Post egregious examples of crap science reporting in this thread

[John Albert]

Really, really bad examples of dumbed-down or just outright ridiculous stories in the media, presented as science.

You know how much you love to hate 'em, so let's have one thread to collect them all!

I'll kick it off with this little gem:

Scientists are about to find "The Force"

What's the Higgs boson?

According to most physicists, there's a Higgs field that is everywhere. The elusive Higgs particle would be the carrier of that field, interacting with all the other particles, "sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the "force", as National Geographic eloquently put it when the Large Hadron Collider was being built.

http://gizmodo.com/5866354/scientists-about-to-find-the-force



This so-called "science writer" from Gizmodo references a decent article in National Geographic, but tosses out all of the good, reliable information presented there in favor of latching on to this single goofy analogy:

Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the "force." The Higgs is a crucial part of the standard model of particle physics—but no one's ever found it.

And then he extrapolates that into: The physicists at CERN are about to discover "The Force."



Shame on you, Jesus Diaz. You should stick to hawking Apple gadgets in the guise of "product reviews."

 

[Mark6]

Voyager 1 on verge of entering Milky Way

 

[LarianLeQuella]

Any "Science" Story on this website...

 

[FramerDave]

Not science strictly, but one that sticks out in my mind is a story the local news did on a business in the area. It offers to fill one's car tires with nitrogen. Their reasoning was that since the atoms of nitrogen are larger than those of air, tires are less likely to leak.

Never mind that air is something like 78% nitrogen.

 

[quarky]

Honey Nut Cheerios.

On the real label, turns out, there's more salt than honey or nuts in that cereal.

Not sure if that counts.

 

[Mark6]

At least they have SOME honey and nuts.

Grape Nuts have no grapes or nuts whatsoever.

 

[alfaniner]

Any article with the words "scientists" and "baffled" in the headline.

 

[Walrus32]

Anything from a group that has "public interest" in it's name.

 

[dasmiller]

Any science article with "overturns" in the title should be considered suspect.

I just did a quick Google of "fossil" and "overturns." On the first page of results, I see that the scientific community's ideas about tyrannosaurs, Jurassic mammals, human ancestry, plant evolution, the human brain, and the age of life on earth have all been overturned within the last few years.

 

[Madalch]

Not science strictly, but one that sticks out in my mind is a story the local news did on a business in the area. It offers to fill one's car tires with nitrogen. Their reasoning was that since the atoms of nitrogen are larger than those of air, tires are less likely to leak.

Never mind that air is something like 78% nitrogen.

And that nitrogen molecules, being lighter than oxygen molecules, will effuse (leak) faster than oxygen.

 

[quarky]

Wouldn't argon work better?

 

[phildonnia]

Wouldn't argon work better?

According to the logic of FramerDave's example which considers atom sizes, yes.

I don't know much about permeation and effusion (I just looked them both up on wikipedia). But I would suspect that Argon would leak faster by either process, since Argon atoms are probably far smaller than molecular Oxygen or Nitrogen.

 

[Madalch]

According to the logic of FramerDave's example which considers atom sizes, yes.

I don't know much about permeation and effusion (I just looked them both up on wikipedia). But I would suspect that Argon would leak faster by either process, since Argon atoms are probably far smaller than molecular Oxygen or Nitrogen.

Rates of effusion depend on the mass of the gas particles, not their sizes- it's like you're bouncing a ball around in a room with an open window. The window is much larger then the ball, so the size of the ball is irrelevant- the chance of the ball escaping is related to how many times it bounces near the window than anything else (and that depend on how fast the ball is moving, which depends on its mass). Argon has a mass of 40 amu, compared to 28 amu for N2 and 32 amu for O2.

 

[Minoosh]

I dated this guy who was a consciousness theorist. Someone interviewed him from a science magazine. They were eating lunch, and she wrote the story as if they were eating at a place that had bullfighting posters on the wall. She made some point in the article that he was like the bullfighter (or the bull, I don't remember which).

We got to talking about it and he said they weren't actually at the restaurant with the bullfighting poster. She just liked the bullfighting image. I can't remember whether he suggested it, or if she'd seen it on a different trip, but they definitely didn't meet over lunch there, as the article said. And it had nothing to do with the alleged science. It was just a dishonest rhetorical trick.

I'm a journalist, and might not have been above going to the restaurant to write a factually true story. But this was a bald-ass lie.

Guess it made a better story with the "bull" in it.

ETA: My newspaper ran a story about him. It held for a day, then ran on the obits page next to a picture of a pig. (Not of my doing)

 

[yy2bggggs]

I remember this jewel from long ago.

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/fyi/news/07/17/flat.universe/index.html

In the first results, scientists said the ripple patterns precisely match the scenario of a "flat" universe in which parallel lines never cross. That means the universe is two-dimensional, like a piece of paper.​

...just in case you didn't know what a flat universe means, this journalist kindly explains it for you.

 

[GlennB]

Some years ago The Guardian ran an article discussing the possible effects of a meteorite impact on Earth. The piece claimed that the shock wave would propagate around the world "at the speed of light". I felt compelled to write a strongly worded letter of complaint

 

[John Albert]

What's wrong with this "psychological study"?

http://jezebel.com/5866602/can-you-tell-the-difference-between-a-mens-magazine-and-a-rapist

 

[Zelenius]

I find that science reporting that includes the phrase "missing link" is almost always garbage.

 

[quarky]

I find that science reporting that includes the phrase "missing link" is almost always garbage.

Yet, its significant when using a chain.

 

[Minoosh]

What's wrong with this "psychological study"?

http://jezebel.com/5866602/can-you-tell-the-difference-between-a-mens-magazine-and-a-rapist

I read it and did not see anything glaringly wrong, besides the name of the magazine. I'll try to "tease" it out.

...just in case you didn't know what a flat universe means, this journalist kindly explains it for you.

Wait, if pieces of paper are two dimensional how come books are so fat?

As glaring examples of idiotic journalism go, I didn't find this redundancy particularly annoying. But I'm having trouble imagining something flat with ripples. Is it flat like a piece of paper with ripples in it?