TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| The blue revolution at BBC Science | Martin Robbins With the BBC now providing links to the scientific research it reports, will 2010 be the year when science journalists discover the web link?It's funny how things can be connected. I was looking up the recipe for Worcestershire sauce last night and ended up idly clicking through Wikipedia. It turns out that the sauce is made from anchovies, which can cause amnesic shellfish poisoning, a brain-damaging illness that may have caused thousands of frantic seabirds to invade towns in Californian in 1961; events that may have provided some inspiration for Hitchcock's film The Birds. I found all this because of links. Links are the foundation of the world wide web. They take us beyond whatever we happened to be looking for, on journeys to places we never even imagined existed. Every minute of every day, millions of curious apes click billions of links, each travelling on their own miniature voyages of discovery. Of all the differences between science blogging and mainstream media reporting of science, one of the most profound is the use of links. Science bloggers often come from a scientific background, and as scientists we were drilled on the need for citations. Any factual statement or assertion you make in a research paper should be backed up with a reference to primary evidence supporting the claim. It's a habit that translates well into journalism, a profession which, like science, should be concerned with studying the world and reporting its findings on behalf of the public in an open and accountable way. By providing links to sources (or indeed posting full interview transcripts), journalists can show that they're honest, open and trustworthy and allow the reader to judge whether the interpretation they've presented of someone else's work or words is the correct one. And links can do much more than that. By embedding links in text, journalists can turn their articles from static descriptions of the world into platforms that open up avenues for exploration and discovery to their audience, tapping into rich veins of knowledge and intrigue to provide the reader with far more value than one journalist could provide on their own. Links are beautiful, so why are newspaper websites so utterly reluctant to use them? In particular, why do science journalists who write about scientific papers so often fail to provide a link to a copy of the paper in question? It's an issue that Ben Goldacre raised with the BBC earlier this year, but with apparently little success. As Ben pointed out at the time: "It's very important that the public are able to get access to information, especially since media reports – for many structural reasons – can be light on information, or even contain errors."But now the Beeb seems to have relented. It has come to my attention, courtesy of the commenter soveda, that the BBC are – occasionally at least – now adding links to the original research in their articles, for example in the 5th paragraph here.This is to be congratulated. It's easy to moan when journalists get things wrong, but fair play to the BBC here – they've listened, and they appear to have changed their practice. For that they should be congratulated, and if you give a crap about news outlets linking to research (and if not, why on Earth are you still reading this?) then you should go immediately to their feedback page, and leave a friendly comment. So will other organs follow the BBC's lead? Unfortunately, the scientific journals themselves are putting barriers in the way of journalists who want to link to the original research, as the science editor of the Times Mark Henderson told me earlier:"I think it's good practice to provide direct hyperlinks to journal articles where practical, but this isn't always easy to achieve. The main problem is that while some journals (eg Nature) provide such links on their embargoed press releases (or tell you how to work them out using DOI numbers), others do not. It can thus take time you don't have to establish the correct link.Worse still is that some journals (PNAS is a particular offender) don't have papers available online when an embargo lifts. It is thus impossible to link even to an abstract."Embargoes themselves are a difficult and controversial subject best left to the likes of Ivan Oransky, but clearly there's a problem with the way that PR officers at some major journals are operating – by failing to support busy journalists, they're failing the public. One simple solution would fix this problem, as Mark suggests: "I would encourage all press officers dealing with journal articles to include a hyperlink to the paper, that will go live when an embargo lifts, on their press releases as a matter of course."Let's hope that the BBC's decision will start putting pressure on journals to do just this. But let's not forget the wider problem here. As blogs and mainstream media draw ever closer together – a long-term shift epitomised by my own move to the Guardian – there are opportunities for each to learn from the other. One of the most obvious things that bloggers can teach mainstream media journalists is the proper use of the link. It's not enough for journalists to simply report on the world, they need to let people see it for themselves.Martin Robbinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
From the archive, 14 September 1955: Murderers sleep well and eat heartily Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 14 September 1955FROM OUR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENTMurderers in the main sleep well in Brixton Gaol. They also, it appears, eat heartily and tend to put on weight. These facts derived from a study of the habits of fifty consecutive murderers confined to the prison were presented at the third International Congress on Criminology in London yesterday as tending to support the view that murderers are remarkably free from care.In describing the emotional reactions of arrested murderers, Dr J.A. Hobson, of the psychiatric department at the Middlesex Hospital, said that although the murderers he had seen had been of very varied personality types and suffering from different forms of mental illness, they had had little in common, apart from the fact that each had killed someone, beyond their freedom from anxiety.Two or three volunteered the information that they had never enjoyed such calm and peace of mind as they had experienced in prison. In pondering the possible reasons why the majority of men awaiting trial for murder are so remarkably lacking in emotion, Dr Hobson suggested that in some cases the very act of killing someone could of itself be therapeutic in removing tension from unconscious conflict.Dr Hobson did not overlook the murderer whose unconcern might be explained by a pathological love of the limelight. The idea of execution and the notoriety had a certain glamour for some of those accused of murder, who might prefer to be hanged in preference to the comparative ignominy of Broadmoor.Dr Hobson, who was the only defence witness at the trial of John Reginald Christie, who was hanged in 1953 for the murder of his wife, said: "I am quite sure, that if we had been successful with Christie he would have been even more critical of me and his counsel than he was. Also, I think it is quite likely that if Christie had been reprieved, he would in some way have felt that he had been cheated of what was his due."Of all murderers I have seen Christie was a hysteric par excellence and dissociated with the greatest facility. He wept crocodile tears in the witness-box, but I think he was less concerned and less moved by his crime than anyone else in court."Towards the end of the case there was one very dramatic moment at the end of the Judge's summing-up. Just at this moment Christie threw over a little piece of paper to me, sitting at the solicitor's bench, which said: 'I trust you did get a few cigs for me. I am absolutely out of stock. I feel O.K.'" Prisons and probationPsychologyMental healthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
