Our Times: May 2007

salmon spawn

Adams River in British Columbia, Canada, supports the largest salmon migration in the world.
Tens of millions of sockeye salmon migrate back to their home river every four years from as far off as Japan. It is believed they use the smell of the stream and location of the sun to navigate.

jump out of your skin

“I didn’t get it when people said they were comfortable in their fat skin but uncomfortable in their thin skin. Then I got it,” says one weight-loss patient who after losing 160 kilograms still had the skin that once held the extra weight. Plastic surgeons are doing increasingly more body contouring surgeries to provide a more fitting skin for those who have achieved great loss of weight.

wrong results

Medical researcher John Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina in Greece offered mathematical “proof” that most published research results are wrong. Using simple statistics, Ioannidis argued that the results of large, randomised clinical trials— the gold standard of human research—were likely to be wrong 15 per cent of the time and smaller, less rigorous studies fare even worse.

Sources: Scientific American, ABC, Smithsonian, theworld.org