Despite creative efforts to tackle it, belief in conspiracy theories, alternative facts and fake news show no sign of abating. This is clearly a huge problem, as seen when it comes to climate change, vaccines and expertise in general – with anti-scientific attitudes increasingly influencing politics. So why can’t we stop such views from spreading? […]
Scientific disinformation about climate change is having a great impact especially in countries like the United States (USA). Misinformation about this topic and about scientific issues in general, not only confuses the population and discredits scientific findings but also paralyzes evidence-based policies. Farrell et al (2019) provide a series of examples and strategies that can […]
Aristotle defined (fair) outrage as the pain that is experienced due to the fortune of someone who does not deserve it and he outlines that a man who is only rightly outraged is worth praising . However, if he described this outrage as fair does it mean there is another one that is unjust? In […]
Technology by itself is not good or bad but it can be given good or bad uses and everything depends on the decisions made by the people who use it. One of the good uses of social networks is what some scientists are doing to create academic networks outside of their work, as well as […]
The article Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate , published in 2018 , affirms that, despite the great potential of social networks to disseminate objective information, they are often abused in order to disseminate content that may harm health. A direct consequence of the exposure of social network users […]
According to the results of the article The spread of true and false news online , which analyzed the posts on Twitter of 3 million people between 2006 and 2017, false news spread on the network faster than the true ones and they have a greater impact. Although many of us know how Twitter works […]
I’m a man slowly sliding into the old age. Being a scientist (a simple science worker), this means that for decades I’ve become familiar with the uncomfortable feeling of struggling to adapt to a constant, quick change of everything. In the very beginning of my career, still an undergrad, I joined a lab where my […]
If there is one worrisome fact about science here and now, it is this: the possibility that a huge amount of publications is to be retracted due to falsified or duplicated data. The phenomenon is not new, there have been more than a few reports sounding the alarm on precisely this problem, and there is […]
Juvenile delinquency is a serious and common problem but not hopeless: it has been on the decline for a number of years, yet, juvenile courts continue to assess millions of cases per year. There are times when this subject seems hopeless such as when we read about a horrendous crime committed by a minor. The […]
Researchers do not know what influences have the stereotypical images of scientists, if any, on children’s perception of science. The most common technique for assessing children’s perceptions of scientists is the Draw-a-Scientist Test (DAST). David Wade Chambers firstly proposed it in 1983 , and its main aim was to identify at what age the stereotypic […]