There is a lot of good science out there and often I finish reading a paper feeling proud and impressed by what researchers have done. They can't all be winners though. I am currently involved in writing a review paper. For anyone not familiar with that terminology, a review paper covers a large swath of material within a sub-discipline. It's a little bit like a summary paper- it summarizes the work of a lot of people and (hopefully) puts all the research in perspective. A review paper, then, involves reading a LOT of other papers. My last review paper had a reference list that exceeded 20 typed pages.
For the current review that I am working on, I have already read roughly 40 papers. It can get a little (or a lot) tedious and is a type of work that I prefer breaking up into manageable chunks with time for "real" research activities in between each piece. Anyway, none of that is really important. When you read a lot of papers, you are bound to come up with a few that are not winners. I have been so amused by these that I decided to blog about them so that, hopefully, you can be amused by them too.
I'll leave any identifying information off of the blog. The works referenced below are not bad works. Sometimes in science, you have to prove something very obvious so that you can take that information and use it in a more in-depth study later on. I myself have had to write some obvious statements in papers because sometimes it is what is called for to prove your point. So, these are not bad works. The authors are not bad scientists. The science in their papers did move their respective fields forward. But WOW were there a few noteworthy, less-than-brilliant, conclusions in the bunch. So, without further ado, I present you the most winning science I've encountered recently.
More snow takes longer to melt.
Inter-tree distances increase following wildfires.
Just remember, you read these breaking, newsworthy assertions here first (probably, unless you've also read these remarkable pieces of human ingenuity).
