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Comment by digitalengineer | Hacker News Reader

"A number of studies have hinted..."

"The scientists were unable to directly examine the 28S RNA fragments in action, so they can’t say for sure that splitting 28S in two is the reason for the accuracy of naked mole rat proteins."

Right. So the entie article is nothing more than bs. Thank you for the book-tip, HN: "Bad Science", Chapter 11: How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science "The dumbing-down of science to produce easily assimilated wacky, breakthrough or scare stories... The relative scarcity of sensational medical breakthroughs since a golden age of discovery between 1935 and 1975, is seen as motivating the production of dumbed-down stories which trumpet unpublished research and ill-founded speculation. "

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I used to get upset about these things, but nowadays if a writeup of a paper bothers me or sounds weird, i just go to the original publication. This might be hard if you're not at a university or otherwise have access to the journals.

In this case i don't see anything particularly wrong. Just reading the abstract would tell you enough (linked from the article):

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/25/1313473110

The paper reports that the 28S RNA is split and that the ribosomes seem to be better at avoiding mistakes whilst keeping the same translation speed, and the authors speculate if these two things could be linked. And that's the gist from the Nat. Geo. article, too.

Thank's for the reply. I'm currently reading 'Bad Science', After someone mentioned it here on HN. Perhaps I'm now in a 'too sceptical' mood. My apolegies to the author ;-)

I'd rather have public misunderstanding of aspects of science than have a deep public mistrust of science, which is the only thing that comments like yours create.

We need more of the public engaged with science and we need a wider appreciation of its value. Misunderstandings can be corrected over time.

Pleger read my comment "The dumbing-down of science to produce easily assimilated wacky, breakthrough or scare stories.."

As mohawk says, the content of the summary article fairly clearly reflects the gist of the publication. It was exploratory work, they think that that's the key factor but aren't sure.

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