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How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you

studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes.

Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has spent much of his career studying the appeal of authoritarian figures: politicians who preach xenophobia, beat up on the press and place themselves above the law while extolling “law and order” for everyone else.

He is one of many scholars who believe that deep-seated psychological traits help explain voters’ attraction to such leaders. “These days,” he told me, “audiences are more receptive to the idea” than they used to be.

“In 2018, the sense of fear and panic — the disorientation about how people who are not like us could see the world the way they do — it’s so elemental,” Mr. Weiler said. “People understand how deeply divided we are, and they are looking for explanations that match the depth of that division.”

In the study of TOK in DP-1 (11th grade), I have learnt about the ways of knowing, and two of the areas of knowledge - natural sciences and human sciences. Of all the discussions and explorations done into these areas of knowledge, there can be patterns observed in the methods of experimentation, data collection, data analysis and also assumptions being made when generalizing situations. In some of the above points, human sciences is similar to natural sciences, while in the others, the ideologies and working is different.

Natural sciences and human sciences for instance both use experiments as a form of data collection but the methods and outputs are different. Natural scientists have lesser moral values to take care of compared to human scientists such as psychologists. Psychologists are directly dealing with humans and hence need to take more ethical implications into consideration. Secondly, human scientists conduct experiments on a large set of people - not limited to one race or gender unless it is required. Natural scientists do not require survey type data. Here, a single scientist conducts the experiments. Both the types of experiments are empirical based though, direct experimentation is more in natural sciences while human sciences are more observation based. But experiments in human sciences have more unpredictable results due to what is known as the Hawthorne effect. This effect explains that when a particular group comes to know that they are under observation for a experiment or an analysis, they tend to be more productive. These cause errors in results of human science experiments especially the ones of psychology.

Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.

Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific.

it’s not even a good description of how the “hard” sciences work. It’s a high school textbook version of science, with everything messy and chaotic about scientific inquiry safely ignored.

recently published scientific article proposes a sweeping new law of nature, approaching the matter with dry, clinical efficiency that still reads like poetry.

“Evolving systems are asymmetrical with respect to time; they display temporal increases in diversity, distribution, and/or patterned behavior,” they continue, mounting their case from the shoulders of Charles Darwin, extending it toward all things living and not. 

To join the known physics laws of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, the nine scientists and philosophers behind the paper propose their “law of increasing functional information.”

Scientists from Britain and Japan shared a Nobel Prize on Monday for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.

discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells, without the need to harvest embryos.

"These groundbreaking discoveries have completely changed our view of the development and specialization of cells," the Nobel Assembly at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said.

Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.He raised questions with the lab’s director. He reran the calculations on his own. He looked askance at the articles arising from the research, which were published in distinguished journals. He told his colleagues: This doesn’t make sense.“At first, it was like, ‘Okay — but I don’t really see it,’ ” Yuan recalled. “Then it started to smell bad.”

The passions of scientific debate are probably not much different from those that drive achievement in other fields, so a tragic, even deadly dispute might not be surprising.But science, creeping ahead experiment by experiment, paper by paper, depends also on institutions investigating errors and correcting them if need be, especially if they are made in its most respected journals.If the apparent suicide and Yuan’s detailed complaints provoked second thoughts about the Nature paper, though, there were scant signs of it.The journal initially showed interest in publishing Yuan’s criticism and told him that a correction was “probably” going to be written, according to e-mail rec­ords. That was almost six months ago. The paper has not been corrected.The university had already fired Yuan in December 2011, after 10 years at the lab. He had been raising questions about the research for years. He was escorted from his desk by two security guards.

Last year, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud had increased tenfold since 1975. The same analysis reviewed more than 2,000 retracted biomedical papers and found that 67 percent of the retractions were attributable to misconduct, mainly fraud or suspected fraud.

Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved

The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue

Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.

