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.

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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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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

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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