How do you read a scientific article? What are the phases of a clinical trial? What are the differences between climate change and global warming? These guides answer questions for journalists and communication departments. Other specific guides help research staff when dealing with the media.
The risks of ultraviolet radiation are well-known: it can cause everything from burns and spots to immune system alterations, cataracts, infections, and skin cancer. We need to protect ourselves from the sun, but do we really know how to do it? What is myth and what is reality? We answer the main questions when it comes to using sunscreens.
Until now, it was thought that the risk of heat-related death in Spain had decreased among older people. But what if we take into account the increase in longevity? Has it decreased as much as the studies suggested? In this case it is useful to use the concept of prospective age, i.e. the years we hypothetically have left to live, rather than the years we have lived.
Every week, the Science Media Centre Spain team reads hundreds of headlines and news alerts for potential news to cover. Our specialty is to generate useful content on science topics that ignite public debate; therefore, we take great care in the selection of stories and spend a good proportion of our time debating what we should and should not give. To end the year, we wanted to tell you part of our intrahistory.
Behind any study that hits the media with eye-catching headlines there are usually numbers to back it up. Analysing the statistics of a study is one of the greatest challenges in communicating any finding with rigour.
The Ibero-American Day of Science takes place on 28 November; it was launched last year during a meeting of science ministers within the framework of the Ibero-American Summit. On this occasion, we have compiled below several guides and databases maintained by universities, research centres and other science organisations that aim to help journalists in search of expert sources. Of course, this list is not comprehensive; if you have suggestions for other guides and sources—whether from Spain, Portugal or Latin America—that we could add, please don't hesitate to contact us so that we can continue to expand this resource.
We often see the term 'vaccine' used in the media to refer to drugs that target diseases that are not even infectious, such as cancer and cholesterol. In this article we explain when it is correct to talk about vaccines and when it would be wrong.
The prions have made headlines after El País reported that a researcher working with them at a Catalan research center died in 2022 with symptoms compatible with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a type of prion disease.
Synthetic embryos, artificial placentas, genome editing... Advances in biology and medicine keep bringing up thorny ethical questions. Here's an overview of Spain’s many bioethics committees, which can be useful resources for journalists.
Floods in Libya and Greece, fires in Australia or earthquakes in Morocco. Disasters are on the rise, partly because climate change is affecting the frequency and intensity of some of them. The media often use the term 'natural disaster' to describe them, something a team of crisis and disaster specialists is trying to change.
Every time there is a heat wave, a DANA or a flooding episode, the question arises: is it the fault of climate change? Attribution studies try to find out the relationship between a particular phenomenon and global warming as a result of human action.