Goodbye And See You Soon!

And thus it came to pass that Cracked Science was no more.

This is not a dead-end; the road, once gravely, makes way for a paved highway.

In the summer of 2013, a former graduate student with a craving for bad-science denouncing and public education started a blog.

There are over 150 million blogs on the Internet.

His was not so much a lone voice in the wilderness as a rookie trader on the floor of the world’s biggest stock market.

He wrote and wrote and wrote, on science education, science criticism, and straight-up pseudoscience, somewhat aimless at first but driven by sheer exuberance.

When words were not enough, he dusted off his lenses. He spent two hours in an indoor pool with the fan turned off to talk about homeopathy and bought 200 styrofoam cups to prove his point. The whereabouts of these cups are unknown.

He rolled his blog into a brand-new production team that he created to bring reason to the public. He started a podcast. He interviewed a cardiologist and budding medical journalist. They thought, “one voice is fine but two voices are better.” Especially when they bicker.

***

Cracked Science was a first trial for me, an experiment, and it was fun. But I am now taking the skills I developed blogging, podcasting, and making videos to a single destination: The Body of Evidence.

CrackedScience.com will remain active for the foreseeable future, but no new material will be posted there.

If you want to see my videos, if you want to read me (including an all-new post on the science behind Chewpods, that chewable natural health product that’s being plastered on the walls of our metro stations), if you want to hear my lovely voice, there’s one destination for that, and that’s www.bodyofevidence.ca.

Plus, you get to read, see, and hear my buddy, Dr. Christopher Labos, so it’s a two-for-one deal, really. Click on our pretty faces below. You’ll be taken to the new site, of which we are immensely proud. Enter your email address in the “Subscribe” box on the right and you won’t miss a thing.

All of you, the 100+ subscribers to Cracked Science, go to The Body of Evidence. If Cracked Science was A New Hope, The Body of Evidence is The Empire Strikes Back.

And I promise: I will never give you Ewoks.

 

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Listen: Science Says, “The Best Beauty Product Is…”

What do you think is the best beauty product out there? The one that science has shown has the greatest impact on your health? The one with tested rejuvenating powers? The one the evidence says, “Buy it, use it, and you will see the difference”?

Is it Retin-A? Coconut oil? Kakadu plum?

Listen to this podcast and you’ll know the answer. Look, it’s got a comedic vox pop segment; two guys with science degrees insulting each other; original music by a local music whiz; and high-end production values.

Subscribe to The Body of Evidence today and find out what the evidence says on…

(Also available on iTunes!)

Listen: Science Says, “The Best Beauty Product Is…”

What do you think is the best beauty product out there? The one that science has shown has the greatest impact on your health? The one with tested rejuvenating powers? The one the evidence says, “Buy it, use it, and you will see the difference”?

Is it Retin-A? Coconut oil? Kakadu plum?

Listen to this podcast and you’ll know the answer. Look, it’s got a comedic vox pop segment; two guys with science degrees insulting each other; original music by a local music whiz; and high-end production values.

Subscribe to The Body of Evidence today and find out what the evidence says on…

(Also available on iTunes!)


Read: 23andMe or the Fallacy of ‘More Is Better’

A few months ago, a fellow skeptic told me he was considering personalized genetic testing and wondered what my opinion was on the service. The idea is that any consumer who desires can send a DNA sample to a company, like 23andMe, and get a report back on various genetic risk factors. Sounds like a good idea, but it is based on the fallacy that “more information is better for you” and, more specifically, that knowing about risks will alter your behaviour.

In a way, this direct-to-consumer service is trotting out that old American obsession with freedom: these are my genes, so I get to know. You can’t come between me and my biology.

The problems with personalized genetic testing are many: the communication of risk factors to a population that is statistically illiterate; the lack of subscription to quality control and assurance standards; and the revelation of risks that may not be clinically actionable and will only cause anxiety. Oh and, as mentioned before, the fact that knowing what you have to do rarely translates to action.

If you don’t believe me, go read Dr. Christopher Labos’ piece in the Gazette: it’s short, sweet, and well argued.

And then listen to us bicker as we tackle common medical misconceptions on The Body of Evidence.

Read: How Antibodies Let Biomedical Research Down

Antibodies are used a lot in research labs around the world and scientists tend to trust what’s on the label. But antibodies aren’t as reliable as researchers may think, with some scientists now arguing that “due diligence” in their use should include considerable time and money.

