(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 ...
When a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis was accused by federal officials of falsifying data, Blythe Bernhard...
When a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis was accused by federal officials of falsifying data, Blythe Bernhard wrote a story for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch outlining the accusations. The student, Adam Savine, who "admitted to investigators that he exaggerated his findings," would not comment, and at first she could not get comment from the professor who supervised him. The university did not release its investigation of the student. So Bernhard didn't have a lot to go on. She covered the who, what, when, where, and why, and that was about all she could do.
But when she got in touch with the student's mentor, a Washington University psychology professor named Todd Braver, he...
The cover story on last Sunday's New York Times Magazine is the latest in a rather remarkable string of medical and psychology stories, including two covers, since the beginning of the year. I don't normally think of medical and science stories as regular fare for the Times magazine,...
The cover story on last Sunday's New York Times Magazine is the latest in a rather remarkable string of medical and psychology stories, including two covers, since the beginning of the year. I don't normally think of medical and science stories as regular fare for the Times magazine, but lately they have been. And that's not counting the columns by the food writer Mark Bittman, which often deal with science and nutrition.
Here's a quick review of recent stories:
Mar. 10: The Allergy Buster (cover).
Feb. 24: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (cover).
Feb. 10: Why...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Similar to when theoretical physicist said it’d have been more exciting not to find the Higgs boson, it’d have been a real surprise if Curiosity hadn’t identified any carbon, phosphorous, oxygen or sulfur in Martian’s soil. NASA’s announcement...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Similar to when theoretical physicist said it’d have been more exciting not to find the Higgs boson, it’d have been a real surprise if Curiosity hadn’t identified any carbon, phosphorous, oxygen or sulfur in Martian’s soil. NASA’s announcement of the existence of the chemical components required for life is big news, because they are necessary condition to keep the expectations of finding real cues of preexistence life in the planet. But it’s not such a shocking discovery as some reporters expressed.
¿Os acordáis cuando algunos físicos teóricos decían que lo más excitante sería que el Higgs no existiera, porque resultaría más inesperado e implicaría que sus asunciones eran incorrectas? Algo parecido se podría decir sobre el hallazgo de compuestos químicos proclives para la vida en Marte. En este estadio, la gran...
Here's a fellowship that paid off. The winner actually worked hard and made deadline. For, with references to events this very year, just out from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School is s slam-dunk must-read (for people in the enviro-...
Here's a fellowship that paid off. The winner actually worked hard and made deadline. For, with references to events this very year, just out from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School is s slam-dunk must-read (for people in the enviro-science journalism business) from Matt Nisbet. It is 56 pages long with a load of footnotes . It includes bits on just about everybody who is anybody in the heavy-thinking, celebrity intellectual end of environmental journalism and a few other beats as well.
Nisbet, associate professor of communication and director of the Climate Shift Project at American University in DC,...
[Corrects that victim of apparent suicide was lead author, not lab director.]
Peter Whoriskey's...
[Corrects that victim of apparent suicide was lead author, not lab director.]
Peter Whoriskey's tale of a whistleblower who was fired by Johns Hopkins Medical School drew me in right from the start.
The story, published on the front page of The Washington Post, began:
The numbers didn’t add up.
Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.
I love stories like this, and Whoriskey's lede promised a fascinating and disturbing mystery tale that I was looking forward to. I was...
I posted my thoughts on the long Steven Brill healthcare story in Time, and now Tabitha M. Powledge at On Science Blogs has put...
I posted my thoughts on the long Steven Brill healthcare story in Time, and now Tabitha M. Powledge at On Science Blogs has put together a nice roundup of comments from other bloggers and pundits, where you can see a range of opinions. Powledge summarizes Brill's 26,000-word article as a tale of "greed, oligopoly, greed, monopoly, and greed."
Health policy expert Uwe Reinhardt is surprised that Americans are "shocked, just shocked" to learn that health care squeezes middle- and upper-middle-class patients "for every penny of savings or assets" they can get. But that misses the point: We might know that, but Brill made clear that the problem is even worse than many of us...
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