Five tips on using science to live a better, healthier life

Image credit Thomas_H_photo, used via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0 licence

by Gaia Cantelli, PhD

You have just woken up. You check your phone and have a look at the news. What do you see? Most days, a key headline will have something to do with science – and with good reason. We live in what many consider a golden age of discovery. Science is making advances we never thought possible and is helping us work out problems we never thought could be solved. We can look for water in outer space, use light-activated nanoparticles to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria and use drugs to correct errors in our DNA to fend off deadly genetic diseases.

However, that’s only one side of the coin. At least half of the science news seems to be urgently pointing at a new problem. Just over the past few weeks, even the most casual news-readers could have found themselves worrying about involuntarily increasing their risk of getting breast or lung cancer by doing apparently healthy things like going outside and taking vitamins. You may have been stressing about compromising your heart’s health by sitting too much or being too tall. And that’s before you’ve even gotten out of bed!

So how can you use science to make more informed decisions? Here are a few pointers to empower you to make a change.

Why Mexico had quakes, diet & inflammation, & virus-laden semen, in our September 18-24 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• What’s going on beneath Mexico? by Daniel García at Mapping Ignorance 
• Why the Mexico City Earthquake Shook Up Disaster Predictions by Eric Vance at Scientific American
• Can your diet reduce inflammation? by Richard V. Miller at The Biochemist
• Podcast of the week: Why Do Dinosaurs Matter? by Katie Hiler at Science Friday
• Human semen can host up to 27 different viruses by Karl Gruber at Science Magazine
• This Is Why Science Loves Twins by Jeffrey and Thomas Delviscio at Stat News
• As care shifts from hospital to home, families try to guard against infection by Melissa Bailey at STAT News 
• The Hydrogen Bomb: Future of Atomic Bombs by Ninad Kumbhojkar at Perk Science
• The Influence of Animal Age in Behavioral Testing at Maze Engineers
• A TSP Breakthrough by Dick Lipton at Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP 

Check back next week for more great picks!

What's in our tap water and babies' teething tablets? Find out in our September 11-17 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• Cassini's Grand Finale by Lee Billings and Mike Lemonick at Scientific American
• Last Days of Cassini: An Insider's Story by Corey S Powell at Out There
• It's Time for a 21st Century Hurricane Scale by Dan Satterfield at Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal 
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the Natural History Museum

Great photography via Natural History Museum

• The Plan to Clone an Extinct Horse by Stacey McKenna at Hakai Magazine
• Renewable energy flooring takes a step forward at Union South by Will Cushman at University of Wisconsin-Madison
• If NYC subways obeyed quantum maths trains wouldn’t be delayed by Mark Kim at New Scientist
• If you're drinking tap water, you're consuming plastic pollutants by Dan Morrison and Christopher Tyree at PRI
• Flu vaccine causes miscarriages – the real evidence says otherwise at Skeptical Raptor 
• Warning Letter of the Week: poisoning infants edition at Chemjobber
• The Terrifying Physics Of How Wildfires Spread So Fast by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang!
• Solidarity in Sobriety by C Mellor at Science For The Common Man 
• Good as Gold by Sonia Fernandez at The University of Santa Barbara Current
• What currently widely-accepted scientific practices will someday be seen as unethical? by Jeremy Fox at Dynamic Ecology
• Math: Still Not Everywhere by Michael J. Barany at mathbabe
• Putting a price tag on the flood-reducing value of wetlands by Brandon Keim at Anthropocene

Check back next week for more great picks!

Do your research! Six ways to find science you can trust online

by Gaia Cantelli, PhD

Credit: Tim Abbott, used via CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 License

If you wanted to know more about a medical condition would you take a trip to the library and pore over medical textbooks? Of course not, you’d look it up on your phone while you’re still in your doctor’s waiting room.

Looking up things online is essentially second nature for most of us – but do you ever worry if you can trust what you find? Most of us get all our information from the Internet – and science and medicine have been made far more accessible by the Internet and mobile phones. It’s incredibly convenient, but it is also a minefield of potential misinformation, misunderstanding and, even worse, fraud. How can we know if we can trust what we see online? Here are some of my best pointers to use this amazing resource to obtain reliable and relevant information – especially when it comes to science and medicine.

