The relentless churn of the newsmedia juggernaut is so hungry for new material constantly, that a lot of stuff gets rushed to the headlines without the time to really let a story fill out enough to make its weaknesses and inconsistencies more clearly known. Lately, this is especially true with science news. Consider:
The media just about wet itself over the reports that a “Second Earth” had been discovered orbiting around a distant star called Gliese 581. The frenzy got even a little more carried away when one less-than-prudent astrophysicist asserted that he was 100% sure that there was life on Gliese 581g, based on absolutely ZERO evidence (which, I’ll give you, is usually enough for most Republicans anyway). Several weeks later, though, different data from a different team seemed to directly contradict that announcement, and it will take a couple of years to try to determine if there is really a planet there at all, or if Vogt’s team were simply trying to score some media attention ahead of a rival group.
Only a few weeks later, the same sort of thing was repeated when NASA staged a big press event, complete with mysterious pre-announcement about something big-BIG-BIG!!! that had a lot of people openly speculating that extraterrestrial life had been discovered or that an asteroid was about to kill us all, or that somebody caught Miley Cyrus smoking drugs or something. The big announcement wasn’t THAT big, but it was still a pretty interesting bit of news: a team of microbiologists announced that they had “discovered” a strain of bacteria that incorporated arsenic into their DNA. The inference was that this would have to change the way scientists defined “life” as they searched for it on other planets. This “breakthrough” didn’t even last long enough for the news cycle to forget about it, though. P.Z. Myers was all over it the very next day, as were a lot of other people, and now the lead researcher has been making mea culpas in public for letting the hype sell the story.
You probably also heard the breathless report about the man cured of AIDS via stem cell replacement therapy. This wasn’t even a new story, having been first reported as long ago as 2008, so it’s not clear to me why this suddenly got swept into the hype machine unless some lazy-ass reporter surfing Google found it and ran with it. Still, “A Cure For AIDS” is a helluva headline, and so there it went. This follow-up post at BoingBoing, though, includes the missing “rest of the story”: the “cure” was a complete one-off due to a combination of the patient’s own immune system having been destroyed by chemo/radiation treatment for leukemia, and the DNA of the bone marrow donor having a known genetic mutation that resists HIV.
Science is pretty damned amazing, but science reporting sure as hell isn’t.
Even if you live in an urban area where light pollution makes it hard to see the full glory of the night sky, most people can find the seven stars that make what we call “The Big Dipper” (or, as the French so aptly call it, “La Casserole” — “the saucepan”). Polaris, the North Star, is the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere, and very easily located, and the other six stars are also big, bright objects. Two of the stars, Alcor and Mizar, were found to be a binary pair many years ago, but more recent observations have now determined that there are additional stars gravitationally bound to them, creating 
At the opposite end of things, researchers at UMass Amherst are working on building a microscope that 
