Can memories be transferred? Is there a loneliness epidemic? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of May 14-May 20 2018 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Ebola is rearing its head again, but World Health Organization experts say it's not yet a global emergency, while we also now have a vaccine ready to fight it with. These subjects and many other topics are among ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

An Aplysia sea slug (or sea hare), the species which
scientists claim to have transferred memories between
members of.
Credit: Géry Parent, used via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0 licence.

• Researchers claim to have transferred a memory between two sea slugs by John Timmer at Ars Technica
• It's That Dress Again, but Now for Your Ears by Stephen L. Macknik at Illusion Chasers
• The inside of a proton endures more pressure than anything else we’ve seen by Emily McConover at Science News
• How to bend and stretch a diamond by David L. Chandler at MIT News
• The Top Five Mysteries of the Human Gut Microbiome by Kristina Campbell at leapsmag
• Sewage science: Are bacteria just the tip of the fatberg? by Laura Cox at Microbe Post
• How smaller drinks could reduce the UK’s alcohol consumption by Inge Kersbergen at Sifting the Evidence
• Podcast of the week: The immune system unleashed by Sara Roncero-Menendez, presented by Brian Stallard and Andrea Alfano, with Douglas Fearon, at Base Pairs
• FDA 'names and shames' generic-blocking pharma companies by Phil Taylor at PMLive
• A Canadian Journalist Calls Out Pediatric Chiropractic, and a Chiropractor Responds by Clay Jones at Science-Based Medicine
• Schizophrenia more prevalent away from green spaces by Marie Barse at ScienceNordic
• No, there is no epidemic of loneliness. (Or, Dog Bites Man: David Brooks runs another column based on fake stats) by Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
• Ebola Vaccine, four decades in the making by Justin Varholick and Amanda Dettmer at Speaking of Research
• Ebola outbreak is alarming, but falls short of global emergency, panel says by Helen Branswell at STAT
• An opioid shortage? It’s real and could harm cancer patients by Tara Soumerai at STAT
• Down syndrome testing shouldn’t tilt parents toward pregnancy termination by Chris Kaposy at STAT
• Tricks, Lies and Videotape: The Dirty Tactics of the Anti Choice Side by Taryn de Vere at Headstuff
• Hawaii Volcano Eruption: What You Need To Know by Kate Broome at Science Trends 
• Conservation Conundrum: Is Focusing on a Single Species a Good Strategy? by Richard Conniff at Yale Environment 360
• Europe Fighting it Out in the Courts over Air Pollution by Gabriel de Silva at On a Clear Day
• That NASA climate science program Trump axed? House lawmakers just moved to restore it by Jeffrey Mervis at Science
• How My PhD Training is Empowering Me by Teresa Ambrosio at Stories in Science
• I've Paid $18,000 To A $24,000 Student Loan, & I Still Owe $24,000 by Kaitlyn Cawley at Bustle
• What the Teacher Strikes Can Teach Students About the History of the Labor Movement by Tanner Higgin at MindShift

Check back next week for more great picks!

Could a hangover cure finally be on the way? What is time? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of May 7-May 13 2018 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

We worry about the environment - but in Sumatra and the Antarctic we've had some wins, and gene editing, psychology, and space offer potential ways out - or possibly just new problems. These subjects and many other topics are among ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

Could we avoid feeling like this if we drink too much?
Image credit: Mislav Marohnić used via Flickr CC BY 2.0 licence

