WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?

A black hole is a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape.
It is all due to gravity – the force which pulls objects towards each other. It keeps the Earth moving around the Sun, instead of flying off into space, and holds us all down on the surface of the Earth.

A black hole’s gravity is so strong that not even light can escape its pull. Because the light is dragged towards a black hole, it cannot shine and so looks completely black.

Dr Marek Kukula, Royal Observatory

WHERE DOES WATER COME FROM?

Most scientists think the Earth’s water came from water-rich asteroids (really tiny planets) and comets raining down on the planet when it was young.

Others think the oceans were home-grown – they may have formed because the young Earth had a thick blanket of a gas called hydrogen, which reacted with chemicals in the Earth’s surface to form lakes and seas.

Roger Highfield, Editor, New Scientist

It does get a bit shaky when The Daily Mail tries to answer some of the trickier questions. The Mail’s own advise columnist Bel Mooney has a crack at dealing with the existential angst of “What happens when we die?”. Apparently it’s all about plants melting, and living on in each others memories, or some such. And I must admit her description of sex (in response to the question “Where do babies come from?”) has left me wondering if I’ve been doing it wrong. “They give each other a massive cuddle because they love each other so much, and that amazing big hug is like two pieces of a jigsaw fitting together, or two bits of Lego”. Hmmm…

So, all-in-all not a bad effort from the Mail, particularly considering some of the stuff they churn out. Well done them. Maybe their journalist should continue writing articles pitched at a 6 year old level, they seem to be good at it.

See, we can be nice to the media sometimes…

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To be fair, she does go on to give some cautionary quotes from people who understand that this research is very much in its early stages. However the article still has a very misleading slant from the get-go, starting with an over-hyped headline. Pleasingly, The Telegraph gets this story very right, and the journalist (who’s name I can’t find, please contact me if you know who it is) gives a lesson in good science reporting. There is no screamingly exaggerated headline; they give a clear indication that this is a study in mice from the first sentence; and there is some interesting commentary on the future possibilities of this research. This is an interesting story without making it out to be something it is not. As always, the awesome Behind The Headlines gives the facts.

This is a classic example of one of the media’s favored tactics for creating over-hyped articles: Reporting the results of petri dish and animal studies as if they apply equally to humans. The Metro did just this at the end of October when they reported “Young ‘better off’ without flu shots“. In particular the Metro journalist Miles Erwin wrote: “It is beneficial to allow youngsters to contract the illness as it could afford them better protection against more dangerous pandemics in the future, experts believe”.

Mr Erwin fails to point out that this expert opinion is just that, an opinion piece in the Lancet based mostly on mice studies. The same edition of the journal also features a piece arguing that such conclusions aren’t necessarily valid (note both the above links are behind pay-walls). Janet Raloff over at Science News gives a very good summary of the issue.

I personally think pre-clinical petri and animal studies should be reported in the mainstream media. Both the possible cervical cancer breakthrough and the possibility of issues with flu vaccination are important and interesting topics. However they should be reported for what they are: Early stage studies which give us a hint that something interesting might be going on. Cells in a test tube or mice in a lab are, for fear of stating the obvious, not humans. The FDA estimates that only 0.1 of compounds pass pre-clinical trials and go on to be tested in humans. And even if they do pass this first phase, and assuming they pass all subsequent phases, it can take a drug 5-10 years to get from the lab to the market.

This kind of sensationalized reporting adds to the public perception that scientists are constantly contradicting themselves, saying something cures one week and kills the next. Perhaps if, instead, journalists met their journalistic obligation and tried to educate their readers on the complexities involved in developing a drug, then we might have a society on our hands who appreciated that there has to be more to a story than “inject drug into mouse, cure cancer”. Of course, having a readership who expects good science in their media reporting really wouldn’t be in these newspaper’s best interests, now would it?

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However my favourite part of the whole article has to be where Mr. Wilson states: “The trouble with a ‘scientific’ argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts”. I beg to differ Mr. Wilson. Science requires – at its core – highly creative non-linear thinkers to propose new theories, to try new methods, to challenge what we think we know and to use the evidence gained from these endeavours to try and keep science and society healthy.  Do you remember what happened when man stopped being imaginative with his understanding of the natural world?  It was called the Dark Ages for a reason.

And, just to clarify, the thing that makes an argument ‘scientific’ is not – contrary to your opinion – that it is based on empirical evidence gathered in a laboratory by unimaginative men in white coats, but rather that the method used to obtain the supporting evidence is itself scientific.  Science is a method. It is not perfect, and nor does it claim to be, but it beats the hell out of fumbling around in the dark.

While we cannot put people in petri dishes, we can still use the scientific method – and therefore a scientific argument – to measure as best we can the effects some variable has on society.  Ideally, we use this scientifically obtained evidence to try to make informed policy decisions.

Perchance Mr. Wilson was simply attempting to paraphrase that great thinker of our time, one Homer Simpson. “Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true”. Indeed.

Maybe we should be more sympathetic to Wilson’s misconceptions of science considering that during a short lived experience as an atheist he came to realise that “the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat”. Such was the shock of this revelation that he concluded god must be the answer and he abandoned his atheism. Naturally such fundamental issues of existence are tough for us decidedly egotistical apes to accept, but lacking either the intelligence or creativity to understand and appreciate the wonder of the natural world is no excuse for writing such a poorly informed article.

I wonder how Mr. Wilson suggests we decide on societal policies if they are not to be informed by good scientific evidence? Perhaps we should be waiting for a white paper from god?

*the article the Daily Mail originally put up on their website included a rather fetching picture of Hitler. I was disappointed to note they removed this photo during the course of the day, but you can still see the image here. Possibly they realised that having a photo with the caption “Adolf Hitler: The Nazi Germany leader believed in science as the only truth” in an article attempting to delegitimise science might come back to bite them…

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