The Science News Cycle - Neatorama

Biggify at: PhD Comics by Jorge Cham

Oh, this is SO true! Jorge Cham of PhD Comics (which stands for Piled Higher & Deeper, if you must know) nailed it with this cartoon panel, The Science News Cycle, about how a scientific finding gets exaggerated and distorted as it trickles down through "The Internets" and the media.

As proud member of the blogosphere and a trained scientist myself, I'm happy to report that Neatorama works hard to wrestle and twist a lengthy scientific finding full of caveats into short (and hopefully witty) couple of sentences with the purpose of partly enlightening you, partly entertaining ourselves and, of course, driving traffic to the blog. The scientific truth be damned! ;)

Link - via The Zeray Gazette

Comments (14)

Alex,

Don't you dare bring truth through my series of tubes, and don't you be taking the fun out of it all!

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The last example was a story about "missing link".

But it was no missing link, Darwin has been rock solid since forever.

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I love it, though it'd probably be p<.01 rather than a power value when presenting evidence

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Alex? A trained scientist? BWAHAHAHAHAAA.
Maybe in the field of sensationalism.

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The field of sensationalism is a particularly hard scientific discipline requiring years of training. Those crafty titles don't just write themselves, you know ;)

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I saw a trained seal at a waterpark once - are trained scientists anything like that?

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Anon, check his biography:
http://www.neatorama.com/authors/

You didn't think he was an expert in English, did you?

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Um, aren't cycles usually, y'know, cyclical? As in, they end up back where they started? This doesn't. Its less a circle and more of a straight line.

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In a way, the cycle came back to the scientist. I lost interest at about the second arrow.

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I hope we are not too far in finding the missing link...

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Sadly true. Reading science stories, or worse, watching them on television, is often a puzzle-box one must unlock to get the actual nugget of fact within.

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Miss C is right. I'm no expert when it comes to English. In the immortal words of Ralph Wiggum: me fail English? That's unpossible!

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Jokes about things that suck aren't really funny.

You can't even trust a scientist anymore. Global warming, my ass!

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this only counts in america.
the rest of us are smart.

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