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According to the NHS (http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vitamins-minerals/Pages/Vitamin...), 1000mg is the typical cut-off for where vitamin C becomes toxic (which is dramatically higher than the 40mg a day most people actually need).

They also have a history of supporting dangerous and unscientific prevention/"treatments" for autism, including promoting anti-vaccine nonsense (http://autisticadvocacy.org/2014/01/2013-joint-letter-to-the...).

But the weird part is that there isn't a Halo character called Asimov. The author's own potholed link to the Halo wikia just shows an "Asimov Center" as a briefly mentioned location in one short story. And even the tiny article for it takes time to explain who it was named after.

Linking the name "Asimov" with the Halo games seems to be a bizarre speculation/research failure on her part, as far as I can tell.

What a bizarre connection to make. Maybe I'm out-of-date on my Halo lore but I don't think there's even anyone/thing significant in that universe named after him. Indeed, the search on the Halo wiki she links only reveals an "Asimov Centre" briefly mentioned in one short story and a quarter of the tiny article is a sentence explaining who Isaac Asimov was.

I recall the Game Boy Colour doing something similar, though it apparently had its own system - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Color#Color_palettes_u....

And now I'm trying to remember what the Game Boy Tower in Pokemon Stadium made the games look like...

I was about to correct you and say that was Bertrand Russell but apparently it was neither of them - http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/11/time-you-enjoy/.

The hormone levels are unlikely to be affected by cultural biases but that's not the potential weakness I'm talking about in these studies. It's during the observation, through the eyes of the parents and scientists, of what toys the children are playing with where expectations can affect the results. On top of that, you've got biases affecting what studies get published and which of those then make headlines and get repeated in blog posts like this one.

It's briefly mentioned in the article as a possible indicator of toy preference because it correlates well with hormone levels. It clearly wasn't what the research, the discussion, or any of my comments were focusing on.

"This kind" being the research we've been discussing, which is about socialisation and toy preference. Finger length and other easily-measured physical differences haven't been part of it.

It couldn't. And I don't recall ever saying it could so I really don't see what you're getting at here.

I never said it could. It's just something that has to be very well controlled for and this article showed nothing to suggest it was in the studies it sort of cited.

It's entirely possible that the results in those studies you provided are solid. I don't know, I don't have the expertise or the access to go through them thoroughly, let alone run a replication. I would just urge everyone here to keep in mind that, as pointed out very well in aestra's comment above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7213317), this kind of research is subject to heavy cultural biases, both through the parents and experiments and through poor science reporting in the media.

And, even if it weren't, this Live Science linkbait blog post, the one rapidly climbing the front page of Hacker News with the sensationalist headline, is still uncited bollocks.

The disguised gender experiment reminds me of similar ones into whether or not sugar makes children "hyper". It turns out that if you tell parents that their children have had sugar, they're much more likely to describe the kids' behaviour as unruly or hyperactive, even if the kids haven't been given anything at all (http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4142 - the Skeptoid article provides a nice summary and cites a few studies).

The fact is, the human brain isn't anywhere near the objective, rational computer and recorder it likes to think of itself as. We project our expectations on to everything we see, from the facial expressions of a monkey to random clumps of noise in datasets and it's important to keep that in mind whenever you read articles like this one. The information presented in a typical piece of science news has gone through the mental filters of researchers, university PR departments, editors, and a writer before you even start interpreting the first word. Even if every person at every step understands what they're doing and has the best intentions (and isn't, for example, deliberately twisting facts to fit their linkbait article for a pop science blog), that's a lot of room for a convenient narrative to obscure the basic, potentially important facts.

Can you show me some of these studies? I just pointed out the problematic lack of citations in the article and your dismissive comment alone isn't going to change my mind. If there's solid evidence one way or the other, I'd be genuinely interested to see it.

And even if they do happen to agree with actual good science, the few studies presented here still don't "explain" anything and this Live Science post is decidedly shonky science reporting (and calling it that is frankly generous).

I'm calling bullshit on the title (which, in the hopefully likely event it gets changed, is currently "Hormones Explain Why Girls Like Dolls and Boys Like Trucks"). One study showing a correlation might suggest something worth looking into further but it hardly "explains" anything.

The results with the monkeys are interesting, if both the research and the reporting of it are accurate. However, animal models, while certainly useful indicators, are still just animal models and can't say anything definitive about human biology and psychology.

And as for those studies on young children, it's a mistake to think that just because a child is only a few months old they haven't been exposed to enough cultural influence to skew what they prefer to look at. If just a few of those parents have put a football mobile above their baby boy's cot or decorated their little girl's room with Disney princess wallpaper, that familiarity could easily explain the results.

Do biological differences exist between genders? Absolutely. Are some of those differences driven by ancient evolutionary pressure rather than modern culture? It's a reasonable hypothesis, worth investigating. Have those differences now been explained by a single factor and a few small studies, half of which were on monkeys, and do they just happen to line up with traditional gender stereotypes? You'll have to do a lot better than a Live Science blog that cites nothing but other Live Science blogs to convince me of that.

