys and apes to supply organs for humans is taboo, Anthes writes, but what about pigs? Genetically engineered pigs can be sources of donor organs from which chemical "pig"...
This week, the journal BioScience made available an upcoming paper with the rather unassuming title "Journalism and Social Media as Means of Observing the Contexts of Science". On first glance, you might...
This week, the journal BioScience made available an upcoming paper with the rather unassuming title "Journalism and Social Media as Means of Observing the Contexts of Science". On first glance, you might think this an unlikely study to generate an angry response.
You have to read a little farther to get to the explosive potential. The paper, published by communications researchers in Germany and the United States, results from a survey of neuroscientists in both countries who were asked to weight the relative value and influence of traditional news outlets versus blogs. Or as the researchers put it in the abstract, to assess "the influence of various types of 'old' and 'new" media on public opinion and political decision making.
Based on the response of some 250 scientists (fairly evenly divided between the countries), the researchers found...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Half of Mexican babies are born by Caesarean section, explains a story that harshly criticize Mexican medical community, and accuses doctors of trying to save time and play with calendars despite the WHO recommendations against the procedure. We also discuss a report...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Half of Mexican babies are born by Caesarean section, explains a story that harshly criticize Mexican medical community, and accuses doctors of trying to save time and play with calendars despite the WHO recommendations against the procedure. We also discuss a report published by UN saying that Latin America is the region where human development indexes have improved more in the period 2000-2012, but there are big differences between countries. Other stories talk about a study showing the huge economic costs of Chagas Disease, the effects of Quinoa's rising demand in Bolivia, the state of the first Ecuadorian satellites, and Peruvian students helping researchers to study the possibility of Mars colonization. We discuss also the decision of the UN of not banning bee-harming pesticides, the creation by Spanish researchers of a microdevice that reads brain activity and liberates drugs, and a cool story about the longer...
A writer working with John Belushi's widow on a biography of Belushi says he can demonstrate that reporting by the legendary Bob Woodward of The Washington Post might get the facts right, but it distorts their meaning.
"How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve...
A writer working with John Belushi's widow on a biography of Belushi says he can demonstrate that reporting by the legendary Bob Woodward of The Washington Post might get the facts right, but it distorts their meaning.
"How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status? I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions," Tanner Colby writes in Slate. Colby says his work on the new Belushi biography put him in the position of essentially re-reporting Woodward's 1984 book ...
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