Discoblog » Worst Science Article of the Week

“Magnetic” Boy Is Probably Just “Plump-and-Sticky” Boy

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 24 May 2011 12:42:12 +0000

Spoons. Frying pans. Industrial-sized irons. The blogosphere has been awash lately with the eclectic mix of objects that stick to a six-year-old Croatian boy’s stomach. In an unfortunately serious story, CBS reported that “Magnet” boy can carry upwards of 55 pounds of metal on his chubby little frame. What they forget to mention is that the boy’s “magnetic” abilities miraculously extend to mostly non-metal objects too, such as plastic TV remote controls and cell phones.

It also doesn’t help that little Ivan Stoiljkovic’s family apparently didn’t think human magnetism was odd enough: They claim that his hands radiate a special kind of heat that allows the boy to soothe “his grandfather’s stomach pains” and “the pain of a neighbor who hurt his leg in a tractor accident.” As for Ivan himself, his cuts apparently heal “very quickly,” leaving no trace of a scar (of course, it probably has nothing to do with the fact that younger skin just heals faster, with its greater elasticity and stronger connective tissues).

As Nature’s Barbara Ferreira so astutely points out, “If Ivan had indeed magnetic powers, he wouldn’t have the need to bend slightly backwards to keep the items stuck to his ...

Aflockalypse: The Media Goes on Apocalyptic Overdrive

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:14:18 +0000

Since Monday’s news that a few thousand birds fell from the sky on New Year’s Eve over Beebe, Arkansas, the world has gone a little crazy with talk of the “aflockalypse”: the mass bird deaths that have been documented worldwide.

Bird die-offs have been reported in not only Arkansas but also in Italy, Sweden, Louisiana, Texas, and Kentucky. Die-offs of other animals, including thousands of fish in Arkansas, Florida, New Zealand and the Chesapeake Bay have also been noted, while dead crabs washed up on UK shores.

Causes ranging from UFOs, monsters (our personal favorite), fireworks, secret military testing, poison, shifting magnetic fields, and odd weather formations have been blamed for the deaths, but researchers are saying these types of die-offs are normal. It’s simply a coincidence that a few big ones happened right around the new year–and once the global media started paying attention to wildlife mortality, we saw examples everywhere.

BoingBoing quotes Smithsonian Institution bird curator Gary Graves on the Arkansas bird die-off that got the conspiracy theory ball rolling:

He ...

Each Cell-Phone Tower Creates 18 Babies?! The Difference Between Causation & Correlation

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:27:15 +0000

Those people living in areas with higher numbers of mobile phone towers have more children, new research is showing (spreadsheet). Matt Parker at The Guardian’s Notes & Theories blog did the analysis of publicly available data and found the correlation:

Could it be possible that mobile phone radiation somehow aids fertilisation, or maybe there’s just something romantic about a mobile phone transmitter mast [aka tower] protruding from the landscape?

The data show that there is a very strong correlation between the number of cell phone towers and the birth rate in communities. For every additional phone tower, there are 17.6 more babies than the national average, Parker writes in his blog post:

When a regression line is calculated it has a “correlation coefficient” (a measure of how good the match is) of 98.1 out of 100. To be “statistically significant” a pattern in a dataset needs to be less than 5% likely to be found in random data (known as a “p-value”), and the masts-births correlation only has a 0.00003% probability of occurring by chance.

With all that ...

NASA Found Aliens! Or Not. The Worst Coverage of Arsenic-Loving Bacteria

Jennifer Welsh — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 23:42:04 +0000

While watching the science news for you here at Discover blogs, we’ve seen our share of bad science coverage. Most of the time, we let it slide. Most of the time, we write the truth and hope to overshadow the erroneous and exaggerated stories. But this time… this time we’re calling it out.

Last week’s coverage of the bacteria that live in Mono Lake, CA was over hyped because of a cryptic message in a NASA press release (namely, that the discovery would “impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life”). And even after all the build up, the early embargo break, and a long press conference, many news outlets STILL got the story wrong.

First, a quick recap of the important findings from DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science, for those who were off-planet last week:

In California’s Mono Lake, Felisa Wolfe-Simon has discovered bacteria that not only shrug off arsenic’s toxic effects, but positively thrive on it. They can even incorporate the poisonous element into their proteins and ...

