I have grown to dread reports of scientific breakthroughs in the media. You can guarantee that reporters will
- overstate the impact the breakthrough will have on everyday life
- utterly miss the point of what's significant about the breakthrough
- mis-state basic scientific principles that ought to be familiar to anyone with a GCSE-level knowledge of science
Even specialists like New Scientist - which can usually be relied upon to get most of the facts straight - get so caught up in the thrill of the discovery that they are often more guilty than most of the first of these sins. To be fair, the origins of all the misunderstandings that pile up in a typical such report may well be the university press office that put out the release the reporter is paraphrasing, but the fault for failing to fact-check and validate and question lies firmly with the journalists.
So I was gobsmacked yesterday to read an article about a scientific discovery that
- taught me things I didn't already know
- was written with flair and humour
- acknowledged the gap between research results and press release sub-headings
- exercised appropriate scepticism about the content of the press release in the first place
More, please.