I remember comparing my own experimental results to published blots. We were in theory using the same antibody, and yet the pattern on the blot was completely different. Leave it to an eager principal investigator to squint really hard to see the band he or she wants to see.

“Scientists often know, anecdotally, that some antibodies in their field are problematic, but it has been difficult to gauge the size of the problem across biology as a whole. Perhaps the largest assessment comes from work published by the Human Protein Atlas, a Swedish consortium that aims to generate antibodies for every protein in the human genome. It has looked at some 20,000 commercial antibodies so far and found that less than 50% can be used effectively to look at protein distribution in preserved slices of tissue. This has led some scientists to claim that up to half of all commercially available antibodies are unreliable.”

You can read the whole article here. It’s not exactly meant for the general public, but it is quite interesting if you are interested in reproducibility issues in science.

Read: Does Being Short Mean a Higher Risk for Bad Heart Juju?

Short people are at a higher risk for adverse cardiac events. Tall people are at a higher risk for heart attacks. Short people live longer. Tall people live longer.

Which is it?

A new study came out (in the much revered New England Journal of Medicine) apparently showing that short people are at an increased risk for heart disease.

Is there any weight behind this claim?

An article in the Montreal Gazette blows away the fog on the association between height and health:

“I wish I were taller. Tall people are more likely to get hired, get promoted and are paid better than their shorter counterparts. They can reach things from the top shelf without difficulty, have unobstructed views at theatres, and are consistently rated as more attractive by others. Overall, seems like a sweet deal.

“Then this study comes along in the New England Journal of Medicineshowing that shorter people are at higher risk for heart disease; just to add insult to injury.

“So while I read this study and wistfully wondered what it would be like to be 6 feet tall, I dug back in my archives and pulled out another study from the journal PLOS one that made me fell better.”

You can read the whole thing here.

If the author’s reedy and whiny voice sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s that of none other than, yes, Dr. Christopher Labos, with whom I do The Body of Evidence podcast.

You may have noticed that I have been mentioning his work quite a bit as of late. A very interesting announcement will be made on this blog in the next two months in that vein (no pun intended, I swear).

In the meantime, do you want to know if being short (or tall) puts you at risk of developing heart disease? And if not, what may? Go read the article now. It’s really short (and humorous).


Read: Do We Have Too Many Postdocs in the Biomedical Sciences?

My answer: yes.

Nature published a very lengthy and well-written piece by Kendall Powell on the postdoctoral fellowship. If you don’t know, the next step for many Ph.D. graduates is not a tenure-track position in a university but a sort of poorly paid specialization called the postdoctoral fellowship, whose funding is often uncertain and whose length can often stretch to absurdity.

“Many postdocs move on to fulfilling careers elsewhere, but those who want to continue in research can find themselves thwarted. They end up trapped as ‘permadocs’: doing multiple postdoc terms, staying in these positions for many years and, in a small but significant proportion, never leaving them. Of the more than 40,000 US postdocs in 2013, almost 4,000 had been so for more than 6 years.”

If you are interested in learning more about the less-than-stellar side of contemporary science, I encourage you to go read the full piece here.


Book Review: Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? by Timothy Caulfield

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“Evidence-based entertainment” is the motto and mandate of the production team under whose banner this blog exists. It expresses a desire for subversive education in light of growing apathy, for using the tools of entertainment to foster skepticism. The pill is always easier to swallow in a scoop of ice cream.

I love stumbling upon like-minded individuals who have found creative ways of bringing real science to an indifferent audience. Law professor and author Timothy Caulfield struck the perfect balance with his first outing, The Cure for Everything! With this sophomore tome, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?, he shows us the potential longevity of a writing approach that weaves scientific results into a tapestry of funny encounters and personal experiences. I look forward to future iterations of the formula: it makes for compelling and enriching reads.

The first half of Gwyneth seems like the natural continuation of Cure: from nutrition and fitness, we move to detox cleanses, unproven cosmetics, and drastic surgeries. The lens through which these cure-alls are described is that of Hollywood celebrities, most particularly their unelected spokesperson, Gwyneth Paltrow, whose website Goop promises to be that rare place “where food, shopping, and mindfulness collide.” “In the preface [to Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook, It’s All Good], she credits [Dr. Alejandro Junger], and the Clean Cleanse, with curing her of a variety of ailments, including the banishment of an intestinal parasite that went undetected by Gwyneth’s conventional physicians, the adjustment of her ‘sky-high’ adrenals and the unclogging of her horribly clogged liver.” For a reader like me who knows the world of pseudomedicine and its simpler, rational counterpart, this is like shooting fish in a barrel; but to Caulfield’s credit, he integrates the bucket of cold water (“absolutely no evidence supports the idea that we need to detoxify our bodies”) amidst a page-turning narrative: he visits Goop headquarters in London; has his face scanned by two dermatologists (before and after a costly beauty routine); and even makes it to an American Idol audition. Well, sort of.

