William Heisel [pictured here] looks at some of the (much) more spectacular neat-and-tidy-science stories some people giddily hurl at the public:
What [are we to] make of the parade of scientific claims first marketed through magazine cover stories and PowerPoint talks as breakthroughs only to be proven with increasing regularity to be more fiction than fact? These are the Big Idea science stories that have everyone marveling and talking for days, weeks, years even, only to be deflated, sometimes by the same journalists who first inflated them.
Obesity is contagious! And so is divorce!
Kinda.
Rapid climate change over the next decade will have “deadly consequences for global food production“!
But maybe not.
Bread is really bad for you, so butter roast beef instead!
Or perhaps things are a bit more complicated….