Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Media Consumption: 1/6/13-1/12/13

A few choices from what I read last week - as always feel free to share with me some of the things you've been reading lately. 

I'm leading with the bonus pick this week, because I don't even do research (but I certainly read enough research papers) and I found the #overlyhonestmethods tweets hilarious. 


This week a hashtag on Twitter (which is used to join/catalog tweets) was circulating about overly honest methods in science research. Most of these were pretty funny, some were a little scary in terms of the things that really go on in the lab and why decisions are made to run an experiment a certain way. Pretty much scientists on twitter had a field day with this. What I’ve linked to is a storify of the tweets, if you’ve never seen storify you should check it out, it is a web platform that you can use to pull tweets on a specific topic together so that they read like a story.

Cancer/Medicine Pick:
Pap Test Could Help Find Cancers of the Uterus and Ovaries – Denise Grady, The New York Times
This week the cancer research story that made a big splash online was this research led by Dr. Luis Diaz out of Johns Hopkins University. The study provides evidence that pap tests which are done to detect cervical cancer could also be used to detect cancers of the uterus and ovaries – thus screening for three cancers with a single test that is already being done.

Science Pick:
The Million Dollar Dinosaur Scandal – Brian Switek, Slate
Switek is an awesome science writer/blogger (he writes Laelaps for the new National Geographic network Phenomena, and previously blogged at Wired) and is a go-to for context and debunking on dinosaur stories. This is a long read, but I thought the world of fossil smuggling was fascinating so that’s why this is my science pick of the week!

Writing Pick:
Great advice here from Deborah Blum, Jeanna Bryner, and Tom Breen on how they prepare before an interview with a scientist.

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