EDIT: Well, at least the title was changed to better fit the article, even if it still doesn't line up with the actual science.

For any field, there's always some basic knowledge that anyone studying or practicing it simply has to have if they're going to be at all effective. A well-written test should be checking that the students have acquired that knowledge (which can be much of the course content) and can apply it appropriately to problems.

Anyone with an internet connection can easily find out, for example, how to add together two ints in Java. But if someone took an introductory Java course and couldn't do that at the end of it, then they don't deserve to pass because they've clearly not learned what they were supposed to. If they were actually trying to program something and had to look up basics like that every time they used them, they would be so slow as to be completely useless. Or consider someone with a more time-critical job like a surgeon - they can do specific research beforehand but some level of knowledge (surgical techniques, how to use their tools, anatomy, etc.) is simply going to have to be in their head at the moment they need it or their patient could die.

Also, phones and internet access don't just provide knowledge, they're a way to communicate with everyone else in the room. If you want to see if any particular person has actually learned the material, you obviously can't allow that.

Just because someone was wrong about the Wright brothers a century ago doesn't mean that someone else is wrong about something completely different today. Carl Sagan said it best:

"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Just considering the possibility isn't too conspiracy theory-ish, but considering it based solely on a single anecdote that could have alternate reasonable explanations (for example, a guard actually was near the car and they just didn't notice) is a little ridiculous, especially when there clearly is a serious issue to be discussed here.

The article only touches on it briefly but I think the difference between most issues and the few "gold-plated issues with megawatt cultural significance" is key. People saw Actions Comics #1 and Amazing Fantasy #15 selling for huge amounts and got the idea that #1 issues and first appearances were somehow inherently worth a lot of money, when in fact it's the cultural importance of Superman and Spider-Man that gave them their value.

Even if there weren't a million bagged-and-boarded copies of Rob Liefeld's Bludd Gunn McShootDeath and the X-Murder Y-Bunch #0.5 sitting in people's basements, it still wouldn't be worth anything because hardly anybody cares about those characters. Even classic runs from the 80s and 90s (Walt Simonson's Thor, Morrison's JLA, Sandman, etc.) haven't had anything like the cultural impact and recognition that major Golden and Silver Age titles did outside of comic circles.

What do you mean by "outdated"? Scientific theories don't go off with age, they depend on evidence and the scientific evidence continues to point to evolution as the best theory. Modern biology might be more advanced than it was in Darwin's day but nothing's disproved the fundamental ideas. That's like saying that the discovery of the Higgs boson makes the Earth orbiting the Sun obsolete.

And as for your second point, it's true. God could use evolution as a tool. God could hide fossils as a joke. God could just be having fun by letting us build up our quaint little theory of evolution before suddenly dumping a herd of unicorns in the savannah. God could, if he existed, do pretty much anything for any reason completely incomprehensible to us. And that's precisely where creationism falls down as a scientific theory - any flaw is just covered by "maybe God did it just because" and it can't be disproved.

Most of the issues with the experiment were identified by other scientists, not the ones involved in the study. That's probably why it was never released in any reputable journal - the study design wouldn't pass peer review. Incidentally, releasing your results to the press before you've published academically is also a fairly reliable warning sign of pseudoscience.

When the entire experiment is based around constantly monitoring someone, any time where you can't see them is a pretty serious flaw in the experiment design. Even if he was only out of view for a few seconds (and I wouldn't mind a source for that), that's all it would take to drink some gargling/bathing water or quickly have a snack that some devotee left hidden.

Smart people can certainly be wrong and often have been. Sometimes due to their own preexisting beliefs and prejudices, sometimes because they were limited by the knowledge and technology of their time, and sometimes even because they're being deliberately deceived and their particularly expertise isn't suited to catching it (I cited Project Alpha in a comment below and there are many other examples).

The key thing about science, and remember that organised science is a relatively new idea in the span of human history and one that's made tremendous advances possible in a short time, is that it's about a consensus backed up by the evidence, not any single scientist's opinion. Sure, sometimes one scientist or a small team will come up with a radically new opinion in some field. When their evidence is examined and their experiments repeated by their peers, sometimes they're a Gallileo. More often they're a Pons and Fleischmann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Fleischmann.E2.80.9...). But if, and quite rightly only if, they've got good evidence and a theory that fits the facts better than any other, the consensus will shift.

It's not about cynicism, it's about rationality and skepticism. As the old saying goes, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.

India on the whole has a lot of trouble with this sort of thing. One of the skeptics who criticised the Prahlad Jani experiments, Sanal Edamaraku (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanal_Edamaruku), had to leave the country to avoid arrest under outdated blasphemy laws for pointing out that the supposedly miraculous tears of a statue of Jesus were actually from a leaking sewage pipe. More recently, another noted skeptic, Narendra Dabholkar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Dabholkar), was shot dead shortly after making significant progress towards outlawing some very lucrative "mystical" practices.

