A little while ago I published a story on ABC Science Online about a study that claimed to find that, among other things, longer penises improved “vaginal orgasm consistency”. I followed that story up with a blog post that expanded on some possibly bogus aspects of the story and some political connections. That post finished with a note expressing my surprise that the story hadn’t been taken up by dodgy publications just running the sensational aspect of the story. I spoke too soon.
A bunch of Indian newspapers have rewritten my story with headlines like “Women’s ultimate fantasy: size not foreplay“. They’ve taken out almost all of the critical stuff and just run with the sensationalism. (Unsurprisingly, they’ve also just reused the quotes I got and, in some cases, messed them up.)
A website “YourTango” did a similar thing, as did PhysOrg.com. It’s bad enough writing a story just from a press-release, but these guys seem to not even have found the press release and have just sensationalised the story I wrote. It’s a shame, because there’s some interesting stuff in this story behind the headline.
The other day my friend came to me and said “Hey, do you know Mars will be the size of the moon tonight”. This person studies aerospace engineering. They had read it on a popular science blog written in Arabic.
This might be the first case of a spam text message becoming a science story.
That’s great! Let me know if you remember what the popular science blog was.
This is a test comment. I’m just testing out the new WYSIWYG comment editing system. Pretty cool, huh?
Right justified text.
A forumula and some bold, italic and underline.