In the Guardian, Stephen Curry writes about how a new analysis of the structure of DNA using electron microscopy was mis-reported and distorted by various online publications. (HT: @nostrich)

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop

    I don’t think we can blame nature for this one.

  • Toni Badora

    To an idiot, everyone else is stupid.
    Here the idiot is the scientist(s) and everyone else is nature.

  • http://profiles.google.com/steve.nordquist Steve Nordquist

    In other news, you can be less than brilliant and thorough in cracking out and choosing images for your online abstract, but still get a) Superhydrophobic (esp. once dessicated) DNA to sort of clot nicely for TEM analysis, and b) published in Nature, but not c) collateral press w/o new matter. Keep bringing it, All-Italian Muggles.

  • Pete Austin

    The real problem is that a pay wall stops journalists from doing this checking. I expect the “various online publications” saw the same message as I do, “Your current credentials do not allow retrieval of the full text … Purchase the full text”. It’s a bit unfair to criticize them for getting things wrong, when the authors have seemingly not made the facts available.
    http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl3039162