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Hormone therapy in rehab. Again. New hormone therapy data confirm that timing matters. The Nobel Prizes. Chemistry is biology, and biology is physics. Reprogramming stem cells: betcha didn't know it dates to 1962. G protein-coupled receptors: "bio with huge pharma implications." Physics: uhhhh ... But why not the Higgs boson?
Is this your first ScienceWriters meeting? Do you have experiences to share from previous meetings? NASW Member Michael Newman is once again organizing a chance for first-time meeting attendees to get together and have their questions answered by veterans. Read on to learn more about how you can get your questions answered and meet new colleagues in an informal setting.
Fraud is the reason for most research paper retractions. Nobelist is trying to clean up social science methodology. Fraudulent peer review and peer reviewers. Is this the End of Science? Politicians misrepresent the facts, too. Lies, damn lies, and statistics about health care and environmental issues clogged the presidential debate between Obama and Romney, but climate change was ignored. Al Gore says Obama's lame performance was due to Denver's altitude.
Poynter's Beth Winegarner lists a half-dozen ways for freelancers to build their businesses. Many of them boil down to finding a network and making the most of it: "Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, connecting with fellow freelancers has never been easier. Knowing who’s writing, and who they’re writing for, gives you a good sense of which publications are open to taking freelance work," Winegarner writes. Also, do your homework, and "pitch more than you can write."
The winner of the 2012 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, is Gayathri Vaidyanathan. Vaidyanathan received the award and its $1,000 prize for two stories in Nature, “The Wheat Stalker” and “The Cultured Chimpanzees;” one story in Greenwire,“Study ignites fresh concerns about drilling emissions;” and a story in Energywire, “Could risk analysis prevent future deepwater disasters?”
Jonah Lehrer resurfaces briefly to announce that he's writing about fraudulent science writing. What a surprise. Genetically manipulated organisms, giant rat tumors, and how to promote a book and movie. Scientific research declares that bad science writing is all the fault of scientists.
Sid Caesar once said that comedy has to be based on truth. By that measure, the humorous cover design of the 2011 annual report for Research Communications at Ohio State was based on the truth that the four people then on staff — Earle Holland, Jeff Grabmeier, Emily Caldwell, and Pam Frost Gorder — are, fundamentally, extreme personalities. From the Summer 2012 ScienceWriters.
The mouse retrovirus XMRV does not cause chronic fatigue syndrome, but there's more, much more. XMRV doesn't cause prostate cancer either. But, you heard it here first, maybe some other infection does? Should PLoS have retracted the prostate cancer paper without consulting the authors? Plus, savor the big book of best science blogging.