Retracted Study: Biblical Woman Had Flu, Not Demonic Possession

Joseph Calamia — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:05:29 +0000

Though it might work for The DaVinci Code, apparently citing the bible doesn’t fly in a scientific journal. Virology Journal apologized yesterday for publishing a paper titled “Influenza or not influenza: Analysis of a case of high fever that happened 2000 years ago in Biblical time,” which attempts to diagnosis “a woman with high fever cured by our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Yesterday, journal editor Robert F. Garry apologized for the paper’s publication and announced that Virology will retract the piece. The blog Retraction Watch, where we found this story, posted a response from the paper’s lead author, Ellis Hon:

“As an article for debate, there was no absolute right or wrong answer, and the article was only meant for thought provocation. Neither was it meant to be a debate on the concept of miracles. My only focus at the time of writing was ‘what had caused the fever and debilitation’ that was cured by Jesus.”

The piece, which appeared in the journal’s “Case Report” section, had a reference list including The Holy Bible (New King James Version) and the Fahrenheit temperature scale. The authors ...

Worst Science Article of The Week: Facebook Causes Syphilis

Allison Bond — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:36:33 +0000

Here’s what we know about the social networking site, Facebook. It can mysteriously suck away large portions of your day, and make you sneaky, nosy, and narcissistic. It can also, in some extreme cases, cause carpal tunnel syndrome from clicking through the bazillion vacation pictures you posted online. But does Facebook cause syphilis? The short answer is “no.” The longer one is “Are you nuts?”

But that didn’t stop British tabloid The Sun from cranking up its imagination and posting an article titled “Sex diseases soaring due to Facebook romps.”

The piece was based on a British National Health Service (NHS) report that noted that syphilis cases in the Teesside region, an area of northeast England, were up four fold. It said casual sex in the area had spiked and as a result of people not using condoms, a surprising number of women had contracted syphilis. So, from fewer than ten cases in 2008, the number had now gone up to 30.

The Sun quotes Professor Peter Kelly, director of Public Health for NHS Tees:

“I don’t get the names of people affected, just figures. And I saw that several of ...

Worst Science Article of the Week: The CIA Dosed a French Town With LSD!

Smriti Rao — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:05:02 +0000

The CIA’s experiments with mind-control and hallucinogenic drugs are well documented. It’s hard to forget about programs like Operation Midnight Climax, in which the agency studied the effects of LSD by dosing unsuspecting clients at brothels. But did the agency go so far as to send an entire French village on an acid trip that killed a few people and institutionalized a bunch more? According to The Telegraph, the CIA did just that in 1951.

For years, people familiar with “the incident of the cursed bread” (or le pain maudit) have subscribed to the theory that villagers in Saint-Pont-Esprit in Southern France suffered massive delusions because they all ate bread contaminated by ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus. After eating bread from a local baker, the villagers reported such delusions as the conviction that they were missing body parts or had animals in their stomachs.

Now, The Telegraph reports that the incident was not “ergotism” caused by the fungus, as previously believed, but was actually a bad trip caused by the CIA, which had spiked the village bread with LSD, or maybe just sprayed LSD into the air. Quite a story, ...

Worst Science Article of the Day: Climate Denialism in The Daily Beast

Andrew Moseman — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:21:41 +0000

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.

Then there’s this little bit from the Michelle Bachmann school of science (CO2 can’t be bad because it’s natural):

Don’t forget carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless gas ...

Worst Science Article of the Week: Lab-Grown Meat Debuts (Again)

Brett Israel — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:06:41 +0000

“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 ...

Worst Science Article of the Week: The “Dark Side” of Darwin

Andrew Moseman — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:02:59 +0000

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 ...

Worst Science Article of the Week: io9′s Unspeakable Genetic Error

Andrew Moseman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:04:18 +0000

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 ...

Worst Science Article of The Week: Women Are Evil, and Want Your Husband

Melissa Lafsky — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:45:11 +0000

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 ...

Worst Science Article of the Week?

Melissa Lafsky — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:05:06 +0000

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:

Wired Calls Out Top Science Cliches, Gives Credit Where It’s Due

Allison Bond — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:20:52 +0000

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 ...

Bad Study of the Week: A Social Life Predisposes Women to Rape

Allison Bond — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:47:50 +0000

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 ...

Worst Science Article of The Week: Twitter Will Make You Eeevil

Melissa Lafsky — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:48:40 +0000

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 ...

Isn’t April Fools’ Over? Scientists Study Whether Soda Is Healthier than Water

Rachel Cernansky — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:53:30 +0000

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.

Their methodology: asking non-dog-owners to match photos of people with one of three dog breeds. The test subjects were right more than half the time, while statistically speaking, only a third of the answers should have been correct. The researchers therefore concluded that “certain ...