If low serotonin levels aren't responsible for depression, what is? By studying the other effects that antidepressants have in the brain, we may arrive at more effective ways to treat depressionScicurious blogs at Neurotic PhysiologyWe've all seen the commercials. There's a sad little white marshmallow, a person in a darkened room unable to attend the party, or unable to enjoy a beautiful day. And then a voice shouts out that here is hope. That depression of yours is a result of imbalances in chemicals in your brain and, if you can correct those chemicals, you will feel better. Easy!It's not that these commercials sell you a pack of lies. Most antidepressants do increase the levels of chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters. A specific type of neurotransmitter, the monoamines, appear to be the chemicals of choice for these drugs. Scientists once thought that simply increasing the amount of monoamines in the brain would treat the symptoms of depression. And that meant, of course, that depression itself must be caused by low levels of monoamines, particularly serotonin. For years, scientists have tried to find drugs that increase these serotonin levels in the brain safely, and tried to find evidence that decreases in monoamines are responsible for depression itself. Well, after much searching, we did find a lot of very interesting things. But some things just didn't add up.The first problem was one of time. If low serotonin levels were really what made you feel depressed, then increasing levels of serotonin should alleviate the symptoms right away. But antidepressants don't work immediately, and in fact can take more than a month to alleviate symptoms. Strike one.The second problem was one of whether the drugs actually worked. Serotonin-specific antidepressant drugs don't work on everyone. In fact, new estimates show that the current antidepressants on the market only work in about 60% of patients. If low serotonin levels were really responsible for depression, then increasing serotonin should have worked on more than 60% of patients. Strike two.The final problem is one of evidence. If low serotonin levels were responsible for depressed mood, then we should be able to induce depression in people by decreasing serotonin, and we should find low levels of serotonin in patients with depression. But neither of those things exist. Decreasing serotonin in humans can lower your mood, but it doesn't always work. And studies looking for low serotonin in depressed patients have been inconclusive. It appears that even though antidepressants increase serotonin, a lack of serotonin doesn't cause depression (kind of like aspirin treats a headache, but headaches are not caused by a lack of aspirin). Strike three. Serotonin is out.So what's in? After all, antidepressants do work in some patients. It's instructive to look at other things these drugs are doing in the brain.Antidepressants increase levels of neurotransmitters in the brain, but they also increase neurogenesis, the birth of new cells in the brain. Throughout your life, you will grow new neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus. And if you take antidepressants for several weeks, you will get increased neurogenesis. These new neurons correspond to changes in animal behaviours that are associated with long-term antidepressant treatment. The behaviours are novelty-induced hypophagia, which measures how much of a tasty food an animal will eat in a novel environment and reflects aspects of anxiety and anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure); and the tail suspension test, which measures behavioural despair. Animals show improvement in both of these tests (eating more, or moving more) after long-term treatment with antidepressants, and these improvements correlate with neurogenesis in the brain.Not only that, if you make animals display signs of depression, you can reduce this neurogenesis, and you can reverse both the behaviour and the neurogenesis by treating them with antidepressants. Antidepressants may increase serotonin in your brain, but the alleviation of depression may be due to the long-term effects of the drugs on neurogenesis.The neurogenesis theory of depression fulfils many of the criteria that the serotonin theory did not. It takes the right amount of time to develop, the three to fours weeks that matches up with long-term treatment with antidepressants. We find reduced neurogenesis in animals and patients that display signs of depression. So far, we're two-thirds of the way towards an explanation. Many scientists are now examining the role of neurogenesis in depression, and looking for new targets to increase neurogenesis directly, rather than increasing neurotransmitters as the current drugs do.The role of neurogenesis in the potential treatment of depression is an exciting idea. But it is not flawless. Many studies cannot discern whether there are real changes in neurogenesis in humans with depression. Some studies show changes, but others do not.While traditional antidepressants do increase neurogenesis and relieve depression symptoms in some animal models, others show that neurogenesis and antidepressant behaviours are unrelated. Much of this debate comes down to the fact that we don't yet have a real understanding of neurogenesis, how it works, and how it is controlled both in normal brains and in the presence of antidepressants. Until we know, finding a truly effective antidepressant may remain out of reach. So while the monoamine/serotonin hypothesis for depression may be out, neurogenesis needs to step it up a little to make it in.Scicurious blogs at Neurotic PhysiologyPsychologyNeuroscienceDepressionMental healthHealthHealth & wellbeingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Evolution of an Idiocracy For those who can't figure out how evolution works, this sadly amusing video provides a lesson -- one that we all are well-acquainted with: the evolution of an idiocracyFor those who can't figure out how evolution works (yes, I am looking at you, Christine O'Donnell, rethuglican candidate for senate in Delaware), this sadly amusing video provides a lesson -- one that we all are well-acquainted with: America's evolution of an idiocracy!GrrlScientistguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Sea ice melting as Arctic temperature rises By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID 2010-10-21T18:56:03ZWASHINGTON (AP) -- The temperature is rising again in the Arctic, with the sea ice extent dropping to one of the lowest levels on record, climate scientists reported Thursday.... hosted.ap.org |