In September 2008, Forbes science editor Matthew Herper and former Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss appeared together on a panel at the World Stem Cell Summit in Madison, Wisconsin. In late February, Herper received an invitation to ‘friend’ Weiss on the Internet social-networking site Facebook. On the basis of their acquaintance, Herper accepted, noticing that a number of other people involved with stem cells were listed as friends on Weiss’s profile. However, that profile — and many of those it was linked to — was a fake. Continue reading Fake Facebook pages spin web of deceit
Category Archives: Nature
Nature Internship 3: Podcasting & more
Victor Hess first discovered cosmic rays using a Geiger counter and a hot air balloon in 1911. Today physicists are using hundreds of giant water tanks scattered across the Argentine pampas to try to figure out where the mysterious particles come from, I learned in an interview for this week’s Nature’s podcast. Here’s the podcast [mp3], or see a transcript [html].
I also wrote a news story this week about an experiment in which writing short essays about their personal values helped low-performing African-Americans to improve their performance and attitudes towards school for the next two years. And I blogged about claims that genetically-modified crops do not actually improve yields, the first images taken by the planet-hunting space telescope Kepler, and new satellite imagery of the effects of the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy earlier this month.
Writing about values shrinks racial grades gap
African-American school students asked to write about their personal values for fifteen minutes at the start of the school year earn higher grades for up to two years afterwards.
The work is a follow-up to a 2006 study in which students were asked to rank the importance of values such as religion, relationships and art and describe what the top value or values meant to them. The intervention reduced the achievement gap between African-American and European-American students by 40%. Low-achieving African-Americans benefited most, getting better grades than students in a control group who were asked to write about why the values they ranked lowest might matter to someone else.
Read the rest of this news story at Nature News [html] or here [pdf]
Nature Internship 2: More than a silver lining
In my second week at Nature I’ve gotten to feel more like a member of the team, if being asked to write more and more is any measure. I’ve contributed more to news meetings, talked with my colleagues about their backgrounds and journalism plans over lunch, and begun working on an unusual feature slated to appear soon…but which will have to remain a mystery for now.
I wrote a news story about how clouds actually make the air around them brighter, a story that made made me feel better about living in Britain. I also wrote about a study in which economists were surprised to find that hormone treatment did not have an effect on how the women made economic decisions–something that recent reports hinted did happen in men.
The countries that run Antarctica are having their annual meeting in Baltimore, so I blogged about how US delegates are pushing for mandatory tourism limits. Finally, I summarized a report from entomologists who used a butterfly family tree to bolster a theory that butterflies use eyespot patterns on some parts of their wings to attract mates and patterns on other parts of their wings as camouflage from predators: [pdf].