Warming & hurricanes; gluten-free diet & diabetes; testosterone & poor choices: Sept. 4-10 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

The September 6 Solar Flare Credit: NASA/GODDARD/SDO

• What We Know about the Climate Change–Hurricane Connection by By Michael E. Mann, Thomas C. Peterson and Susan Joy Hassol at Scientific American
• How Hurricane Harvey’s Record-Setting Rainfall Happened by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang!
• Denying Hurricane Harvey’s climate links only worsens future suffering by Dana Nuccitelli at Skeptical Science
• What hurricane categories mean and why we use them by Mary Beth Griggs at Ars Technica
• Lessons from Germany’s transition from coal to renewable energy by Emma Bryce at Ensia
• The sun just belched out the strongest solar flare in 12 years by Leah Crane at New Scientist
• Solar flares via Cosmos
• Experiment reveals evidence for a previously unseen behaviour of light by Jon Butterworth at Life and Physics
• A Personal Voyage with Voyager by C. C. Petersen at The Spacewriter's Ramblings
• Massive genetic study shows how humans are evolving by Bruno Martin at Nature
• The lonely walk to extinction by Jan Freedman at Twilight Beasts
• How short-term increases in testosterone change men’s thinking style by Emma Young at British Psychological Society Research Digest
• Anxiety may alter processing of emotions in people with autism by Jessica Wright at Spectrum
• Low gluten diet – evidence of link to type 2 diabetes at The Skeptical Raptor
• Black Salve BS by Kat Day at The Chronicle Flask
• The stories behind a CV by Wei Ji Ma at Science
• Condemning Predatory Journals/Publishers: Nature by Pranab Chatterjee at Scepticemia
• Dr. Sims built a lab and experimented on enslaved women. Take down his statues by Dr Jen Gunter 
• Mutación Responsable de Enfermedad Cardiaca Podría Quedar en el Pasado gracias a la Ingeniera Genética en Embriones Humanos por Attabey Rodríguez Benítez at En Arroz Y Habichuelas

Check back next week for more great picks!

Find out vital info about hurricanes, nukes, cancer and more in our August 28-September 3 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• Ten Surprises For Scientists And Skywatchers During The Total Solar Eclipse and Science knows if a nation is testing nuclear bombs by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang! 
• Don't Use Hair Conditioner In A Nuclear Blast by Trina Espinoza at Ms. Beautyphile

• America approves ‘revolutionary’ CAR T cell immunotherapy — what does this mean for cancer patients? by Claire Hastings at Institute of Cancer Research 
• This 1,000-year-old oak tree survived Hurricane Harvey by Ellen Airhart at Popular Science 
• Perspective: What's the Risk of an Outbreak After a Flood? at Infective Perspective 
• Were Ancient Humans Healthier Than Us? by Ricki Lewis at DNA Science Blog 
• Memo To White Nationalists From A Geneticist: Why White Purity Is A Terrible Idea by Ricki Lewis at Science Trends 
• For politicians, the more data, the more they ignore by Scott K Johnson at Ars Technica 
• How biotechnology is making farming more sustainable by Randy Krotz at Genetic Literacy Project 
• Missing symbionts: do some animals lack resident gut microbiomes? by Elin Videvall at The Molecular Ecologist 
• Podcast of the week: Microbiome Research – Opportunity or Over-hype? with Anand Jagatia, Benjamin Thompson, Julian Marchesi, Jim Prosser, Lindsay Hall and Thorunn Helgason at The Microbiology Society 
• Eating Triggers Release of Endogenous Opioids in Human Brain, Study Reveals at Sci News 
• The concept of schizophrenia is coming to an end – here’s why by Simon McCarthy-Jones at The Conversation 
• The brain’s wiring as you've never seen it before via Cosmos Magazine


Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre – Diffusion of Axons from cscweb on Vimeo.
• Which encoding mechanism is best for Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean? by Cherrie Kwok at NYU Center for Data Science 

Check back next week for more great picks!