Blogs / Discoblog

Lately when we’ve picked on people for bad science reporting, it’s often been anti-vaccine nonsense in the Huffington Post, or The Telegraph for going way overboard on one story or another. Today, though, it’s The Daily Beast, running columnist Tunku Varadarajan’s “A Skeptic’s Guide to Copenhagen.” And Varadarajan earned both contempt and some praise for this piece.

Given the title, Varadarajan certainly isn’t trying to hide what he’s doing; it’s a big tent revival for people who agree with him. The piece trots out one global warming non-believer talking point after another: suggesting the East Anglia hacked e-mails affair shows a widespread conspiracy, taking the word “trick” in the emails out of context, saying the sun is “the likeliest global warming culprit,” painting a handful of scientists like Freeman Dyson as heroic for “dissenting from the warmist consensus” and dismissing the rest as a bunch of villainous sheep, and so on.

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“Meat grown in laboratory in world first,” trumpets the headline of an article in The Telegraph.

The article went on to explain that Dutch researchers have grown in vitro meat in a laboratory, which is essentially edible fake meat grown in a test tube using the cells of a livestock animal. Sounds cutting-edge, right?

But we here at DISCOVER, we’ve seen a pile of other headlines over the past decade that make it clear that lab-grown meat is nothing new.

A sampling of previous articles: Serving up man-made meat (2005), Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table (2006), Scientists develop method for home-grown meat (2006), Scientists Flesh Out Plans to Grow (and Sell) Test Tube Meat (2008).

Nonetheless, according to The Telegraph:

Scientists have managed to grow a form of meat in a laboratory for the first time, according to reports. Researchers in the Netherlands created what was described as soggy pork and are now investigating ways to improve the muscle tissue in the hope that people will one day want to eat it.

It’s a great headline and opening (regardless of whether anyone will eat something as delectable sounding as a soggy hotdog), however researchers have been growing tiny bits of meat in their labs for years. The non-bylined Telegraph article does not mention that the idea of in vitro meat has been around since the 1930s, and the modern technology was born from a little agency named NASA, which was looking for a way to feed hungry astronauts, as reported in a 2008 Time article [emphasis added]:
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2009 represents a double-dip of Charles Darwin milestones. A plethora of Darwin stories in the press have marked his 200th birthday. And today, as 80beats has already noted, is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, an occasion that sparked another round of Darwin fever.

TIME, however, observed the day by posting a Q&A with British author Dennis Sewell, who is selling a book on “how often — and how easily — Darwin’s big idea has been harnessed for sinister political ends.” Sewell isn’t an evolution denier, but rather among the crowd crowing that Darwin was a racist and responsible for inspiring eugenics.

Sigh. While it’s probably true that Darwin was influenced by the racial attitudes of his time and place—Victorian England–DISCOVER has covered the other side of that coin: that the scientist was an abolitionist and rather progressive for his day. Even Ray Comfort, in his rambling, Darwin-bashing introduction to a “new edition” of Origin that creationists passed around college campuses recently, concedes: “However, after much research, I do concede that you won’t find anything in Darwin’s writings that would indicate that he in any way felt blacks were to be treated as inferior or that his views of them were due to their skin color.” Even if the opposite were true, and Darwin the man was actually a howling racist, Darwin’s theory of evolution would still smash the fallacy that different races belong to different species.

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In a new study in yesterday’s edition of the journal Nature, researchers analyze the speech-connected gene called FOXP2—both in the variant found in we talkative humans and that found in our close relatives the chimpanzees, who despite great genetic similarity to us are not a linguistic bunch. The team notes that only two amino acids separate the human and chimp versions. So a post over at io9 came out with the headline, “One Gene Tweak Could Make Chimps Talk.”

It has a nice poetic ring to it, and we can understand why a sci-fi blog would theorize that tinkering with this important gene could turn our fair home into Planet of the Apes. But we have to play the fun police on this one: The headline is just so wrong.