Today’s Unscientific Media Conclusion: Boobs Getting Bigger in New Zealand

Rachel Cernansky — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:06:05 +0000

In another example of a news report that lacks… reporting/analysis/context/rational thought, the increasing size of women’s breasts is apparently mystifying “braologists” in New Zealand. This one-quotation article says that over the last three years, bra sizes between D and J have increased more rapidly than those from AA to C.

With no mention of the growing obesity epidemic worldwide, it does not answer (or ask) the question of whether it’s an overall increase in body weight that’s translating into into the larger busts.

Plus there’s the little matter of cosmetic breast enhancements, which may also be the cause of the increase. Of course, it’s much more fun (and incorrect) to simply imply that every young lass in New Zealand is simply growing bigger knockers these days.

Image: Flickr / AZAdam

Worst Science Article Ever? Women “Evolved” to Love Shopping

Melissa Lafsky — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:50:48 +0000

You don’t have to look to hard to find bad science writing. Here at Discoblog, we do our best to chronicle, analyze, and explain the worst of it, from the playing hockey with facts to the over-reliance on questionable studies to the always-popular “slapping pseudo-science on a stereotype and declaring bulletproof validation.” But sometimes an article comes along that’s so egregious, so sloppy, so far from anything resembling actual fact, that even we are astonished.

Case in point: “Shopping is ‘throwback to days of cavewomen,’” a piece by Ben Leach at the U.K. Telegraph. It refers to a study (we use the term loosely) led by David Holmes of Manchester Metropolitan University, which “found” that “skills that were learnt as cavemen and women were now being used in shops.” According to Holmes:

Gatherers sifted the useful from things that offered them no sustenance, warmth or comfort with a skill that would eventually lead to comfortable shopping malls and credit cards. In our evolutionary past, we gathered in caves with fires at the entrance. We repeat this in warm shopping ...

Is the Recession Keeping You from Being Eaten by a Shark?

Melissa Lafsky — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:43:29 +0000

When people have less money, they tend to do less of certain things, like buy $3,000 jackets, order the $250 omakase, and pick up diamond-encrusted lingerie for their penthouse-dwelling mistresses. They also don’t typically fork over as much cash for vacations to beaches, islands, and other ocean-bordering locales.

The good news: Since all these recession-battered folks are crouched in their living rooms watching their 401K values plummet on a laptop screen, they aren’t swimming and cavorting in waters that are also frequented by permanent residents, such as sharks. With fewer humans and sharks in physical proximity, we have fewer chances for said sharks to munch on passing surfers and snorklers. Logical? Absolutely.

Of course, all logic can be twisted and mangled with a little help from the English language. Which brings us to the following LiveScience headline: “Economic Recession Means Fewer Shark Attacks.”Ah where shall we begin…

First, there’s the actual numbers: Shark attacks have fallen “from 71 in 2007 to 59 in 2008, the fewest since 2003, when there were 57.” So the grand worldwide decline is all of 12 attacks. In the U.S., the number of shark attacks went ...

Worst Science Article Of The Week: Too Much Coffee Will Make You Hallucinate?

Boonsri Dickinson — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:54:50 +0000

Hallucinating isn’t all that uncommon: A whopping 10 percent of people claim to hear voices in their lifetime (though it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re crazy). And while caffeine can cause a range of ailments including bone loss and a rise in blood pressure—and is accused of causing plenty more— hallucinations have remained safely off the list.

Until now, that is. Supposedly, a team of psychologists from Durham University in the U.K. have found that big-time coffee drinkers are three times more likely to suffer hallucinations. The researchers wanted to assess how an excess amount of caffeine affects a healthy population, so they asked 200 non-smoking students about their daily caffeine intake, including anything from coffee to tea to energy drinks to chocolate to caffeine pills.

After probing each person for their caffeine habits, the researchers assessed the students to determine their stress levels as well as how likely they were to hallucinate. A small number (the exact number wasn’t released, but it was small) of the subjects claimed they could see things that weren’t there, hear voices when no one was around, or even “sense the dead.”

According to the researchers, the ...

Worst Science Article of the Week: We Can See Your Dreams!

Boonsri Dickinson — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:34:19 +0000

A group of Japanese researchers are claiming that their “mind-reading” machine can read people’s dreams. While it sounds like a novel idea, this is certainly not the first claim from scientists that they can depict what a person sees based on their brain activity—nor the last.

