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With the Oscars just 3 days away, movies have been on our mind lately here at CDC's Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response.  Especially disaster movies.  They come in all kinds of flavors: deadly viruses, tornadoes, earthquakes, and, yes, even snakes on a plane.   Their special effects can be realistic enough to make us feel like we are right there in the heart of the storm.  But frequently, the heroes and heroines of these movies respond to disasters in ways that bear no resemblance to what people in the real world should do.  We can nevertheless use disaster films to consider how the characters could have been more prepared or how they should have reacted if the situation they faced was real.  Check out some of our favorite disaster movies and the lessons we can learn from them.

Back in August I wrote a post covering a rash of reports on the worrying rise of bad science in TED talks. A couple of months later TED pulled the following TEDx talk after the neuroscientist Bradley Voytek posted a question about it to Quora: "Is Randy Powell saying anything in his 2010 TEDxCharlotte talk or is it just total nonsense?". The top voted response was from Stanford theoretical physicist Jay Wacker and began:

Our personal data is among today's most valuable information currency. It's often hard to determine what part companies own, what part the government owns, and what part, if any, is entirely our own - provided a third party hasn't already sold it to someone else.

"Are more people doing wrong or are more people speaking up? Retractions of scientific papers have increased about tenfold during the past decade, with many studies crumbling in cases of high-profile research misconduct that ranges from plagiarism to image manipulation to outright data fabrication. When worries about somebody's work reach a critical point, it falls to a peer, supervisor, junior partner or uninvolved bystander to decide whether to keep mum or step up and blow the whistle. Doing the latter comes at significant risk, and the path is rarely simple. Some make their case and move on; others never give up. And in what seems to be a growing trend, anonymous watchdogs are airing their concerns through e-mail and public forums. Here, Nature profiles three markedly different stories of individuals who acted on their suspicions. Successful or otherwise, each case offers lessons for would-be tipsters."