Humans originated as a hybrid between chimps and pigs? Everything you need to know about

popcorn but were afraid to find out? Could the Large Hadron Collider spawn a planet devouring

black hole? Squeezing breasts can prevent cancer? Alcohol more harmful than heroin?

Woman becomes pregnant in the mouth with baby squid after eating calamari? fast-lane to

autism: living near freeways. Science figures out how cats drink. Semen is an antidepressant?

Oh, quantum physics proves there IS an afterlife.

I know what you're thinking, those sound like something out of The Onion, but unfortunately

those are all real science headlines that I found, and I didn't have to look that hard.

Some of them are a bit over blown, and some of them are pushing an agenda, and some are

actually just complete BS.

Figuring out what's good science and what's bad science when you're reading science news

is one of the best skills that you can put right here in your thinking machine. It will

serve you for your whole life. With that in mind, I'd like to give you my tips for how

to read science news.

Is the headline of the article a question? This one really ruffles my feathers for some

reason. Although, it occurs to me that sometimes we do it for YouTube videos, but it's different

for the news! Don't start your article off with a question. I'm here to ask you questions,

I am the one who is wondering things, and you are the one who is going to give me the

information. It's really a very simple deal. When you start your article with a question

it makes me wonder if you even know what you're talking about. What's with all those weird

quotes people use in the headlines? Zebra stripes mystery "explained", like was it actually

explained or was it like "fake" explained or was it a fake zebra? I don't understand

the quotes.

After considering #1, maybe it's just best if we skip the headline altogether. Yeah,

skip the headline.

Do you know the difference between a press release and journalism? Really, do you? One

is hopefully fact-checked, and balanced, and analyzes both sides of the story, and the

other one, is well, it's marketing material. There's a lot of websites out there that package

press releases to look like real news and it's important that you know the difference.

Press releases aren't untrue by design, but it's important that you take them with a big

grain of salt. I mean you wouldn't go to a car dealership and take the salesman's word

for everything. You've gotta go home and do your research.

I just want to reiterate, because I see this stuff shared all the time, press releases

are not news!

Look for "warning words". there are the words that will tell you if there's bit of uncertainty

in the article or maybe they don't know quite as much as they're letting on. Link, correlation,

possible, study suggests, or my favorite, "scientists were baffled". Scientists are

baffled all the time, but they don't write research papers about it and they certainly

don't sit around with reporters going "you know I was just totally baffled right now,

do you wanna write an article about it?"

Is the scientific method being applied? Take tie to check if what you're reading has been

peer-reviewed. Or was it presented at a conference, or is this just some scientist talking on

a street corner? While far from perfect, our peer review system for publishing science

is far from perfect, it's worked out pretty well considering, and good journalists and

good writers, they'll treat a research finding like a hypothesis, and they'll scour that

work and the work of others for data that supports or refutes it. They'll look to outside

sources as sort of controls. Good science writing applies the scientific method.

Ask yourself, does someone stand to gain financially from me reading this article? If you're reading

that news on any commercial news website with advertising or subscriptions, then the answer

is yes, somebody wants you to read that. That's not necessarily a bad thing, people need to

make money to support their operations and pay their writers, but that desire had better

be outweighed by the desire to inform you.

Did the person who wrote the article actually do any research of their own. Are there quotes

from the actual researcher? Or did it say something like "according to the press release".

More importantly, are there quotes from someone besides the researcher? Now some science is

so complicated that it can help to have someone just explain it to you, and that's actually

my favorite kind of science to both read about and write about, but that should never be

all that they do, they should still apply a critical eye. Honestly, if someone just

rewords the press release, they are the WORST.

Is the story about a new breakthrough, OR is the story trying to scare you? The media

has always been obsessed with these kinds of stories because they know you're going

to click on them. But their ratio of truthiness to hype sometimes leaves a little to be desired.

Frankly, most stuff isn't as scary as it's made out to be. But some stuff is scary, like

antibiotic resistant bacteria, knowing to tell the difference between hype and reality

is pretty hard. On the other hand, breakthroughs are pretty rare, which is why we give big

awards for them and stuff.

Here's one: Possible cure for cancer found in mice. Now, curing cancer in mice isn't

the same as curing cancer in humans, so is that a breakthrough, ehhh? We've cured a lot

of cancers in mice, and unfortunately not so many in humans. Now maybe one day one will

lead to the other, but for a lot of cancers your best bet is to turn into a small furry

creature. Remember, when it comes to scare stories and breakthrough stories, just because

a lot of people have read something, doesn't make it any more true.

Does this story fit in nicely with commonly held beliefs or stereotypes? Ok, that's not

necessarily a bad thing, but does it fit in a little TOO well with commonly held beliefs

and stereotypes? Recently a paper came out about mapping brain connections in male and

female brains.And they found some differences, which is fine, but then they applied those

differences to things like men being better at reading maps, or women being better at

organizing the house or something. Be wary of papers that want to fit a scientific story

into a nice neat social construct, because that's not how science works. This also works

with science that challenges previously held beliefs and stereotypes, because a lot of

times controversy can make an easy substitute for accuracy. It's like that old saying "does

this sound too good to be true?" because a lot of times well, it is too good to be true.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't true. You should approach every story

with a balance of curiosity and skepticism, as Michael Shermer says "you should have an

open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out".

The internet is big and its accessible, and its given us access to more information than

we ever thought possible, and that's clearly a good thing, but it also means that anybody

who wants to donate 2 cents can pop that in the piggy bank of human knowledge. As traditional

media continues to cover less and less science than ever before, this is clearly a very good

thing. Or it can be a bad thing, for all those reasons that I talked about before. Unfortuantely,

the S&%t flows uphill, as they say, and the more that writers, journalists, facebook pages

and tumblr pages get things wrong, then society loses trust in science as a whole, it's like

a modern version of the boy who cried wolf.

Chances are, you're not an expert, and journalists aren't experts either, it's just that the

good ones operate under a set of guiding principles that let them become temporary experts, and

find real experts when that doesn't work. Some people are way better at this than others.

I'm gonna put a list of my favorites down in the description, people who are good at

getting things right, pointing out what's wrong, and being entertaining while they do

it. Please feel free to leave your favorites down in the comments.

You know every science story should really end with something like 'Now we just have

a tiny bit more information about science, but we're gonna have to do a lot more experiments

to figure out if any of it's really true, and come to think of it, nothing in science

is ever really proven true, it's just continually supported by new evidence, and actually maybe

it's best that we don't draw any life-changing conclusions from all this and we just enjoy

the process. Yeah, let's do that."