There’s been a range of interesting reactions to my piece on Pete Seeger’s question about whether confidence in science as a source of human progress is underpinned by fact or faith.

the discussion was not about confidence in science as an enterprise, but confidence that benefits would always accrue to society from applications of scientific knowledge

Theologically speaking, science constantly reminds us of the sense in which we are nearly – but clearly not quite – gods. Perhaps the trickiest value issues surrounding science are hidden behind the seemingly innocent metaphors of ‘getting into the mind of God’ (physics) and ‘playing God’ (biomedicine). Notwithstanding scientists’ own disclaimers, as a matter of fact science has done as well as it has because scientists have adopted a ‘godlike’ attitude toward nature. We have allowed ourselves to imagine and intervene in things at very high levels of abstraction and in ways that can only be justified in terms of the power unleashed by the resulting systematic view of things. The costs incurred have included devaluing our most immediate experiences of nature and subjecting things to quite artificial conditions in order to extract knowledge.

a stimulating conference at Clark University about “Manufacturing Denial,” which brought together scholars from wildly divergent disciplines — from genocide studies to political science to philosophy — to explore the idea that “denialism” may be a sufficiently coherent phenomenon underlying the willful disregard of factual evidence by ideologically motivated groups or individuals.

the Oxford defines a denialist as “a person who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence,” which represents a whole different level of cognitive bias or rationalization. Think of it as bias on steroids.

First, as a scientist: it’s just not about the facts, indeed — as Brendan showed data in hand during his presentation — insisting on facts may have counterproductive effects, leading the denialist to double down on his belief.

Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.

And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”

devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

One of the most common arguments against a scientific finding is confirmation bias: the scientist or scientists only look for data that confirms a desired conclusion. Confirmation bias is remarkably common—it is used by psychics, mediums, mentalists, and homeopaths, just to name a few. As you may guess from such a list, deliberate use of confirmation bias is held in low esteem by scientists, and allowing confirmation bias to get the better of your results is regarded as a particularly sad form of incompetence. Yet, whenever science meets some ideological barrier, scientists are accused of, at best, self-deception, and, at worst, deliberate fraud.

all the information in our 3-dimensional reality may actually be included in the 2-dimensional surface of its boundaries. It's like watching a 3D show on a 2D television.

the team found that the observational data they found was largely predictable by the math of holographic theory. 

After this phase comes to a close, the Universe goes into a geometric phase, which can be described by Einstein's equations.

democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories

Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.

Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of "evidence" that they proudly present to potential recruits.

Dmitry Kuznetsov, a Russian biochemist whose published work has been repeatedly alleged to be fraudulent, is now the chief editor of two science journals. The appointments are raising questions about the scientific integrity of the publications.

one of the worst fraud records in the history of science,” said Dan Larhammar, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden who has written about problems in Kuznetsov's work. “That should be a major concern to” the publisher that recruited Kuznetsov as editor-in-chief, he said.

“As a result of these claims [by Kuznetsov and colleagues] a couple of students have spent several years of their life on a wild goose chase,” Coey told The Scientist.

According to the exhibition’s organizers, art and science both “involve the pursuit of those moments of discovery when what is perceived suddenly becomes more than the sum of its parts.”

the natural beauty of C. elegans suddenly sent a scientist in search of a camera—in this case the camera in her phone

“I held it right up to the microscope eyepiece and took a photo,” she says. “A quick Instagram filter later, and I had my image.” After sharing the image with the world, some of Wright’s non-biologist friends, many of whom had never heard of C. elegans, told her they wanted to know more about the model organism. 

Gender stereotyping in which men are more strongly associated with science than women has been found in some unlikely countries, with the Netherlands leading the list and the United States in the middle at 38th, according to research that surveyed more than 350,000 people in 66 countries through a website called Project Implicit.

asked those surveyed how much they associated science with men or women and how quickly they associated words like "math" or "physics" with words like "woman" or "man." But they were not asked whether men or women were more competent at science.

"Educators should present examples beyond Marie Curie to help shape students' beliefs about who pursues science," said Linn. "Students reconsider who pursues science when they can compare examples of female scientists and reflect on their beliefs."

Language helps the human brain perceive obscured objects,

While some scientists have argued that vision is independent from outside factors, such as sounds or the brain’s accumulated knowledge, the study indicates that language influences perception at its most basic level.

“I think [the study] makes a really important contribution to the field of visual perception and cognition in general,” said Michael Spivey,

In an Austrian laboratory, a team of scientists has grown three-dimensional models of embryonic human brain

“Even the most complex organ—the human brain—can start to form without any micro-manipulation.”

Knoblich cautioned that the organoids are not “brains-in-a-jar.” “We’re talking about the very first steps of embryonic brain development, like in the first nine weeks of pregnancy,” he said. “They’re nowhere near an adult human brain and they don’t form anything that resembles a neuronal network.”