Some doctors are using practices that don’t work
The news last fall that stents inserted in patients with heart disease to keep arteries open work no better than a placebo ought to be shocking. Each year, hundreds of thousands of American patients receive stents for the relief of chest pain, and the cost of the procedure ranges from $11,000 to $41,000 in US…
Fake news always propogates faster than the truth
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds:…
A great roundup of education research from 2016
In 2016, we learned more about how teachers feel about their profession, from the reasons why they started teaching in the first place (#1) to why they leave (#6). We learned that science students do better when teachers share stories about the struggles scientists face instead of portraying them as geniuses (#3). We’re also learning…
Poverty’s affect different in the US vs other developed nations
Poverty stunts IQ in the US but not in other developed countries In a new meta-analysis of 14 psychology studies from the past few decades, researchers found that the strength of poverty’s pull differed by country, with US poverty providing the only forceful yank among developed nations. The authors, who published the results in Psychological…