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Let’s get this out there to begin with, so it’s absolutely clear in everyone’s minds. ‘Failure to replicate’ a study does not mean that the original study was wrong, poor, or fraudulently conducted. It does not call into question an entire field of science. It does not call into question the integrity of any scientists involved. It means that the results of the replication did not match the original study, which could be for a number of reasons. It is... Read more
Today's post was written by Joanna Martin. Joanna is a 2nd year PhD student at Cardiff University, in the Institute of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences. For her undergraduate degree, she studied Experimental Psychology at Bristol University. She's on Twitter as @trufflesquirrel and blogs about life as a PhD student at: http://squirreledthoughts.wordpress.com/ The way researchers, clinicians and society think about child mental health problems is constantly evolving as we discover and come to understand more about the nature of human mental... Read more
When it comes to science writing, we are very fortunate to be living in a world of plenty at the moment. Over the past year, we've had the chance to read some excellent books - Spillover by David Quammen, Extremes by Kevin Fong, and Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre all immediately spring to mind. Now, it's the turn of Dr Adam Rutherford - geneticist, science broadcaster, editor at Nature, and lover of Lego. His new book, Creation, is two books... Read more
Channel 4 in the UK currently has a TV show on Tuesday nights called ’16 and Counting’ - one of those shows that dresses itself up as documentary, when really it just provides a chance for nosey people to get a shallow insight into the lives of other people (in this case, people who choose to have huge numbers of children). Being a nosey person myself, I was zoning out to last night’s episode, until one particular scene caught my... Read more
It's 1937. In a factory in America, the air is thick with the acrid smell of rubber being created. Like a finely tuned hive mind, workers go about their duties, accustomed to the stench in the air, their minds on the task at hand. And amid the day-to-day cacophony, E.E. Williams, a plant physician, notices something strange; none of his workers seem to be able to handle their alcohol. In a paper published that year in the Journal of the... Read more
As part of Brain Awareness Week, March’s SpotOn NYC (#SoNYC) event will look at the challenges of conveying the knowns and unknowns of neural disorders to the public. Preparing for the conversation, SpotOn is hosting a collection of related guest blog posts; contributions will examine the way brain research is communicated to the public and how this research is interpreted by the press. You can join in the online conversation by following the #BeBraiNY and #SoNYC hashtags. This post originally appeared... Read more
A few weeks ago, I had the very good fortune to talk to Dr Elisabeth Whyte from Penn State about her recently crowdfunded project looking at developing video-game-based interventions for autism. You can see the final piece over at The Crux, which includes information about other ways in which video games can help improve health care quality. As part of the interview though, I got to talk to Elisabeth in more detail about how her crowdfunding experience went, what it's... Read more
In what I can only assume is an attempt to join the Daily Mail bandwagon of classifying everything depending upon whether or not it's going to kill you, the Daily Mirror today lead with the story that the “TV and computer craze is giving kids cancer”. Well, it's not. Not according to the press release on which the story is based, anyway - it doesn't mention children once. The only data in the story are from a commercial report from... Read more
Here's a bit of fun for you, to end 2012 with. About a year or so ago, I developed an interest/mild obsession in 'nominative determinism', or the idea that a person's name somehow has some sort of effect on their career choice. Although the concept has been floating around for decades, it was an article in the New Scientist that jump-started the term nominative determinism itself, in 1994: "We recently came across a new book, Pole Positions - The... Read more
You may have heard that the world is ending this Friday. We don't know how, or when precisely - those damn dirty scientists know, but they're not telling us. But we do know that it's all because of the Mayans. As everyone knows from high school history, the Mayans were a group of people who lived about 20,000 years ago in what is now known as Sheffield, and had amazing powers over life, the universe and everything. They were... Read more
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