Information overload

One of my favorite cartoons, which I have pasted on my desktop computer, shows a man with a little beach pail standing on a beach while a huge wave (which looks like the woodcut "Great Wave Of Kanagawa" by Katsushika Hokusa) is about to break over him. The man is saying, "Eureka! More information."

(I can't show the cartoon here because it's copyrighted. I was going to link to the author Ted Goff's page, but he's apparently updating his website and the links don't work for now.)

This cartoon illustrates how I feel about science news these days. I get about 150 Eurekalert science press releases every day, as well as the tables of contents from a lot of journals. And it seems as if just as some fact is generally accepted, a paper comes out refuting that fact.

Also, science research is getting much more technical these days. Unless a study is commissioned by some commercial group like the the California Walnut Commission, which funds a lot of studies showing the health benefits of walnuts when some of those benefits might be found by eating similar nuts, people no longer tend to publish simple studies saying that factor X increases or decreases diabetes symptom Y. Instead the authors (often 20 or more) drill down to the molecular level and try to show that factor X increases or decreases the level of numerous cell factors that govern gene expression or hormone activity.

Unless the reader has a background in biochemistry or molecular biology, I figure the reader probably wouldn't understand these studies (sometimes I don't either), so there's no point in discussing them.

Also,  unless I think there's a major flaw in the evidence, I see no need to link to a study that has been picked up by all the news media, something like "Eating pickles and figs will make you lose 10 pounds in a week." You'll most likely see that study on the TV news anyway.

All this is a way of explaining why I'm not blogging much at the moment. But I haven't disappeared. I continue to try to keep up with new research developments, and when something both interesting and comprehensible by the average reader comes out, I'll let you know.

Hang in there. I'm trying to.