Monday, March 23, 2009

Science links

  • Here's an interesting video from NASA following Jupitor behind the sun compiled from spacecraft photos. Jupitor's moons and the change in the solare flare are incredibly detailed.
  • For those following the ridiculously inaccurate comments of George Will on climate change science in the Washington Post, a reply has finally been printed. What gets me about all of this, as I have blogged about before, is just how bad the press is at understanding the science behind climate studies.
  • But there is more evidence of the media's incompetence in describing science in general. Bad Science discusses how the same evidence on prostate cancer screening was presented by the US and UK media in the exact opposite way as the Australian media. But this is not just poor understanding of the studies looked at: "There were in fact two large studies on PSA testing published in the New England Journal on the 18th of March 2009, not one. They were both published on the same day, in the same journal, they are side by side on the same contents page. British journalists discussed only one of them: the one that said PSA screening does reduce deaths." They completely ignored the other study that found no results for screening.

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