Brain imaging has been around for ages. Typically, when fMRI machines are used to read people’s brain activity, the different states are classified into categories and then used to predict a person’s “perceptual state.” So what these ATR Computational Neuroscience researchers are saying they can do is actually reconstruct what a person is seeing. But can they really?

In the study, published in Neuron, the researchers flashed 400 images in front of subjects for 12 seconds each. An fMRI machine was used to collect brain activity data, which was then analyzed on a computer to determine patterns linked to how the brain reacted when it saw the images.

When the subjects were shown images of letters that read “neuron,” the fMRI picked up the brain activity, and once the computer analyzed the brain waves, the word neuron appeared on a screen—indicating a successful translation of ...

Worst Science Article of the Week: Drinking Coffee Shrinks Your Breasts?

Nina Bai — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:52:37 +0000

Female coffee drinkers beware: that Pumpkin Spice Latte might shrink your breasts. Or so you would think, if you scanned the headlines last week. A new study in the British Journal of Cancer [subscription required] has incited mass hysteria over a tenuous link between coffee intake and breast size. The Telegraph warns: “Drinking Too Much Coffee Could Shrink Women’s Breasts,” while UPI throws in a pun: “Study: Cups of Java Cut Cup Size.” But the best comes from the New York Post: “Women Face Drink & Shrink Dilemma, Coffee Poses a Booby Trap.”

But before you pour that cup of coffee down the sink (or “accidentally” spill it on your busty archnemesis) let’s take a closer look at that study:

Researchers from Sweden recruited 269 women (average age was 29) to have their breast size measured and to answer a questionnaire about coffee intake and other lifestyle choices. All the women were from families at high risk for breast cancer and about half carried a gene, CYP1A2*1F, that is associated with breast cancer. Essentially, the researchers were studying the relationship between CYP1A2*1F, breast ...

Worst Science Article of the Week: Lose Weight by Reading?

Nina Bai — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:33:11 +0000

Obese children, get thee to a library! A press release yesterday announced: “Duke Researchers Show Reading Can Help Obese Kids Lose Weight.”

Not so fast. Before you click over to Amazon.com, let’s take a closer look at the study they’re talking about:

Researchers at Duke Children’s Hospital asked 31 obese girls ages 9 to 13 to read an age-appropriate novel entitled Lake Rescue that was “carefully crafted” with weight management tips and positive role models. The novel follows the overweight heroine on an outdoor school trip, during which she gains self-esteem (rather than pounds) and learns about healthy eating and exercise.

Another group of girls was asked to read a novel not related to weight issues—about a girl searching for a missing cat—and a control group did not read either book. All participants were already enrolled in a comprehensive weight loss program.

Six months later, the girls who had read Lake Rescue experienced a 0.71 percentile decrease in BMI. Meanwhile, the group that read the non-weight-loss-oriented book had a 0.33 percentile decrease in BMI and the control group had a 0.05 percent increase in BMI. According to ...

Worst Study of the Week: Are 27 Percent of College Students “Tanorexic”?

Andrew Moseman — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:14:57 +0000

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 ...

Worst Science Headline of the Week: Cyborg Edition

Andrew Moseman — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:28:50 +0000

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

Worst Science Article of the Week: Are Sugary Snacks Actually Good for Kids?

Andrew Moseman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:20:11 +0000

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.

The author of the Telegraph story, however, can’t resist writing that the idea of sugar being good for kids will “delight children and horrify parents,” as if Benton’s finding somehow means that children can now gorge themselves at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory in the name of science. Eventually the author returns to the realm of real science and reminds us that excessive sugar ...

Worst Science Article of the Week: Did Women Wield Power in Greece 3,500 Years Ago?

Andrew Moseman — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:06:45 +0000

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.

The researchers’ study and their subsequent news release were tempered in their enthusiasm, saying that the find showed that Greek women from that era may have been able to achieve high social status—if they were born into a powerful family. Previously, they said, they thought women could only ascend to any kind of influence my marrying ...

Worst Science Article of the Week: Use a Cell Phone, Damage Your Baby

Melissa Lafsky — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:17:24 +0000

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.

Researchers at UCLA and the University of Aarhus, Denmark, did in fact conduct a study of around 13,000 women (a decent sample size, but hardly “giant,” as The Independent calls it), and found a correlation between the women who used cell phones during pregnancy and women who had children with ...

Worst Science Headline of the Week:

Amos Zeeberg (Discover Web Editor) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:51:43 +0000

“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.