A while ago I wrote about Carl Zimmer’s use of the colloquial name daddy-longlegs when referring to harvestmen, and how it hurt the international accessibility of his writing. Honestly, it wasn’t a big deal at the time (although it did bring in a celebrity commenter!) and it looks utterly insignificant compared to this. I’m going to assume that Dr Andrew Ross is as competent as his position of collection manager of fossil invertebrates and plants at the Natural History Museum in London would suggest — which is very — and that he simply wasn’t careful enough about his use of words in interview. During the course of the article, he refers to this harvestman specimen both as a spider and in a roundabout way as an insect as well. Not only are both incorrect, but they’re also mutually exclusive. It’s a real shame that given the opportunity to get the word out and educate the public a little, a senior employee of the Natural History Museum managed, instead, to misinform the public through something as simple as poor word choice.

Luckily there was a safety net this time; the BBC’s journalist, Rebecca Morelle, clearly knows her stuff, and she pre-empts his comments with the correct definition; that harvestmen are arachnids that are closely related to, without actually being, spiders. I just can’t help feeling that it shouldn’t fall to a journalist to correct the expert she quotes.

Even the BBC appears to use them rather too liberally. Take a look at this article. There’s no suggestion anywhere that the girl might have made it up; warehouse have apologised and compensated her, the tool in the photo looks like the sort of thing that would be used for cutting canvas in a bag factory; so why the scare quotes around ‘finds blade in bag’ in the headline? Why say she ‘claims she pulled out a cutting device’ rather than just reporting that she did?

It’s a weird article; I can’t decide if it’s just sloppily written, or if the author is trying to play on the public’s fear of teenagers with knives. In either case, it’s below the BBC — they should know better.

This really is the last thing we need.

I’m not talking about the bug itself (although obviously MRSA is a problem and needs to be taken very seriously,) but about the fact that it seems to have established itself in the gay community. I haven’t googled to find out, but I’m sure the Religious Right has already got hold of this and stared beating it’s “dangers of an immoral lifestyle” drum. And if they haven’t, it’s only a matter of time. Mark my words.

For an example, take a look at the Metro’s coverage. Their headline alone is shockingly misleading; “Strain of Superbug ‘may be new HIV’”. I don’t know where they got that quote from (they don’t bother to attribute it anywhere in the article,) but I’d love to hear it justified. Is MRSA a virus? Does it attack the immune system? No. So in what way exactly might it be the new Human Immunodeficiency Virus? Oh yes, because it’s a “gay disease.” Just like AIDS. The ignorance staggers me.

And it gets worse. Further down the article they write:

MRSA expert Prof Mark Enright, from Imperial College and St Mary’s Hospital, London, said gay communities and drug users were particularly at risk. But it could also be spread by those involved in sports, such as wrestling, with skin-to-skin contact.

‘Having a number of sexual partners and making skin contact with a large number of different people is how these infections are picked up,’ he added.

I really hope they’ve ‘massaged’ Prof. Enright’s quote, because if not, he should not be called an expert. Gay communities and drug users are not “particularly at risk,” and Enright knows it; he says as much in the next paragraph. The people particularly at risk are people who make a lot of direct skin contact with a lot of different people. Now, it might be true that there’s a strong correlation, that gay people tend to have more direct contact with others than non-gay people, but that is utterly irrelevant; it’s still the contact, not being gay that puts those people at risk and to suggest otherwise is downright irresponsible.

Obviously health professionals have a responsibility to identify trends in disease transmission and infection rates, and to try to highlight high-risk activities and to keep the public informed; that’s their job and it’s immensely valuable in preventing and treating illness. The problem arises when some rag takes what they’re saying and twists it into an article which effectively says “Oh noes! Teh Gay! It’s making us ill! Again!”

Shame on you Metro, for publishing this: It’s bad science, it’s bad journalism and it’s morally reprehensible.

By now you’ll have all noticed the stories about a newly discovered breed of giant sea scorpion, which terrorised aquatic environments 300 million years ago. The BBC and CNN have both reported on it. Sloppily.

Quite aside from Kevin Z’s valid criticisms of the CNN coverage, the thing both sites have utterly failed to mention is that this isn’t that remarkable. I mean, it’s good, interesting science, and the team involved have done a great job, but two-and-a-half metre sea scorpions are not a new discovery. In fact it’s only because this recent work has lowered the estimated size of a previous find by 40cm that this new discovery is considered the largest yet found. I know it makes for better news if you can make out this is some sort of amazing discovery of hitherto unknown giant bugs, but that doesn’t justify neglecting to mention the background to the work.

There’s a great article over at the BBC, about what happens when you give the climate change denialists a chance to present their side of the argument. You get

The sum total of evidence obtained through this open invitation, then, is one first-hand claim of bias in scientific journals, not backed up by documentary evidence; and three second-hand claims, two well-known and one that the scientist in question does not consider evidence of anti-skeptic feeling.

While I’m not surprised that these people complete failed to back up their claims of systemic bias in the scientific community, I don’t share Mark’s view that the whole exercise was a waste of time. Sure, we knew they wouldn’t come up with the goods, but it’s worth doing the legwork to prove that to the public at large, especially if you can get that result published on a hugely popular site like the BBC.

Also, if someone goes through these motions every once in a while, then it gives the denialists less scope to claim they’re being oppressed. Of course they won’t stop; they’ll just claim that this a piece of establishment propaganda, but for every article like this that is published, the public at large will be less inclined to give those claims credence.