A couple of years ago now (before I got into this blogging thing, anyway) there was a brief flurry of media interest over a study that – according to various stories in the press – showed that the Maori population has a higher frequency of a ‘warrior gene’ & that this explained all sorts of […]
Continue readingI was moved to wonder about this after seeing another article in today’s Herald about ageing. Or, more particularly, about slowing/stopping the ageing process & thereby extending the period of our natural lifespan. Rapamycin got a look-in as well. And there was something about how the French manage to lead long & presumably healthy lives. (Having […]
Continue readingIn the community paper that arrived in our letterbox this morning there was a letter expressing very strong ‘anti’ feelings with regard to folate. The writer would, he said, boycott bread if this dreadful chemical was added. Google ‘folate & prostate cancer’, he said, & all would be revealed. (This was in reference to the […]
Continue readingThat’s the eye-catching title of my current reading matter – the book Lies, Damned Lies, & Science by Sherry Seethaler. And reading it led to the following musings: Science is complex. Yet too often it’s presented – in the media, but also in textbooks & science classes – as a series of stand-alone facts (in the […]
Continue readingOne of the reasons put forward for not adding folate to bread is the perception that this will lead to a rise in some forms of cancer (specifically, prostate & colo-rectal cancer). The Science Media Centre has posted a commentary from Dr Murray Skeaff, who’s the Professor of Human Nutrition down at Otago. He discusses […]
Continue readingIn this morning’s Herald is an article on the inclusion of folic acid (aka folate) in bread. This has hit the news recently because (among other things) bakers are concerned about the cost of adding this supplement to bread. (One figure that’s been bandied about is that someone would have to eat 11 slices of bread […]
Continue readingPerhaps – if you’re a mouse… A couple of nights ago TV3 news treated us to a breathless little item about an antibiotic compound, rapamycin, that appears to promote longevity in mice. If it was applied to people, said the reporter, we could live for another 20 years or so! Gosh. Well, I can think of […]
Continue readingSometimes I suspect that you think I’m over-reacting to poor reporting of science stories in the media. Maybe I’m just picky, or pernickety, or – as my Significant Other would says – purely pedantic. So I was interested to see a paper in PLoS One (Ly & Lane, 2009) that looks at the quality of various […]
Continue readingand, from what Brian Switek says over at Laelaps, a whole lot more media hype. The new fossil is a 38-million-year-old primate from Asia, Ganlea megacania (the species name refers to the fact that it has enormous canine teeth). While the paper describing this fragmentary fossil (teeth & bits of jaw) describe it as a seed-eating monkey, […]
Continue readingI don’t often watch the TV news, but on Monday last week I didn’t feel like doing much else after work. Anyway, about 1/3 of the way through a story came on that had my critical radar twitching. It was effectively a puff piece about how employers were sending their workers on a course teaching […]
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