Prepare yourselves, dear readers: The United States of North America is coming.
Writing in the newest issue of Dædalus, two historians of science, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, have taken on a quixotic task: imagining a future historian looking back at our time, in an effort to tease out how we failed to avert a climate-caused collapse. Or, as they put it, how it came to be that “a second Dark Age” fell “on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.” (The full version of the article is online here.)
Known for their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which examined the role of industry in casting doubts on the findings of scientists on cigarettes, climate change, and other topics, Oreskes, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, and…
Boston — Scientists have a hard enough time getting people to understand what they’re talking about.
Their thoughts can be complicated. Their sentences can be laden with jargon. And their conclusions can offend political or religious sensibilities.
And now, to make things worse, readers have an immediate forum to talk back. And when some readers post uncivil comments at the bottom of online articles, that alone can raise doubts about the underlying science, a new study has found. Or at least reinforce those doubts.
The study, outlined on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, involved a survey of 2,338 Americans asked to read an article that discussed the risks of nanotechnology, which involves engineering materials at the atomic scale.
Of participants who had already expressed wariness toward the technology, those who…
Last week CNN pulled a story about a study purporting to demonstrate a link between a woman’s ovulation and how she votes, explaining that it failed to meet the cable network’s editorial standards. The story was savaged online as “silly,” “stupid,” “sexist,” and “offensive.” Others were less nice. Most of the vitriol was directed at CNN and at the reporter, Elizabeth Landau, who pointed out on Twitter what should go without saying: She didn’t conduct the study.
The person who did conduct the study is Kristina Durante, along with two co-authors, Ashley Arsena and Vladas Griskevicius. Durante, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, whose doctorate is in social psychology, often writes about how ovulation affects women’s choices. Another forthcoming study of…
[Updated on 9/12/2012 at 10:35 a.m. with a response from Isabelle Boutron.]
In recent years, newspapers have been full of articles touting the health benefits of coffee: It cuts the risk of heart attack, stroke, and various kinds of cancers. Yet some studies have also raised warnings, saying coffee can encourage overeating and, yes, even increase heart-attack risks.
Similar uncertainties—at least as reflected in newspaper articles and TV news reports—surround red wine, aspirin, estrogen supplements, prostate screening, and many other foods, pharmaceuticals, and medical procedures.
What’s going on? Are science reporters unable to make sense out of medical research? Are they overblowing minor fluctuations in study findings just to attract readers?
The answer, according to an analysis published on Tuesday in the journal PLoS Medicine, is neither. Instead, according to one …
The ecological effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill are still largely unknown. Josh Fischman, a senior writer at The Chronicle, is on the research vessel Endeavor in the Gulf of Mexico with a team of university scientists seeking answers. He is filing reports from the ship.
This oil slick was spotted from the deck of the Endeavor this weekend. (Courtesy of Kai Ziervogel)
About one mile from Deepwater Horizon’s former site—Gallons and gallons of chemicals called dispersants get poured onto oil spills, including the one that started here. It’s tempting to view dispersants as chemicals added to chemicals. But they really may be aids to biology, working hand in glove with microbes to break apart slicks. An experiment now running aboard the Endeavor is starting to show how this happens.
Why do we sometimes delight in otherpeople’smisfortune? The ugly emotion has an appropriately harsh name—Schadenfreude—and most of us have been guilty of it on occasion.
But the emotion may reveal something not terribly flattering about the person who feels it. A 2011 study concluded that we’re more likely to experience Schadenfreude if we suffer from low self-esteem. Researchers evaluated the self-esteem of 70 undergraduates and then told them about a fellow student who was a high-achiever. They later told the subjects that the successful student had given a lousy thesis presentation and was being forced to rewrite it.
The students’ levels of Schadenfreude were tested by asking whether they agreed with statements like “I couldn’t resist a little smile.” Those with low self-esteem felt more threatened by the achievements of the student, and those who felt more threatened…
This week the scientific world discovered Adolf Hitler, German dictator and wannabe science grant-winner, for the umpteenth time. The worthy Scholarly Kitchen today features parody videos of Der Führer ranting against stupid grant reviewers, right on the heels of the estimable Boing Boing, which posted them a week ago.
They are not the first to notice. The parodies were on YouTube in 2009. And CBS News did a story on them in 2010. That same year the science blog bioephemera pointed out this was a meme, and Hitler ranting against various kinds of heavy-handed oversight—or exercising it himself—was becoming quite common.
All the clips are overdubs of the 2004 German-language movie Downfall, starring Bruno Ganz as the fearless leader. There was one with Hitler as a movie producer, ordering a bunch of copyright-infringement “takedown” notices for allegedly derivative works….
In one sense this is just a spat between an author and a reviewer. But it’s worth looking at closely because it’s also about how science gets communicated and translated, summarized and (possibly) dumbed-down.
Here’s a brief dissection of the back-and-forth (the quotes are from Chabris’s review):
“Visual information from the left eye does not go only to the brain’s right hemisphere; information from the left visual field does.”
Chabris points out an error. Lehrer acknowledges it. Point Chabris.
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