• A hangover pill? Tests on drunk mice show promise by Yunfeng Lu at The Conversation
• She swallowed a mouse by Thomas Morris
• Experimental vaccine to be used against Ebola outbreak in the DRC by Helen Branswell at STAT 
• Mini-antibodies discovered in sharks and camels could lead to drugs for cancer and other diseases by Mitch Leslie at Science
• Animal tests surge under new U.S. chemical safety law by Vanessa Zainzinger at Science
• How Augmented reality is disrupting healthcare by Jan van den Burg at PM Live
• Fasting May Regenerate Stem Cells In Humans, Study Finds by Mohendra Shiwnarain at Science Trends
• 2050 – A world without plastics by Mark Lorch at Chemistry Blog
• Science Begins To Look To Gene-Editing Tools Like CRISPR To Save Coral Reefs by Eric Mack at Forbes
• How Kilauea's Lava Invades Neighborhoods by Wendell Duffield at Scientific American
• Sumatran community grows crops, aids conservation through ‘village forests’ by Loren Bell at Mongabay
• South Georgia declared ‘rat-free’ in largest-ever rodent eradication program by Shreya Dasgupta at Mongabay
• Can Social Psychology save the Earth? | Psychology and Climate Change by Rachel Tobin at Headstuff
• Mining in Space Could Lead to Conflicts on Earth by Ramin Skibba at Nautilus
• What time is it, and why? by Jon M. Butterworth at Life and Physics
• A celebration of curiosity for Feynman’s 100th birthday by Tom Siegfried at Science News
• The Dangerous Connection Between Humiliation and Violence by Suzanne Phillips at PsychCentral
• Life beyond the Laboratory Bench by Direna A. Curbelo Ushma Neill and Allison Mayle at Scientific American Voices

Check back next week for more great picks!

What's the latest theory on consciousness? Can dogs understand us? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of April 30-May 6 2018 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

While we are learning more about how the moist warmth of a sauna is good for us, we have also discovered that the fact we live in cold climates seems to have given humans migraines. Also: contact lenses that turn eyes into lasers! Yes, really! These subjects and many other topics are among ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

• 

  Sweat out those toxins!
  Credit: Visit Lakeland used via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0 licence

  Sauna Bathing Reduces Risk of Stroke, New Study Shows at Sci-News.com
• How is it that in 2018 Stanislaw Burzynski is still preying on desperate cancer patients? (Update) by Orac at Respectful Insolence
• Cancer Sequencing Hype And Reality by Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline
• People adapted to the cold and got more migraines as a result by Jessica Hamzelou at New Scientist
• Brains of men with autism have some ‘female’ patterns by Rachel Zamzow at Spectrum
• Wearable device accurately scans brains in moving people by Nicole Wetsman at Spectrum 
• On caring for suicidal patients: A psychiatrist reflects by Jennifer Huber at Stanford Medicine
• The 100 Billion Dollar-Euro Question: Is There A Placebo Effect In Medicine Outside Drug Trials? by Paul Enck and Sibylle Klosterhalfen at Science Trends
• Podcast: What Does Your Dog Really Think About You? by Alexa Lim and Gregory Berns at Science Friday
• Podcast: Echochambers, Organic Solar Cells, Self-Cleaning Coating, Who's That Noisy by Steven Novella, Jay Novella, Bob Novella, Evan Bernstein and Cara Santa Maria at Skeptics Guide to the Universe
• EU Decides To Ban Major Insecticides That Harm Bees by Daniel Nelson at Science Trends
• An endangered animal thrives in a novel ecosystem by Brandon Keim at Anthropocene
• Brazilian Salamanders: Rare, Beautiful and Endangered by Pedro Peloso at National Geographic Wildlife Blog
• Warmer winters increasing risk of avalanches in the Himalayas, studies find by Neha Jain at Mongabay
• Australia to invest $379 million to protect the Great Barrier Reef  by Shreya Dasgupta at Mongabay
• Friends to Foes: When a Symbiont Becomes a Parasite by Osama Alian at Sciworthy
• The Birds that Live with Lava by Erin McKittrick at Hakai Magazine
• The Intertidal Architects of the Coast by Amorina Kingdon at Hakai Magazine
• Microfluidics from LEGO bricks by Jennifer Chu at MIT News
• Scottish Scientists Just Made a Contact Lens That Lets You Shoot Lasers from Your Eyes by Stephen Skolnick at Physics Buzz
• The Most Important Equation In The Universe by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang! 
• Astronomers Spot Helium on Exoplanet for First Time by Alexandra Witze at Nature
• A Super-Simple, Non-Quantum Theory of Eternal Consciousness by John Horgan at Scientific American 
• Federal appeals court hears CRISPR patent dispute by Jon Cohen at Science
• Building Thinking Skills to Help Students Access Their Best Work by Katrina Schwartz at Mindshift
• "We continuously increased the number of animals until statistical significance was reached to support our conclusions" . . . I think this is not so bad, actually! by Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
• Good Intentions Do Not Always Mean Good Policy by Scott Fridkin at Controversies in Hospital Infection Prevention 

Check back next week for more great picks!

