Blogs / Discoblog

Maybe you like to lay out in the sun. Maybe you like to do it frequently. But can you really not stop going? Earlier studies have suggested that tanning could be a kind of addictive behavior, and now new research says that more than one-fourth of college students surveyed at one university were “tanning dependent.”

The team of researchers say there is “some evidence” that tanning dependence, or “tanorexia,” has a biological basis, like the release of endorphins known as a “runner’s high.” So they had 400 students and volunteers from Virginia Commonwealth University answer a survey about their tanning habits. Forty percent said they’d used tanning booths, and the researchers classified 27 percent as “tanning dependent,” with tanning beneath the real sun actually more related to “dependency.”

This conclusion seems a little suspect. First, the questionnaire the researchers used was adapted from one used to survey people for symptoms of substance abuse and dependence. While that at first seems like a clever way to do a study, we have to wonder: Isn’t it a self-fulfilling prophecy to ask questions that presuppose tanning to be an addiction, and then declare that tanning is a widespread addiction?

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Don’t look now, but apparently the revolution has begun.

John Rogers from the University of Illinois and Max Lagally from the University of Wisconsin announced this week that they created a way for cameras to capture images on a curved surface, rather than the flat surface used by regular film and digital cameras. It’s a design based on the mammalian eye, and it’s made possible by stretchable electronics made from silicon, which allow cameras to capture wide-angle images without the pictures being distorted.

Rogers says his finding, especially the idea of putting circuits on elastic surfaces, could someday lead to electronics that can integrate with the human body. But the British Newspaper The Telegraph isn’t willing to wait, publishing the story with the headline, “Bionic Eye Heralds Cyborg Revolution.”

It’s an exciting finding, but sadly, many years of research, development, and testing stand between us and creating The Terminator. So if you poke your eye out tomorrow, don’t expect an electronic replacement to be ready.

Image: iStockphoto

The Telegraph published an article this weekend headlined, “Sugary Snacks Help School Children Concentrate.”

Really?

Here’s what actually happened: In a study of 16 kids, researchers gave them fruit juice containing either artificial sweetener or glucose—the natural sugar that acts as the body’s main energy source. The kids who drank the juice with glucose scored better on memory tests than the ones who ate artificial sugar, and appeared to have longer attention spans as well. Study leader David Benton’s main conclusion, then, was that children might perform better in school if they ate occasional snacks, rather than one big meal, and that a snack with some sugar might not be such a bad thing for them.

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Ancient Greek societies were, like the vast majority of other societies, patriarchal. Even as Athens moved toward an early version of democratic government around 500 B.C., men ran the show. But according to an article published on Sunday in the British newspaper The Observer, everything we knew about Greek gender relations was wrong.

The Observer article, titled “DNA Explodes Greek Myth About Women,” reports on a Manchester University study of DNA that dates back to the Mycenaean civilization from around the 16th or 17th century B.C., more than a millennium before the classical Athens of Socrates, Pericles, and Plato. What the scientists actually found through DNA analysis was that two skeletons located in a royal grave together were brother and sister, not husband and wife as archaeologists had previously thought.

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Mainstream news outlets are buzzing today about a new study from UCLA that found an apparent link between mothers using cell phones during pregnancy and their children developing behavioral problems. The story broke on Sunday, when Britain’s Daily Mail and The Independent both reported its findings.

From the headlines in these two papers (”Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby” in The Independent) to the claims (”Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research”) and categorizations (stating that the study was conducted by “top scientists”) to … just about every other sentence, these stories do a pretty spectacular job of diluting the facts. And while The Independent may win the award for “most egregious science coverage,” with the Mail a close second, they certainly weren’t alone.

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“Study: Acupuncture works for back pain”

You need only read the first sentence of the article to get the actual news: “Fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing for low back pain, and either kind performs much better than usual care.” Oops.

There is a widely held belief that women, those chatty creatures, utter far more words per day than men. Last year in her book The Female Brain, psychology professor Louann Brizendine tossed out the figures 20,000 (womanly words) versus 7,000 (motes of manly monologuing), which became a kind of informal consensus. As with much Men-are-from-Mars psychologizing, there was never much data to back up what was essentially an old wives’ tale.

Last week, Science published a paper by some researchers who finally looked into the matter and delivered what one hopes—though suspects will not be—a knockout blow to this rumor. In the study’s fairly large (though admittedly homogenous) sample group, both men and women said about 16,000 words per day.

Just a few days before the media blitz over the debunking paper, The Times of India published an earnest, credulous opinion piece that not only accepted the soon-to-be-disproven rumor but tried to explain exactly why it is that women speak so much more than men: because they do more manual work and they have more cells dedicated to emotion and communication. Judging by what we know now, this logic train must have been derailed by terrorists before it ever left the station.

I do admit that giving The Times this booby prize is a bit of a raw deal; many publications repeated the exact same theory before. But this was one magnificent flourish of bad timing.

(Some publications deserve credit for trying to debunk the rumor last fall.)

A few weeks ago I DiscoBlogged about a thoroughly dumb Mayo Clinic press release and BBC news article on a “vertical workstation”—a standard treadmill Elmer’s-ed to an office desk for giants—that was supposed to help pudgy people lose weight as they worked. Since then I’ve found myself thinking that there must be a lot of lazy, inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise just bad science reporting out there, and DiscoBlog could do a great service to its readers by pointing out those articles that should be taken with not a grain of salt but an entire Salar de Uyuni.

I forgot about that idea until hitting this AP article about how some parts of the world will be helped by global warming. Reading it convinced me that DiscoBlog should, nay, must take on this task of defending the world from crimes against science journalism. I hereby begin that mission by naming it the Worst Science Article of the Week.

What’s wrong it?

First off, the headline: “Surf’s up, Buffalo: The good side of global warming.” You’d think by reading the first half of this headline that global warming just might bring surfing to Buffalo. But toward the end of the article we read, “So … surf’s up, Buffalo? Probably not. While oceanfront cities might have to build seawalls to hold back the ocean in a warming world, some researchers believe the freshwater Great Lakes will evaporate a bit.” I’d say that this basically makes the headline a lie. Blatantly false. Contrary to the truth.

The other big problem is here: “[Canada] would see a 220% increase in international tourist arrivals by the end of the century, followed by Russia with a 174% jump, and Mongolia, up 122%.”

How the hell do these researchers know how many tourists are going to go to Canada—let alone Mongolia— in 2100? No, seriously. How. I’d love to know. This is obviously an extremely complicated system that depends on millions of un-trackable variables, and there’s no reason to crank some silly result out of a silly algorithm purporting to forecast the number of tourists a hundred years from now. You can add some caveats about not being sure, maybe put some error bars to the graph, but this is straight-up hoodoo. No one should try to pass this off as science, and no one should report it as such either.