The Ed's Up #98
How Reliable Are Psychology Studies?
My first piece in my new job at The Atlantic! No one is entirely clear on how Brian Nosek pulled it off, including Nosek himself. Over the last three years, the psychologist from the University of Virginia persuaded some 270 of his peers to channel their free time into repeating 100 published psychological experiments to see if they could get the same results a second time around. There would be no glory, no empirical eurekas, no breaking of fresh ground. Instead, this initiative—the Reproducibility Project—would be the first big systematic attempt to answer questions that have been vexing psychologists for years, if not decades. What proportion of results in their field are reliable? (Image: Lali Masriera)
The Bacteria That Turn Amoebas Into Farmers
Most people think of bacteria as germs, signs of filth, or unwanted bringers of disease. Slowly, that view is changing. It is now abundantly clear that the bacteria that live on the bodies of other creatures help their hosts by digesting food, providing nutrients, protecting against disease, detoxifying poisons, slaughtering prey, and even creating light. The list of surprising abilities is extensive, and just when you think it might run out, someone comes along and shows that bacteria can turn amoebas into farmers. (Image: Scott Solomon)
More good reads
- Read the New Yorker's devastating Hiroshima story from 1946, of six ordinary lives, brutally interrupted.
- Here's David Attenborough saying a blue whale's heart is the size of a car. Which is not true.
- Aatish Bhatia and Robert Krulwich have started a new blog together. It’s called Noticing. It’ll be great.
- Talking on the phone stopped being enjoyable because the experience of talking on the phone fundamentally changed. By Ian Bogost.
- There's a version of Turkish in which all the syllables have been converted into piercing whistles. By Michelle Nijhuis.
- Torture doesn't work; so, what does? Peter Aldhous a fascinating look at the science of interrogation.
- A story about corn wars between the USA and China, featuring spies smuggling corn kernels
- Christie Aschwanden synthesises the ongoing fraud and irreproducibility crises in science.
- Sandcastles built as if “Antoni Gaudi had designed the fictional island of Laputa in a dream." By Adrienne LaFrance
- How Big Pharma used feminism to get the “Female Viagra” approved. Great story by Azeen Ghorayshi. Meanwhile, Jen Gunter reports that the safety of this women-only drug was based on tests of 23 men and 2 women.
- Emily Willingham reviews Steve Silberman’s new book Neurotribes, about “a haunting history and new hope for autistic people”.
- What goes through the minds of people who try to break obscure world records? Cari Romm considers.
More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.
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And that's it! Thanks for reading.
-Ed