How can you remember dreams? Can chocolate boost your memory? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of April 23-29 2018 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Space is beautiful, mind-bogglingly enormous - but also kind of funky-smelling on one of our notorious solar system neighbours. These subjects, a number of intriguing life hacks, and many other topics are among ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

• Biggest ever 3D map of the galaxy pinpoints 1.7 billion stars by Leah Crane at New Scientist
• It's Official: Uranus Smells Like Farts by Kate Broome at Science Trends
• Super Earth Aliens Could Be Trapped On Their Home Planet by Brian Koberlein at Forbes
• Vitamin B6 boosts dream recall by Andrew Masterson at Cosmos Magazine
• Eating Dark Chocolate Improves Memory, Reduces Inflammation and Stress at Sci-News.com
• Podcast of the Week: Geothermal Activity and Earthquakes by Roland Pease at The Science Hour
• Native Knowledge: What Ecologists Are Learning from Indigenous People by Jim Robbins at Yale Environment 360
• When Whales and Humans Talk by Krista Langlois at Hakai Magazine 
• Poachers versus Poop by John R. Platt at Extinction Countdown
• Better than bottled: How a Dutch company uses bison to maintain pure drinking water by Joshua Parfitt at Mongabay
• New rule could force EPA to ignore major human health studies by Warren Cornwall at Science
• Study: States with weak gun laws put neighboring states at risk by Kim Krisberg at The Pump Handle
• I Used To Be a Holistic Nutritionist by Denby Royal at Science-Based Medicine
• Shoebox-sized lab can diagnose infectious diseases from a drop of blood by Helen Branswell at STAT
• Inchworm: How This Caterpillar (Turned Moth) Inspired An New Exercise Workout by Daniel Nelson at Science Trends
• Building for your brain by Jon Farrow at The Thoughtful Pharoah
• A Microbial Utopia: Cheese by by Nathan Jayne, Amanda Alker, and Nathalie Delherbe at Small Things Considered 
• The chemistry of tulips and tulip fingers by Andy Brunning at Compound Interest 

• When the Stress of the PhD Meet The Anxiety of the Visa: On International Postgraduate Studies, Financial Anxieties, and Everything Else That Scares Me by Alex Fitzpatrick at Animal Archaeology
• Are the robots coming for our (research) jobs? at The Thesis Whisperer
• Aubrey de Grey: The chromatic number of the plane is at least 5 by Gil Kalai at Combinatorics and more

Check back next week for more great picks!

How do we find new stars and planets? How does meditation benefit people? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of April 16-22 2018 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Meditation can apparently influence gene expression and enables attention without control - or can it? These and many other topics are among ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

Stellar scientist Annie Jump Cannon
used star-hunting techniques that
are still to be found in software
named after her

