Member articles

Gary Schwitzer guest blogged as part of our Health Literacy Month Series. He talks about the challenges of accurately reporting on health and medicine, and actually misleading readers instead of informing them. He considers absolute vs. relative risk info, association vs. causation, and screening tests. A must read for anyone in science writing.

It's impossible to anticipate who will have health literacy problems. You can’t predict based on a patient’s age, gender, profession or income. So what can be done? Listen to my conversation with AHRQ’s Cindy Brach to hear how AHRQ is offering tools to help clinicians communicate better: http://engagingthepatient.com/2011/10/03/ahrqs-cindy-brach-the-20-actions-you-can-take-to-prevent-health-literacy-related-complications/

The latest on early human migration to Australia and Southeast Asia. The latest on what a mongrel species Homo sapiens is. Bioethics and Aborigine genetic research. 50 reasons not to believe in evolution. Nearly mind-reading and somewhat spooky: Capturing images of what the brain is seeing. Best video of the week: The NASA satellite that fell to earth. Not.

DON'T PANIC, but Microorganisms R Us. Gut bacteria govern the brain and behavior, mice say. Yogurt and the Mind-Body Problem. My.microbes wants your microbes. The Encyclopedia of Life is reborn: 700,000 species and counting.

Meet a new human ancestor, maybe. Can 2 million year-old soft tissue be recovered from a fossil site? The politics of vaccination: Republican presidential candidates, HPV vaccine, and cervical cancer. Green fluorescent cats: These are not cute kitties, but genetic engineering a possible weapon against AIDS.

Cloudy and unfair. The latest controversial climate change paper led a journal editor to resign. Should he have retracted instead, or did his resignation force useful new analyses of the paper? Open The Open Notebook and see how science writers do their work. The 9-11 tenth anniversary: fewer health problems than forecast. Is a less scary world on the way?

That Virginia earthquake caused the Earth to move the East coast, but wasn't a big deal after all. Is there a pattern in recent quakes? Tracking the Tweetquake: Tweets really did outrun the quake itself. Fossil news. The oldest life? The oldest placental mammal? How the Juramaia find affects dating mammal evolution, particularly primates. The latest trendy chef is Homo erectus. Maybe.

Big HITs: Health information technology is not a snore. Really. Chinese scientists to deflect Earth-threatening asteroid Apophis! The physics preprint server ArXiv at 20. Are physics and chemistry getting more popular because of television? The potential influence of the TV show Breaking Bad.