No, Virginia, it's not mobile phones
Friends, I have said it before and I'll say it again-- if it's science, and you read about it in a magazine or newspaper, there's a really good chance that someone fucked it right up.
The latest example is the insane hype over the Independent posting an article claiming a pair of scientists had linked Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the latest honeybee plague, to EM radiation from cellular phones. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this complete mischaracterization of their work has meant the researchers themselves cannot get any work done because they've been flooded with calls and emails.
If you want to know the real science, you have to go to the working groups, the peer-reviewed journals, and the meetings of the minds. Science is social in nature. When a mystery like CCD comes up, the floor becomes open to hypotheses about what's going on. That's where we're at with CCD right now...we don't know what's going on. So, scientists run miniature tests, tease out their speculations, and try to form something they can hang their hats on. And then they test it further. They field test with real scenarios. The cream eventually rises to the top as people repeat and repeat the process. That's why peer review, validation through working groups, etc, is so important.
When something comes out in the popular press, it has to spark the imagination of only one journalist and one editor. Many, and conceivably most, science journalists are not scientists themselves, and many, and conceivably most, science editors are concerned with the narrative quality of the story and not the hard data. For example, a newspaper once interviewed a professor that I knew at UF. He was asked why IPv6 was a good thing, and he said it'd expand the IP address space. He showed the reporter an IPv6 address in hexadecimal. The newspaper printed that IPv6 would expand the address space because "IPv6 does not use only numbers but also the alphabet." Popular press is out to give a good story, not good science.
The output from the Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group is less exciting. It basically comes down to "We don't know, but here are a few things to try." It does, however, represent a snapshot of ongoing knowledge rather than wild speculation and confirmation of biases. This isn't as much fun as waking one day to GMO crops being to blame, then blaming cellular phones next week, but it's important to understand that the idea that these things were ever "to blame" was a fiction created by popular press to sell advertising space.
For the record, I suspect we'll find a pesticide that puts a byproduct in pollen which is bioaccumulative and which eventually disorients a bee until it cannot find its way home. This would explain why foragers are missing (they're often older), why a sick colony still has a brood and brood tenders, why the queen is reasonably healthy, and most importantly might help explain why sick hives are not robbed when they are in decline.
The latest example is the insane hype over the Independent posting an article claiming a pair of scientists had linked Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the latest honeybee plague, to EM radiation from cellular phones. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this complete mischaracterization of their work has meant the researchers themselves cannot get any work done because they've been flooded with calls and emails.
If you want to know the real science, you have to go to the working groups, the peer-reviewed journals, and the meetings of the minds. Science is social in nature. When a mystery like CCD comes up, the floor becomes open to hypotheses about what's going on. That's where we're at with CCD right now...we don't know what's going on. So, scientists run miniature tests, tease out their speculations, and try to form something they can hang their hats on. And then they test it further. They field test with real scenarios. The cream eventually rises to the top as people repeat and repeat the process. That's why peer review, validation through working groups, etc, is so important.
When something comes out in the popular press, it has to spark the imagination of only one journalist and one editor. Many, and conceivably most, science journalists are not scientists themselves, and many, and conceivably most, science editors are concerned with the narrative quality of the story and not the hard data. For example, a newspaper once interviewed a professor that I knew at UF. He was asked why IPv6 was a good thing, and he said it'd expand the IP address space. He showed the reporter an IPv6 address in hexadecimal. The newspaper printed that IPv6 would expand the address space because "IPv6 does not use only numbers but also the alphabet." Popular press is out to give a good story, not good science.
The output from the Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group is less exciting. It basically comes down to "We don't know, but here are a few things to try." It does, however, represent a snapshot of ongoing knowledge rather than wild speculation and confirmation of biases. This isn't as much fun as waking one day to GMO crops being to blame, then blaming cellular phones next week, but it's important to understand that the idea that these things were ever "to blame" was a fiction created by popular press to sell advertising space.
For the record, I suspect we'll find a pesticide that puts a byproduct in pollen which is bioaccumulative and which eventually disorients a bee until it cannot find its way home. This would explain why foragers are missing (they're often older), why a sick colony still has a brood and brood tenders, why the queen is reasonably healthy, and most importantly might help explain why sick hives are not robbed when they are in decline.