Outbreaks of science myth-busting can be a bit of a puzzlement. The science behind a popular headline-maker might be a tottering house…

It’s not really news when a journalist goes cherry-picking for juicy tidbits to fit a narrative, is it? We all fall into…

A competition for attention lies at the heart of the scientific enterprise. And the abstract is its “blurb.” A scientific abstract is…

You could get a very sore neck watching all the claims and counter-claims about mammography zing back and forth. It’s like a…

Act I: An ounce of “prevention.” “Prevention is better than cure.” Aphorisms like this go back a long way. And most…

The one time I went flying off the side of a mountain on skis, I certainly didn’t mean to. Before I hit…

Knowledge accumulates. But studies can get contradictory or misleading along the way. You can’t just do a head count: 3 studies saying…

Was this the year open access for science reached critical mass? One hypothesis suggests that a transformative group needs to reach one-third…

It’s not often that a research article barrels down the straight toward its one millionth view. Thousands of biomedical papers are published every day…

Imagine if there were a simple single statistical measure everybody could use with any set of data and it would reliably separate…

The scientific literature is full of it. By which I mean, of course, spin, error and less-than-reliable results. All that noise…

Pieces of information, disputed and not, can be woven very quickly into competing explanatory narratives. Press the right buttons, then it can…