In case you haven’t heard, tobacco smoking is very bad for your health. In fact, it is extremely dangerous. It is associated with an astoundingly morbid gallery of adverse consequences, including a quadrupling of cardiovascular disease risk, a quadrupling of stroke risk, at least a dozen-fold increase in lung cancer […]
Daily Mail
This week’s carcinogen: Your mobile phone
So it looks as though we are all going to die. Again. This time it’s our mobile phones that are going to kill us. And who says so? Well, exactly. As in, the WHO says so. In a news story that has captured the imagination of cancer obsessives around the […]
When correlation does not imply “casualness”
Yesterday, the Daily Mail published a news story with the following headline: “Psychologists warn of ‘casual link’ between internet porn and rise in sex offences”. Hmm, a “casual link” you say? Really?! “Casual”? (Thank you to @EvidenceMatters and @decaux for pointing this out to me on Twitter.) Now, I guess this particular typo […]
A study not worth its salt?
This week’s news that researchers had apparently debunked the link between dietary salt intake and heart disease was surprising to say the least, but for all that it was lapped up enthusiastically by the media. Some headline writers revelled in the newness of the findings: “Scientists shake up what we […]
It’s true, college is a rat race
Earlier this week, a new paper by neuroscientists at Bristol University was covered across several media outlets. Very quickly, a common thread began to emerge through the headlines: “Stress can help when studying for exams” reported the Daily Telegraph; “Last-minute exam stress can actually help students to form stronger memories” […]
Alcohol causes cancer? If you assume so, yes
Last week, a study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) linked alcohol consumption with cancer risk, and duly attracted extensive international media coverage. News outlets around the world keenly reported on the carcinogenic properties of alcohol. This description from BBC News was pretty typical: “A large Europe-wide study in the […]
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