Science in the News

I move that the news media no longer report on scientific discovery. Can I get a second?

The majority of newspaper and television audience members can't understand and don't have the patience for the depth and jargon of journal articles. By definition, the critical nuances of a study will be smoothed out to make the story more palatable.

At best, what we the audience are exposed to is a watered-down blurb of trivia, disguised as current events. At worst, the so-called news is thinly-veiled yellow journalism.

Take, for example, this gem. Apparently, WiFi causes cancer! Save the children! Run for the hills! Armageddon! Except, if you look at the very bottom of the article, you see that "wi-fi radiation [is] about 100,000 times less intense than that emitted by domestic microwave ovens." A journal article would've put that in the introduction, if not the abstract.

And then there's this report, which asserts that the relative lengths of your fingers are predictive of your relative SAT scores. Yeah. Wow.

I want to make some quip about phrenology, or the correlation between beady eyes and criminals. Will, however, already put it best: "I also heard that if your hand is bigger than your face, it means you have AIDS."

For whatever it's worth, I didn't just find some questionable websites and troll them for quasi-scientific content. Earlier tonight, Fox 5 News reported these stories, and I simply Googled them on my internet machine.

Screw the news. I'll just stick to watching Leno, because who could find fault with that big-chinned everyman?