The online world is, of course, full of crap that sometimes
seems destined to drown out real information. "Natural News" may be
the worst of the worst: nothing in it is news and very little is nature, unless
you count human nature (grasping for money). From a source I'm always happy to recommend, Sharon Hill's' DoubtfulNews, comes another example - not as bad as Natural News, but concerning. Sharon writes, "Mother Nature Network
(MNN)...is a site that takes real science stories and rewrites them, getting
them wrong in the process." Case in point: no, there is no river of molten
iron flowing from Russia to Canada that's about to flip the Earth's poles.
There's a really interesting science story buried in here, related to a real
paper about magnetic anatomies indicating real movements of Earth's
not-so-solid innards, but Ms. Hill, a geologist, notes this is part of a trend
of simplifying and torqueing science into clickbait.
When I have time to try to catch up on science online, I usually
read the breezy LiveScience and the more technical Science Daily and the BBC for a broad range of headlines and stories, Scientific American, the New York Times, Nat Geo, and Smithsonian for
depth, NOAA.gov and NASA.gov, and a handful of others. There are many more good
sites, but there are an increasing number of bad ones: do your research and
pick the ones in your area of interest that you can consistently trust!
No comments:
Post a Comment