• Can this robot build an IKEA chair faster than you? by Matt Warren at Science
• Candy Crush Stained Glass from “STEAM Lab for Kids” by Liz Heinecke at The Kitchen Pantry Scientist
• Digital Pills: Big Data or Big Brother? by Kirstin Leslie at theGIST
• Study Uncovers How Mind-Body Techniques Lower High Blood Pressure at The Mass General Hospital Research Blog
• First ever neuroimaging study of people in the midst of Transcendental Meditation by Christian Jarrett at British Psychological Society Research Blog
• Anti-vaccine pseudoscientist fails to show vaccines are linked to autism at Skeptical Raptor
• In Search of New Worlds—Meet TESS, Humanity’s Newest Exoplanet Scout by Kendra Redmond at Physics Buzz
• Spectacular Lagoon Nebula Glows in Hubble’s 28th Birthday Photos at Sci-News.com
• Looking For Stellar Families Using The Skills Of A Human Computer by Brian Koberlein at Forbes
• The chemistry of William Gibson’s Neuromancer by Nick Uhlig at Chemistry Blog
• Chameleon-like elastomers — champions of quick color change by Lisa Craig at The University of Akron
• does this conference have no shame? asking for a friend by Jenny Martin at cubistcrystal
• Recent Sea Level Change by Tamino at Open Mind
• New modelling finds that in a human world, big animals run the greatest risk of extinction by Andrew Masterson at Cosmos Magazine

Check back next week for more great picks!

Causation vs Correlation: How tell when someone's trying to feed you baloney

Don't fall for people misusing evidence to
tell you what you're doing is wrong.
Credit: Arlette Cifuentes Meneses via Flickr CC BY 2.0 licence.

by Gaia Cantelli, PhD

Last time that somebody told you that what you were doing was bad, did they offer evidence - and did you believe it? 

In an age obsessed with fake facts, hopefully you have an armour of skepticism forming already. But here's a chink in the armour you may not have thought of: perfectly true facts can also be warped to manipulate people. One of the most common ways to do this is by mixing up causation and correlation.

Causation and correlation are both extremely boring statistical words that underlie very simple concepts. Two events are correlated if they happen at the same place, or at the same time. For example, in children, shoe size is most likely correlated with the number of books they have read – older children have both read more books and have bigger feet. The two things do not cause each other but do happen at the same time. Causation, on the other hand, means that one of the two events is happening because of the other. For example, students who do better in exams also have a higher acceptance rate into college - because grades are one of the things that college considers when evaluating an applicant.

What do coffee, ayahuasca, and being ill do to our brains? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of April 9-15 2018 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

From South American psychedelic substances to coffee to sickness, many things in our world influence how we think and who we are. These and many other topics are among ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

This neutron star is glitching. Image credit:
NASA/CXC/University of Toronto/M. Durant, et al.

• Alien Signals We Discover Could Be The Echoes Of Dead Worlds by Brian Koberlein at Forbes
• Three years of staring lets scientists capture a neutron star “glitch” by John Timmer at Ars Technica
• Podcast of the week: Astrobiology and the Anthropocene by Alejandro Soto, Maeve Conran, Joel Parker and Adam Frank at How on Earth
• A quantum internet could revolutionise communication, computing and basic science, and it may be only 10 years away. But what is it? by Michael Lucy at Cosmos Magazine
• Caffeine causes widespread brain entropy (it's good, trust us we're scientists) by Christian Jarrett at British Psychological Society Research Digest
• Can Ayahuasca Prompt Neurogenesis? by Patrick Smith at The Psychedelic Scientist
• Why being sick can create anxiety at It Ain't Magic
• Drinking may have given me cancer. The alcohol industry has worked hard to bury the link by Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones
• The weekly alcohol limit still carries a risk of early death at New Scientist
• Hypothesized benefit from integrative treatments for veterans’ chronic pain fails to materialize by Jann Bellamy at Science-Based Medicine
• Engaging With Bad Science Episode 2 – What A Study Is And Why We Care by Gaia Cantelli
• Global warming may poison monarch butterflies, study finds by Morgan Erickson-Davis at  Mongabay
• The Hidden Coral Crisis: Loss of Fish Diversity After Bleaching Strikes by Todd Woody at Oceans Deeply
• Animal trainers are teaching wildlife to conserve themselves by Linda Lombardi at Mongabay
• A final dash across the United States: Updates from the 2018 March for Science at Science 
• Africa's unsung scientists finally get their own journal to spread research by Emmanuel Akinwotu at The Guardian
• 125-250 words, 15 minutes: Setting small writing goals to build an academic writing practice by Raul Pacheco-Vega

Check back next week for more great picks!