Thursday, July 09th, 2009 | Author: DCF

Hardly a day goes by without the Media reporting a new juicy tidbit of the “latest research just out”. If you trust these sources, drinking alcohol will give you Alzheimer’s, and eating coloured berries will make you live longer.

These marvels of critical journalism are of course backed up with phrases such as ”investigated by scientists” or “statistically proven”. These words in themselves mean nothing, and our experts are quite likely to be a spotty student or a reporter with a calculator.

Check the methods and double-check the figures yourself. These attention-grabbing, scare-mongering headlines sell papers but provide little in the way of sound scientific investigation. I’m sure they won’t lose too much sleep over their shoddy reporting.

I recommend taking any such headlines with a big pinch of salt.

However, too much and this could raise your blood-pressure or give you cancer….

Category: Blogging, Science
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