press releases
oracknows | August 26, 2012If there's one thing I've been railing about for the last few years, it's how scientific and medical studies are reported in the lay press. It seems that hardly a week passes without my having to apply a little Insolence, be it Respectful or not-so-Respectful, to some story or another, usually as a result of the story having caught my interest, leading me to look up the actual study in the peer-reviewed literature. This is something I've learned the hard way that I have to do, having been burned a couple of times in my early blogging career. Sometimes, even now, I forget. For example,…
jhalper | February 27, 2011The day has finally come. In our very first post, back in June, we wrote that the launch of the new website was slated for later in the summer. In fact, by then we had already been at it for months, and if we had known how much longer it was going to take, we might have thrown up our collective hands on the spot. So we are quite pleased to say that our new website is now on line, and it even seems to work most of the time. There are, of course, some new articles to read - a new wrinkle in insulin production, why fish scales shine, molecular Frisbee, and more - as well as press releases and…
edyong | July 4, 2009One of the highlights of the World Conference of Science Journalists was the final day's heated debate about embargoes. For newcomers to the issue, journalists are often given press alerts about new papers before they are made publicly available, on the understanding that they aren't reported before a certain deadline - the infamous embargo. This is why so much science news magically appears at simultaneously across news outlets. All the major journals (and many minor ones) do this with their papers, as increasingly do universities and other research institutions.
Vincent Kiernan (who has…