The second half of the book was more illuminating to me: putting aside what celebrities peddle, how likely is it to become one of them? We may all think we know the answer but the numbers Caulfield cite give lottery probabilities a run for their money. Chances of becoming a movie “star”: 1 in 1.5 million. Chances of a pro career in football: 0.08%. Chances of becoming a full-time independent musician who lives on an average salary: 1 in 477,000. And while you are awaiting your turn into the rock-star spotlight, you will be making, on average, 7,228$ a year, which is “less than half of the Canadian poverty line cutoff.” And yet fame is, according to a recent survey, “the number-one cultural value of children between the ages of ten and twelve”, with a depressingly high number of students believing celebrity status was within reach. The author summarizes the cognitive dissonance at play here with this gem: “People think the statistics apply to other people, but not to them.”

With so many studies quoted, some facts are bound to surprise the reader, how ever well informed he or she is. Did you know that the rural lifestyle is not all it’s cracked up to be? Life expectancy goes down as you move to the countryside. But don’t worry, because beautiful pianists play what sounds like better music compared to their uglier counterparts. The final section of the book, on whether fame is worth having, drags on a bit. After reading nearly 300 pages on celebrities, I must admit the message was clear and I couldn’t wait to move to a less glamorous subject.

Putting aside the nay-say, what positive message there is boils down to, “You aren’t going to be rich and famous. Stop worrying about it.” The lesson reminded me of the much-publicized atheist bus ad campaign of 2009: “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Irrationality of all ilk thrives amidst fear-mongering. The more people worry, the likelier they will be tempted to seek out all-encompassing answers, which tend to be unscientific and complex. In both The Cure for Everything! and his latest book, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?, Timothy Caulfield beautifully reinforces the best kept secret of life: keep it simple. Eat well, exercise regularly, get a good night sleep, and accept that you will never be a celebrity. Will the message reach the people who need it most? If any messenger can make it happen, it is one whose writing is compelling, disarming, and entertaining. Gwyneth Paltrow may not be wrong about everything, but Timothy Caulfield shows us the dangers of following the siren song of scientifically illiterate celebrities. And he makes it fun.

The Trojan horse of rationality has arrived.


Within Reason Episode 206 – (Bad) Science

Originally posted on Moutons No More:

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Jonathan Jarry hosts another edition of Within Reason, the podcast that looks at contentious issues from a rational perspective.

This month, is scientific research inefficient or have we grossly oversimplified the situation? We begin with a mad comedic dash through the life of a young scientist to the sound of Italian music and then meet an actual Italian scientist! Dr. Fanelli and Dr. Kimmelman unearth the nuances behind falsification, idealization, animal studies, and reproducibility. As science goes meta, what can we do to be better scientists? If these discussions are too cerebral for you, there’s Christopher Hammock and Kishanda Vyboh to make you laugh. Are they cynical? No…. Sarcastic? Yes! We talk C.S.I., PCR, pedestals, and sharks! By the time you’re done listening to this episode, you will realize that scientists are human beings.

Also available on iTunes. Make sure to subscribe to get the latest episode when it’s…

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Listen / Watch: The Cost of Cancer Drugs

The only good drug is the one the patient can afford.

WNYC radio show and podcast extraordinaire RadioLab most recently did an episode entitled “Worth” in which the show’s hosts and producer investigated the worth of an extra year of human life. They stumbled upon a very interesting story centred on the cost of cancer drugs in the U.S.

Dr. Christopher Labos brought to my attention a recent report from 60 Minutes which discussed the same controversy (using much of the same interviewees, actually).

If you prefer to listen to a top-of-the-line aural production, check out “Worth” from RadioLab.

If you love the sound of a ticking stopwatch and like your journalism the old fashioned way, check out “The Cost of Cancer Drugs” on 60 Minutes.

Both are excellent.

And if you like getting your news from different sources, enjoy them both!