Sunday 16 March 2014

Manufacturing significance

What if I could produce an experiment that concluded that listening to an old song could make you younger? Not feel younger, but be younger. Impossible, of course, but the story of how this can be achieved is a great example of how easy it is to produce statistically significant findings in science. All you need is enough 'wriggle room' in the data and a pre-conceived notion of what the results will be. Like ghosts in The Sixth Sense, scientists often only see what they want to see.

Monday 10 March 2014

When the antivenoms don’t work, you gotta start asking questions

As a junior doctor in Australia, the country with the deadliest snakes and spiders in the world, you quickly learn where the antivenoms are kept. Now it appears that the deadliness of these critters is less than we thought, and the benefits of the anti-venoms are under question, or have been proven to be ineffective.