What do you conclude when different foods are claimed to be eaten on surveys by people who have one type of stroke but not another?

Not much. But it will still be a food frequency questionnaire epidemiology paper, the bane of public trust in science. What about confounders? Were people on medication, like statins?  The people who had strokes were 59-60 when they enrolled in the survey, so what about their lifestyle choices prior to that?

In an age of deepfakes and alternative facts, it can be tricky getting at the truth. But persuading others – or even yourself – what is true is not a challenge unique to the modern era. Even the ancient Greeks had to confront different realities.

Edgar Allan Poe, The author, poet, editor, and literary critic, died in 1849 at age 40 in Maryland. He was chronically depressed, he had even tried to commit suicide using laudanum a year before his death.

But when he went to the hospital for the last time, having been found delirious and wearing a stranger's clothes, he hadn't been committing suicide, according to a heuristic look at his writing.

A new paper claims that the Mediterranean diet may increase "longevity" and it created its mystical conclusion using the favored magic wand of food studies, epidemiological correlation, sprinkled with biological speculation.

You may be old enough to remember other claims using similar kernels of scientific truth that became popular diet fads; cigarettes, grapefruit, cabbage. the Adkins diet, Paleo. 

Tomorrow morning the Cornell arXiv will publish the preprint of a long scientific article, the result of 4.5 months of painstaking work by yours truly. So I thought I would give you a preview of its contents. Of course, it will take more than a single post to do a good job - I guess I can describe the generalities here, and leave it to another time the plunging into technical details that may only be interesting to insiders.

First of all, what experiment are we talking about? It is called "MUonE", and it aims at measuring with the utmost precision the rate at which muons scatter elastically off electrons, as a function of the transferred energy of the scattering reaction. 

Merge is a controversial belief by some that human language faculty arose in humans through a single gene mutation, rather the evolving gradually.

This human burst of genetic exceptionalism is embraced by some linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, but the science community has doubts. The basis for Merge is that humans are genetically equipped with a unique cognitive capacity that specifically allows us to implement computations over hierarchically structured symbolic representations.

A new paper says scientists can make their work more appealing to the public by making it more personal. I learned of it through a paid university PIO but few scientists will see the irony in that.

I certainly agree with the point. I have been part of two communities, science and the military, that in defiance of public perception are filled with hilarious people who have great stories. But when the recorder comes on, it's often like talking to someone in marketing who hasn't been cleared for media by their boss. They clam up or give canned answers.

You might know blue whales are an endangered species while pandas are not. Yet there are 25,000 blue whales and only 2,000 pandas.  There are 100,000 sea otters yet they are still classified as endangered. Who drew that line between endangered and not endangered? And why are there suddenly so many more endangered species? A new tiny species might be discovered and someone is immediately petitioning government to declare it endangered, even though there may be lots of them and western ecologists just don't know it.

Sildenafil (viagra) is used to treat erectile dysfunction and is safe, with known side effects, but a few people have experienced light sensitivity and color vision impairment at the highest recommended dose.

That doesn't mean men who need it should stop taking it, the psychological consequences of erectile dysfunction are of more concern than side effects, which can include headache and blurred vision that disappear quickly. These occur because sildenafil was originally developed as a treatment for high blood pressure, and it also dilates blood vessels and relaxes smooth muscle in the penis, making it easier to achieve and maintain an erection. 

A recent study identified the coronavirus responsible for the pneumonia epidemic in the Hubei province of China and finds the bat-origin virus is related to other known pathogenic coronaviruses.

The 2019 coronavirus (CoV) causes fatal pneumonia that has claimed over 1,300 lives, with more than 52,000 confirmed cases of infection by mid-February, along with various impacts to the lives of the scholars who revealed the virus against the wishes of the Chinese government.