Last week the journalism world was buzzing about — guess who? — Jonah Lehrer. Yes, again. We knew about the science writer’s self-plagiarism and Bob-Dylan-quote fabrication. Last week a New York Magazine exposé by Boris Kachka claimed that Lehrer also deliberately misrepresented other people’s ideas. Kachka’s piece led to some fascinating discussions about whether it’s possible to […]
Most scientists are reluctant to talk about “curing” mental illness, and rightly so. The mountain is too steep: These disorders have a range of genetic and environmental causes, and symptoms vary widely from person to person. But for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — in which people are haunted for months or years by memories of […]
Scientists aren’t very good at telling stories. That’s a generalization, but true. I’m constantly cajoling scientists to tell me the story — hell, any story, any anecdote, any remotely narrative nugget — of their work. More scientists than you’d expect are good at simplifying a complicated technology or theory into layman’s terms. And many are […]
Tomorrow marks the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, which killed nearly 3,000 people and traumatized hundreds of thousands of others. One out of four witnesses to that awful scene — fires, blood, flying glass and metal and stone and people — developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized by fearful […]
You probably heard about last week’s Nature study on older dads and autism; it got a lot of attention. The basic findings were fascinating but, in my opinion, far less sensational than what most of the news articles would have us believe. The researchers, led by Kári Stefánsson of deCODE Genetics in Iceland, showed that the average 20-year-old man passes on […]
On April 17, 1997, Bill and Hillary Clinton organized a one-day meeting with a long and lofty title: The White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning: What New Research on the Brain Tells Us About Our Youngest Children. The meeting featured eight-minute presentations from experts in public policy, education and child development, and […]
Two weeks ago, I wrote about scientists who intentionally killed 80,000 feral goats on one of the islands in the Galápagos archipelago. The effort was in the name of biodiversity and conservation, sure, but was it right? The post spurred some fascinating questions and comments, particularly from Jason G. Goldman, who writes The Thoughtful Animal […]
This is the last installment of my six-week series about the Galápagos Islands. To recap the first five posts: The Galápagos is an archipelago of 14 volcanic islands that scientists since Darwin have gone well out of their way to study. The islands are extremely inhospitable to life, and yet, over long periods of time, life has […]