Some star psychologists don’t disclose in research papers the large sums they earn for talking about their work. Is that a concern?

Read more here.

There’s no evidence that social media is to blame for an increase in teen deaths

There’s this trick that climate deniers used to use. They used to say “there’s been no warming since 1998”. And in a weird way they were right: looking at global atmospheric surface temperatures, none of the years that followed was as hot as 1998.

But they were cheating. They picked 1998 deliberately since it was an outlier – an El Niño year much hotter than the years around it. If you were, on the other hand, to measure from 1997 or 1999, then there were lots of much hotter years on record; and the clear trend was that later years, on average, were hotter than earlier ones. It was a wobbly, noisy line, with some outliers, but the average temperature really was going up, and the only way you could hide that trend was by cherry-picking statistics.

I was thinking about this as I read the Sunday Times splash this week, which (using as-yet unavailable data from the Office for National Statistics) claimed that the “suicide rate among teenagers has nearly doubled in eight years”. It expressed concerns that we are raising “a suicidal generation”.

Read the rest here.

The decision to legalize cannabis in Canada could be seen as a hippyish, free love move by aging potheads.

But — counterintuitively — it is better understood as a hardheaded, evidence-led attempt to protect children from the undoubted dangers of drug use.

Read the rest here.

New biomedical techniques, like next-generation genome sequencing, are creating vast amounts of data and transforming the scientific landscape. They’re leading to unimaginable breakthroughs – but leaving researchers racing to keep up.

Read more here.

Sure, the Remain-Leave argument can get pretty angry. The rows between Labour and Conservatives, too, and the respective supporters of Israel and Palestine. But the deadliest and most intractable fight of all is between people online and their completely made-up imaginary opponents.

Read the rest here.

I’m the science editor at UnHerd.com; I also do freelance science writing. Until January 2018 I was science writer for BuzzFeed UK; before that, I was a comment and features writer for the Telegraph, having joined in 2007. My second book, How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Stats in the News  (and Knowing When to Trust Them) was published in 2021; my first book, The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity’s Future, was published in 2019. I’ve written for the Times, the i, the Telegraph, the Observer, the Guardian, politics.co.uk, New Scientist, CNN, Wired, Smithsonian Air & Space, and elsewhere.

I’ve won several awards, including the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism (twice, in 2018 and 2020) and the Association of British Science Writers’ science journalist of the year (in 2021). My first book was one of the Times’s science books of the year.

Contact me via Twitter or by email.

Below, I’ve added a few links to some of my favourite things that I’ve done over the years.

The header pic is the Cassini space probe’s final image of Saturn, because Cassini is the best space thing.

It is tempting to describe the government’s approach to cannabis as a spectacular failure. But that would be untrue: the government’s approach cannot fail, because the government has no approach. It has no goals, it has no aims, it has no policies.

Read the rest here.

December 2017:

A recent scientific trial has led to acrimonious debates over chronic fatigue syndrome, aka ME, and boosted interest in a secretive therapy that some call a “cult” and others call a “miracle”.

Read the rest here.

After 20 years in space, some amazing science, and some unbelievable images, the Cassini-Huygens mission finally came to an end. We asked two of the scientists who worked on it what the mission meant to them.

Read more here.

August 2017:

Analysis by BuzzFeed News found that more than half of the most-shared scientific stories about autism published in the last five years promote unevidenced or disproven treatments, or purported causes.

Read the rest here.