I’m proud to announce my journalistic debut this Monday, a news report on a study which claimed to show that transcendental meditation decreases the risk of death due to heart disease. On Wednesday, my article earned a (mostly) positive nod from Paul Raeburn of the Knight Science Journalism tracker, a blog that “peer reviews” science reporting on the web.
Mr. Raeburn wondered why news outlets didn’t give this study very much attention, considering how dramatic–more to the point, how publicly funded–its results were. He also criticized what little coverage there was for being too credulous and not asking a few obvious methodological questions. I know this is old news now, but since I was one of the reporters who dropped the yoga ball (so to speak) with this story, I’ll try to clear up a few facts that were lost in Monday’s deadline shuffle. Info that wasn’t previously reported is in bold.
(You may want to read my original article and the study’s press release to get a few basic details. Don’t worry, both are short.)
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Last night I was on Eurekalert, the science news wire service, and came across this press release:
Fruit fly sperm makes females do housework after sex
The sperm of male fruit flies are coated with a chemical ’sex peptide’ which inhibits the female’s usual afternoon siesta and compels her into an intense period of foraging activity…
Wait, what? I have to tell my friends!
I quickly checked the date and time on the research paper, and it was embargoed until 9pm. That meant that at 8:38pm, I couldn’t tell anyone about the news for another 22 minutes. The journal that published the paper, the regal-sounding and yet surprisingly fun Proceedings of the Royal Society B, had probably just posted the paper online today and needed journalists to keep quiet about the research until it was ready for press.
I wondered how much press it would get. After the jump: Is this my chance to scoop all the British newspapers?
For those of you who don’t already know this IRL, I have now made the switch from being a science writing intern in Boston to a social media intern in Washington, DC. My new employer is Science Magazine, or more specifically, Science’s online news division called ScienceNOW.
Since my job consists of monitoring Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere all day, I’ve been on top of the science news cycle (i.e. surfing the web) even more than usual. Today has been a good day for wacky news, so I’ll start with the least surprising and work my way up.
4. Water droplets with opposing charges repel each other, as seen in the movie above. Read that again if you’re not surprised. I said opposites REPEL. Remember in high school, when you were taught that opposites attract? Well, not always. And the reason has to do with a complicated bit of physics that you can read more about at ScienceNOW. The weirdest science news after the jump…
Here are two clips of cats purring. One of the clips is from a cat who is happy and content, and the other is from a cat who is hungry and wants you to feed it.
Clip 1:
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Clip 2:
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Can you tell which is which? (The answer is after the jump)
“What’s effective is not the placebo, but the meaning of the treatment,” writes the doctor Harriet Hall in Skeptic Magazine. “We enter into a human relationship with a caring person who offers to help us.”
Hall is talking about placebos, those pills used by doctors and scientists that don’t contain any medicine, but often seem to help patients get better anyway. I say “seem” because the exact nature of the improvement, and the way that placebos effect it, is one of the most famously controversial topics in 20th-century medicine.
The article mentions that patients who know they’ve been given a placebo (commonly a sugar pill or just water) often request to continue the treatment. If you’re the type doctor who only believes in a physically measurable improvement — and most doctors are — then this request seems hardly justified. On the other hand, even if the patient is “imagining” their improvement, it seems presumptuous to claim that they are also “imagining” the sense of subjective comfort they are obviously getting.
The answer, says Hall, is to widen the medical definition of “betterment” beyond the rigid and often unsympathetic limits imposed on it by the tradition of empirical science. (Personally, I think mind-body duality is also to blame…)
