After several absorbing days at ScienceWriters2014, I’ve fallen behind. Here are a few quick things that I didn’t want to miss: Meredith Levine wrote an interesting piece for CBC News in Canada on vertigo, which has little to do with the Hitchcock movie but can be a serious, disabling illness, as she found out herself when […]
Isolation? Quarantine? Choose carefully when covering Ebola.
When a person infected with Ebola is moved away from others to prevent the spread of the disease, is that isolation? Or quarantine? I’ll admit I wasn’t sure, but now I know, thanks to a useful post at Covering Health, the blog of the Association of Health Care Journalists. After a brief discussion of the […]
Suppose 50,000 Americans died of Ebola every year…
Ebola has killed one person in the United States. Several others are infected. And yet the emergency is considered so severe that President Obama canceled a campaign trip today “so he could convene a meeting of several top cabinet members to coordinate the government’s response to the Ebola outbreak,” The New York Times and others reported. […]
Update: Discoverer of ‘Alzheimer’s in a dish’ was a cheerleader for a study that failed.
Yesterday, I posted on a story in The New York Times by Gina Kolata that contained more superlative adjectives than you can find in some of the most overheated advertising copy. The story reported on a way to create a version of Alzheimer’s disease by growing neurons in a laboratory dish, a potentially important advance […]
Ebola, make way for Lassa.
Erika Check Hayden had a nice piece in Nature a couple of weeks ago in which she did a very good job of placing us in a clinic in Sierra Leone without actually visiting the place herself. We see and hear the tin roof on the Ebola ward collapse, and we see the crush of […]
Open Notebook offers writing fellowship for early-career science writers.
The Open Notebook is seeking applicants for fellowships that give early-career science writers the opportunity to write five articles over a four-month period on the craft of science writing. The fellows “will produce a total of five articles for publication at The Open Notebook—a mix of ‘story behind the story’ interviews, reported features, and other resources, with […]