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.
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Discoblog: Worst Science Article of the Week: Drinking Coffee Shrinks Your Breasts?
Image: Flickr / AZAdam
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 centres where we can flit from store to store without braving the icy winds.
The lead of the news article, found directly below a photo of a Nordic beauty staring lustfully into a shop window (since, naturally, when an article like this refers to the “humans” who love shopping what it really means is “women”), reads as follows:
Shoppers are using instincts they learnt from their Neanderthal ancestors, researchers have found.
So let’s review: According to the study, we learned to spend our days in malls maxing out AmEx cards from our ancient Neanderthal precursors. Except for the fact that Neanderthals are not direct ancestors of modern humans, and the two didn’t have any overlap. So just when did these “instinctual gathering” lessons occur? When we were all riding on the backs of Tyrannosaurs spearing woolly mammoths?
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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…
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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.”
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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.
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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 size, and coffee intake. The gene is known to control the metabolism of the hormone estrogen as well as certain chemicals found in coffee; it’s also been linked to higher breast density and thus higher breast cancer risk.
This is what they found:
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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 the CDC, children and teens with a BMI over the 95th percentile are considered obese. The difference between the readers and non-readers in this study was less than 1 percent — a suspiciously low number.
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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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