And a large, well-funded project doesn't guarantee reliability. Science involves a certain amount of trust of your peers and scientists studying these claimed phenomena often miss tricks by the participants that someone trained in deception wouldn't (there's a reason so many skeptics and "debunkers" are magicians by training). Look at Project Alpha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha) - a couple of amateur street magicians were able to make a whole department of researchers believe they had psychic powers for years without even being challenged.

When it comes down to it, science is about evidence. That's why scientists were able to overturn ideas like geocentrism - they examined them and they didn't fit with the evidence, so they had to go. Theories that had seemed "impossible" to some (certainly not all) people before them, like the Earth going round the Sun, did fit the evidence when scientifically examined and they became the accepted scientific consensus (to cut a long story short).

Scientists dismissing these studies aren't doing so based just "on their own observations". There's a very solid base of scientific, verifiable evidence that says that people need to eat. I don't think it's overly cynical to say that a couple of flaky studies should do little to change anyone's mind.

That's probably the one I was thinking of when I mentioned people going without water being allowed to bathe. There's quite a few red flags there - just one researcher doing the experiments (despite offers from other teams and noted skeptics like Sanal Edamaraku to investigate), the research never being published in a journal, the fact that he noticeably lost weight over just ten days, the CCTV coverage being incomplete... The "Reactions" section of the article covers a lot of them, enough to say that the studies are pretty much worthless.

In a case like this, it's up to the ones making the extraordinary claim to provide the evidence, not up to anyone else to debunk it.

I found this article - http://tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com/2010/07/02/the-end-of-... - which mentions some other cases and claims that Paul Kern didn't sleep... but did close his eyes and rest for a couple of hours each day. The whole thing's setting off some skeptical alarms in my head. I think it's pretty telling that all but one of the examples are unverified and from before 1950, when things like EEGs weren't available to verify if someone was sleeping or "just resting their eyes". The only modern case was followed for just four days, which is a long time to go without sleep but certainly not impossible.

It reminds me of credulous studies of people who claim they don't need to eat and drink, surviving off sunlight or air or something mystical. Dig into them a little and you invariably find that they were only monitored for a few days or they were left alone to bathe or pray or whatever else provided some gap where they could go and get food.

EDIT: Did a little more research and I came across a possible explanation that does seem to have some decent scientific studies to back it up (more than any of the non-sleeping examples, at least). "Sleep state misperception" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_state_misperception), where a patient doesn't think they've slept much or at all, even though they actually have.

The bomb detectors (if it passed through any) were more likely trying to detect actual chemical signatures of explosives rather than just a bunch of wires that might be a detonator. So something like this would pass fine, as it should.

Natural selection isn't something that's applied to individual animals, it's something that exerts pressure on whole populations over many generations.

To go with your Arctic tern example, just because one bird can dive deeper doesn't guarantee it's survival. It might still get eaten by a predator or catch a disease or just have a run of bad luck that causes it to starve. However, the birds that can't dive as deeply run the same risks (assuming there's no additional risk to diving deeply) and, over a long time and with a large population of birds, those that can dive deeper will survive to breed more often, until eventually the whole population carries that trait.

I know. I said that I didn't have an issue with porn, I was simply explaining to glesica the logic behind making actual rape films illegal.

If you were a rape victim, how would you feel knowing that images of your rape were being distributed around the internet and used as porn? In a situation like that, there's a clear victim protection argument for making distribution of such images illegal.

Now, that's a very different situation to either someone recording a crime for evidence which should obviously be legal (and I doubt anyone would want to hang on to the images/footage after providing it to the police anyway) or to actors enacting a fictional fantasy scene, which I feel should be legal with reasonable parental controls in place to stop minors accessing it. The law should be capable of differentiating between these situations, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.

And all that would mean something if (a) all of sociology was somehow based on the work of Margaret Mead, (b) Margaret Mead had been proven fraudulent, (c) proof of bad evidence on one side automatically meant the correctness of the opposite, and (d) you provided any evidence of your claims that genetics somehow drives society towards an ideal that coincidentally lines up perfectly with your preferred gender roles.

Since none of those things are true, I'm left to ask again - what the hell does any of this have to do with men getting weird looks in parks?

Yes, men do tend to be highly valued in some countries. And women in such countries tend to be treated as property. What does that have to do with suicide rates of men in the US? And what does any of it have to do with your original point about feminism somehow causing media scare stories?

It's unfortunate that politics can have such an influence on science and psychology and sociology are far from the only fields it happens in. But, again, that doesn't somehow prove feminism wrong or your original point correct.

Did you even read that link you provided about Margaret Mead? Freeman was accusing her mostly of incompetence (taking jokes/lies as fact is the main example) and Freeman's attacks on Mead's work have themselves been heavily criticised.

And even if they hadn't... so what? You're going to condemn the entirety of feminism (and the field of sociology, I suppose) because one person early in its history may have lied?

There are a lot of societal differences between first and third world countries and they exist for a lot of reasons. I really don't see why you would pin this particular one, if it even exists, on feminism.