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Science recently published the largest cluster-randomized trial to date on face coverings, a massive study that the science community had been calling for since the start of the pandemic.As the fear of Covid wanes with its news coverage, one of the remaining vestiges of the narrative involves face coverings. The premier journal Science recently published the largest cluster-randomized trial to date on masks, a massive study that the science community had been calling for since the start of the pandemic. This study divided rural villages in Bangladesh into those encouraged to wear either medical or cloth masks, or no mask....

Stanford professor David Rosenhan wanted to prove that psychiatric hospitals of his day would instantly label and mistreat even the mildest of symptoms, so he convinced a group of students to go undercover at various hospitals and then wrote an influential study about the results. Rosenhan’s paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places” was published in the journal Science in 1973 and had a big impact at the time. Rosenhan’s eight healthy pseudopatients allegedly each followed the same script to gain admittance to psychiatric hospitals around the country. They each told doctors that they heard voices that said, “Thud, empty,...

Washington (AFP) - A few years ago, two researchers took the 50 most-used ingredients in a cook book and studied how many had been linked with a cancer risk or benefit, based on a variety of studies published in scientific journals. The result? Forty out of 50, including salt, flour, parsley and sugar. "Is everything we eat associated with cancer?" the researchers wondered in a 2013 article based on their findings. Their investigation touched on a known but persistent problem in the research world: too few studies have large enough samples to support generalized conclusions. But pressure on researchers, competition...

In science, research must prove that what we suspect to be the case is actually true. But some studies really take the cake in the no-duh department. Here are some findings from this year that should come as absolutely no surprise.