FOXP2 certainly is important. The scientists say in the Nature study that “so far, the transcription factor FOXP2 (forkhead box P2) is the only gene implicated in Mendelian forms of human speech and language dysfunction.” They say that scientists don’t know for sure whether this two-amino-acid change in human FOXP2 occurred around the same time we developed language and is connected us beginning to talk, but their study teases the idea: “These data provide experimental support for the functional relevance of changes in FOXP2 that occur on the human lineage, highlighting specific pathways with direct consequences for human brain development and disease in the central nervous system (CNS).”

But the fact that FOXP2 is connected with human language, and that chimps have a slightly different version of the gene, doesn’t mean chips would start reciting Shakespeare if we swapped our version for theirs. For one thing, there are unavoidable physical differences in the voicebox and the size (and non-speech functions) of the brain. And FOXP2 isn’t “The Speech Gene.” Rather, it exerts some control over a series of other genes that all work in concert—at least 116 of them in humans.

The New York Times reports:

Several of the genes under FOXP2’s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure, meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolved together in making language and speech a human faculty.

So  talking chimps aren’t coming just because of one genetic tweak. But maybe I’ll move Planet of the Apes up to the top of my Netflix queue—original version, of course.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Chatty Chimps Use Human-Like Connection Center
Discoblog: “Bro-Mance” For Chimps? Male Apes Form Long, Lasting Friendships
DISCOVER: Great Mysteries of Human Evolution

Image: flickr / King Chimp

Oh Lord. From the Telegraph, we’d expect this. But New Scientist?

From a piece posted earlier this week:

Women: do you have a man? If you do, better beware. Chances are that some lone female has her eye on him.

A new study provides evidence for what many have long suspected: that single women are much keener on pursuing a man who’s already taken than a singleton.

The study of which they speak consisted of a survey of 184 heterosexual university students, both male and female. Half were single, and half in relationships. The entire group was told that a computer program would match them with an ideal partner.

Unbeknownst to the participants (but knownst to us), everyone was offered a “fictitious candidate partner who had been tailored to match their interests exactly.” Every woman was shown the same picture of “Mr Right,” and ditto for the men. Half the participants were told their ideal mate was single, and the other half that he or she was off the market. According to NS,

The most striking result was in the responses of single women. Offered a single man, 59 per cent were interested in pursuing a relationship. But when he was attached, 90 per cent said they were up for the chase.

The article goes on to quote the study authors’ conclusions like:

single women may be more drawn to attached men because they’ve already been “pre-screened” by other women and found to be satisfactory as a mate, whereas single men are more of an unknown quantity.

What the piece neglected to note was the fact that filling out a survey form indicating you might be willing to go after a dude is a far cry from actually going after that dude. So by logic, a small sample size of women reporting more interest in an attached man shouldn’t lead to a screaming rush of hide-your-men-crazy-zombie-mate-poachers-are-on-the-loose.

Plus, there’s also the small matter of what those photos of Mr. Right looked like, as the study authors note:

One limitation of the present study was that it used a single male and female target photo and although our pretest indicated both photos were perceived as moderately attractive, our study showed men’s attractiveness ratings for the female photo were higher than women’s ratings for the male photo.

So maybe the lede should be something more like: “If your man is not super attractive, other women may need him to be pre-screened before they’d think about going after him.”

This post has been appended from its original version.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Can Pheromone Body Wash Make You More Desirable?
Discoblog: Bad Study of the Week: A Social Life Predisposes Women to Rape
Discoblog: Two Twins, Two Dads: DNA Test Proves “Twins” Born to Different Fathers

Image: iStockphoto

Women are getting “hotter” as more beautiful women reproduce at a higher rate and have a higher proportion of girls to boys? We post, you decide:

Even the most casual readers of science news may have come across a few phrases that get used over and over, to the point of becoming extremely annoying.

So Wired took it upon itself to compile an entertaining list of the top five worst science cliches—and called DISCOVER out for employing one of the dreaded phrases (along with pretty much every other science publication).

