science in the news: rebuttals

[rivendellrose]

Newsflash: The Telegraph's 'Exercise Makes You Fat' article that's been spinning all over the net wasn't accurate! Ben Goldacre takes on the real science in the above link. Big surprise that the Telegraph wouldn't quite have it right, and that everyone since has just been repeating their "findings" without a bit of independent thought. Direct quote from Ben's blog: "Prof Blundell says: “the Telegraph article was a complete distortion of the facts of our investigation, which showed that exercise is very effective for weight loss. They completely reversed the outcome of our study.”"

Also, Harriet Hall explains Why we shouldn't worry about men disappearing just yet, despite what certain popular media outlets (CBC, this time) would like you to think.

Lastly, for fun, "Aliens regret policy of only abducting lone weirdos. ♥

Personally, I'm just looking forward to the holiday weekend. It's been a long week. I hope all of you are well!

Comments

[irishninja.livejournal.com]

The alien one is completely awesome! :D

Made slightly funnier that I'm listening to Jacko at the moment. LOL ^_^

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Isn't it fabulous? The Jackson thing did make me giggle a bit... poor, confused aliens. ♥

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

For extinction purposes, I'd be much more worried about females disappearing than males. Males, after all, aren't the bottleneck in the reproduction process. Even if the male-to-female birth ratio goes to something wacky like 1 to 5, I'm sure humanity will be able to come up with something.

There are plenty of reasons to worry about exposure to toxins in the environment. But I seriously doubt this is one of them, even if all their assertions were true.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Totally. Biologically speaking, you guys are definitely not the problem if we're worried about OMG losing the population. Which, um, we cannot possibly be in any danger of. I don't know why people freak - we're overpopulated, not under.

It's just a scare tactic. And, as that article proves, it's a bad one, at that.

[nightsinger.livejournal.com]

Best line from the second article:

A woman comments “Little boys are no different than alligators.” Most of us would beg to differ.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's kind of a... I mean... I kind of liken all small children to alligators sometimes, but that's a totally different problem. :P

Oh, your icon. ♥

[lovelies.livejournal.com]

Oh, Leeds Uni.

I'm surprised that the disappearing male article didn't even touch on the eroding or degradation of the Y chromosome, which is actually pretty fascinating.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Please. They were far too busy trumping up and misrepresenting evidence that didn't mean anything to actually deal with something scientifically significant! ;)