Antiscience

Ars Technica on that lousy rat cell phone study: The study, which was not properly peer reviewed—despite what some outlets have reported—is chock full of red flags: small sample sizes, partially reported results, control oddities, statistical stretches, and a slim conclusion. In short, “there is nothing in this report that can be regarded to be statistically significant," Donald Berry, a biostatistics professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, told Ars. "The authors should have used the 'black box warning.'" If cellphone radiation really does cause cancer, this study wouldn’t have proven it. And the mountains of preexisting data on the topic all point to mobile devices as posing zero to very low risks. This includes a recent Australian study that found no significant increases in brain cancer since the introduction of mobile phones. So how did this study grab headlines? First, the authors are researchers at the National Toxicology Program (N...

Shame on The Wall Street Journal for sensationalizing the claim that certain cell phone frequencies lead to a tiny increase in glioma incidence in rats. Most readers won't go past the headline and deceptive blurb before the lede. In fact, many lab rat strains are highly predisposed to spontaneous tumors so even a small but reproducible effect in this experiment doesn't mean this is relevant to humans. As the article notes: The U.S. government’s official position is that the weight of scientific evidence hasn’t indicated health risks. In 2011, the World Health Organization said cellphone radiation was a group 2B possible carcinogen. Illustrating the ambiguity of the designation is the fact that certain pickled vegetables and coffee are also considered possibly carcinogenic. There also are many studies showing no harmful health effects. Just this month, a survey of brain cancer rates in Australia found no increase since the introduction of mobile phones there almost three decade...

Shame on Andrew Pollack, who is usually one of The New York Times' best biotech reporters, for pandering to readers' fears with this gawdawful headline and deceptive lead. He makes a private symposium on science fiction genetic engineering of human tissues sound like something sinister and secretive. George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of the organizers of the proposed project, said the characterization was a misunderstanding, and that in reality the project was aimed more generally at improving the ability to synthesize long strands of DNA, which could be applied to various types of animals, plants and microbes. “ They’re painting a picture which I don’t think represents the project,” Dr. Church said in an interview. “If that were the project, I’d be running away from it.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/science/synthetic-human-genome.html

I usually don't read The Verge , a truly crappy science news source, but this horrid tale about fecal matter transplant self-experimentation warrants a mention as Antiscience There was another thing that all the experts agreed on: the chances that Zayner would experience any benefit from the transplant were essentially zero. "We don’t have any evidence whatsoever that fecal microbiota transplantation helps cure other diseases," says Sahil Khanna, a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic. Hohmann added that Zayner’s experiment was ultimately "naïve and poorly advised — on several levels." http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/4/11581994/fmt-fecal-matter-transplant-josiah-zayner-microbiome-ibs-c-diff