Here’s a few excerpted entries from the list, compiled by Betsy Mason:

1. Holy Grail: To me, this is the mother of all bad science clichés, the worst offender. And I recently learned I have back up on this opinion from the venerable journal Nature which has literally banned scientists from putting holy grails in their papers.

2. Silver Bullet: No more silver bullets, please. Apparently they are really only meant for werewolves, witches and the occasional monster…. Things that are not silver or magic bullets: antioxidants, carbon capture, disk encryption, GM crops, vitamins, and carbon dioxide mosquito traps.

3. Shedding Light: Why must everything always be shedding light on something else? In addition to the light I shed on dark matter in 2006, light has also been shed on virtually everything you can think of… Googling “shed* light” + science OR scientists OR research returns 6.66 million hits.

Thanks, Wired, for shedding some light on the shifting paradigm of science journalism, and filling in that missing link on our never-ending quest for media’s holy grail. Now all our field needs is a silver bullet (or a revenue model that actually works).

Related Content:
Discoblog: Journalism Fail
Discoblog: Worst Science Article of the Week
Discoblog: The New Defense Against Despotism: Text Messaging

Image: flickr / moria

UPDATE: The article discussed below has since been removed from the Telegraph’s Web site, with no word on whether the story was officially retracted. As several commenters pointed out, the sensationalism of the article differed quite a bit from the actual findings of the article. Essentially, the Telegraph makes it seem as though the study makes the scientifically dubious claim that men are insensitive sex-mongers, while women who behave a certain way encourage men to rape them. So perhaps the title of “Worst Science Article of the Week” is more in order. For more discussion of this matter, see here and here.

Outgoing women who drink socially and wear skirts, beware: You have predisposed yourself to being raped. At least, that’s what a highly questionable study headed by psychologists at the University of Leicester asserts.

The first problems lie in the study subjects, not to mention the methods: To find out the opinions of the male population (through a survey—never the most reliable of data sets) the researchers recruited 101 men from local and university soccer and rugby teams. It’s safe to say that this is not an accurate sample of a diverse male population.

Next, the researchers surveyed the subjects about “how far” they would go with a woman “before calling it a night.” For a subject as emotionally, sociologically, and politically charged as rape, a subject that has many contributing variables, these questions are somewhat of an oversimplification, not to mention potentially misleading to both respondents and researchers.

So what were the results? Here’s what the Telegraph tells us:
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Quick! Grab the latest scientific study that may have something remotely to do with Twitter! Run it with a “Twitter Will Destroy Humanity!” headline! With a graphic by Hieronymus Bosch!

Here’s how it all started: A University of Southern California study, which is slated for publication next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition, has come to the reported conclusion that Twitter can/might/will turn humanity into a teeming mass of barbarians who engage in all matter of mass killings, wanton torturing, rape, and other atrocities. Or something.

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a researcher and co-author on the study, has been quoted far and wide across the Internets with such gems as:

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.”

Possibly—though “fully experiencing emotions” about others’ psychological states is not something that humans were ever particularly good at. Plus “implications for our morality” can be drawn from just about anywhere, on the Internet or no.

Not to mention the small matter, which some reports fail to mention, that the study’s methodology had absolutely nothing to do with Twitter.

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It’s only Monday, and there’s already a toss-up for worst science article of the week. Scientists at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health seem not to have realized that when it comes to weight gain, we’ve got one thing figured out: The fewer calories you consume, the less weight you put on. So they spent time and resources on a study to reach the following conclusion: Drinking water is less likely to cause obesity in kids than drinking sugar-sweetened drinks like soda and juice.

Weirder yet, the researchers don’t even sound assertive, as if their hypothesis needs further testing—not drinking sugary beverages, they say, “can reduce” excess calorie consumption. Well, yes, it can—and it does.

But while there’s validity, however obvious, to the Columbia  study, the U.K.’s Bath Spa University has just published its own, er, breed of ludicrous research: a study concluding that pet owners look like their dogs.

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