Science reporting brings us the most exciting news, but are we learning anything?

Science headlines rely on sensationalism. The world is an endlessly fascinating place, but to get the most clicks, reporters need to use just the right words. Here are a few recent headlines:

Headlines focus on superlatives. We get to hear about the largest galaxy, the longest spaceflight, the oldest molecule.

Weather reporting increasingly uses the same techniques. We no longer have snow storms or blizzards, we hear about snowpocalypse, snowmaggedon, and the bomb cyclone. (coming to your area, next, the Hyperbolicane!)

The stories behind the headlines don’t always live up to the hype. Three feet of snow takes a bit of shoveling, but it hasn’t ended the world yet. The shockingly deep lakes on Titan are 300 feet deep. The aforementioned asteroid headline implies a highly threatening body, but goes on to inform us that “Earth will be entirely safe: the asteroid will fly past at a distance of … 136,000 miles.” The rock in question is the size of a double decker bus, which would burn up in the atmosphere but could maybe break a few thousand windows if it ever did collide. An asteroid capable of global disaster would have to be more than a quarter-mile wide.

What’s often missing from science reporting is any overall picture, context or understanding. Ask around a little and you’ll find that many people actually know very little about space.

Only 74% of Americans know that the Earth goes around the sun, not the other way around.

One professor surveyed his college students about space travel, asking how far humans had travelled from the Earth, in recent history (since 1980).

Out of a total of 109 students responding (one group in 2006, another in 2010), only 11% got the right answer: low Earth orbit. 52% thought humans had been as far as the Moon since the 1980’s, and 20% thought we had been farther than the Moon. Some were indignant on learning the truth: “What do we use the space shuttle for, if not to go to the Moon?!” I can only guess that some students imagined the International Space Station as a remote outpost, certainly beyond the Moon, and likely strategically located next to a wormhole. How disappointing it must be to learn that it merely hugs the globe.

Americans knowledge of basic geography is poor:

About 11 percent of young citizens of the U.S. couldn’t even locate the U.S. on a map. The Pacific Ocean’s location was a mystery to 29 percent; Japan, to 58 percent; France, to 65 percent; and the United Kingdom, to 69 percent.

Likewise, people have a poor sense of where things are in space, many can’t go outside and recognize constellations or find planets in the night sky.

Sensational reporting isn’t making people smarter, it’s just missing all the basic details they don’t know.

The big astronomy news of April was the first picture of a black hole, taken by the Event Horizon Telescope. The worst clickbait I found for the discovery was this article from metro news:

After sucking readers in with that headline, the article concludes, “We’re glad to report that the galactic gobbler is 55 million light years away, which means the beam poses no threat to Earth.”

The same site offers this classy approach to describing rocket science:

The metro news approach tries to make the black hole discovery interesting, by connecting it to your life somehow. Specifically, by suggesting the black hole is going to kill you.

Reading through a more typical article about the picture, we still don’t get much context. The black hole is in a galaxy called M87. It’s 55 million light years away. It sounds like a very abstract thing, floating off in space somewhere, that’s not connected to your life at all.

I find this sad, because science is not just something you can read about, it’s something you can do, it’s something you can see for yourself. It takes a very powerful telescope to see a blackhole, but you can find M87 in the night sky and see it yourself, through a pair of binoculars. You can understand a lot of things about the universe, just by looking at the night sky.

Super Blue Wolf Blood Moons

Lunar eclipses are beautiful events, usually worth the trip outside, especially with a pair of binoculars.

Science reporters have recently written articles about these, telling us to go see the super blue blood moon or the super blood wolf moon.

The problem is, most of the clickbait terms used in these headlines aren’t actually things you can see.

The moon turns deep red in a lunar eclipse, so “blood moon” is a useful name. “Blue moon” is meaningless — the moon isn’t actually blue, this is a just a name for two full moons falling in the same month. “Wolf moon” is also meaningless, it’s just an old name for the full moon that falls in January. Headlines this week tell us to go see the “Pink moon”, which is the same color as every other month.

The great joy of astronomy is in observing the stars and asking questions about what you see. There’s a bit of amateur science you can do, during an eclipse. You could take a photograph and compare the Earth’s shadow to the moon’s size. You can tell how large the Earth is, compared to the moon. On another night, you could travel a bit and figure out the size of the Earth, by measuring the height of the north star from two different cities. Now you can tell the Flat-Earthers that you know the Earth is round, and how big the Earth and moon are. You can figure out how far away the moon is. And you can do this all with the same simple reasoning people used 2000 years ago.

“Super moon” is also a mostly useless term— the moon is at its closest and looks a bit larger, but almost no one will really notice the difference — a supermoon is only 7% larger than an average moon. You could photograph two full moons and compare, but otherwise it’s hard to tell. We understand size in a relative sense. Ever notice how large the moon looks on the horizon, compared to high in the sky? It’s actually the same size in each case, it just seems larger as it rises next to a distant mountain.

Photographers are sometimes disappointed by how small the moon shows up, in a landscape photo, because our mind is normally able to take in the full view and enjoy the moon at the same time.

Some landscape photographers photoshop in a larger moon, to correct for this. Some take the process a bit far. This is very similar to the way reporters sensationalize headlines to get more clicks. It’s not really necessary to make a great image — recall one of Ansel Adams’ classics:

Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico

Suppose Ansel could have used photoshop?

I suspect the modified thumbnail would get more clicks, but the original is the better image. Think: advertising jingles versus music you actually like.

I tried uploading the change to image rating site photo.net with a request for feedback:

Initial ratings were pretty high, but after an hour, someone recognized the source image and the thread quickly filled with more comments than any one of my real photos on the site. All you need is a hook and some controversy, you’ve got a story.

Superstimuli and your brain

Stuart McMillen drew an excellent comic, describing how animals and humans react to exaggerated stimuli. Birds will sit on an abnormally large egg over a real one, or feed a fake baby chick rather than their own children, if the fake beak is larger and redder than the actual chick.

Exaggerated stimuli are more appealing, but not necessarily better for you. Candy bars are more addictive than vegetables, but an addict might end up weighing 400 pounds.

Exaggerated advertisements of female beauty lead some young women to starve themselves.

Some people will literally keep playing videogames so long that they die in place.

Nature photographers get attention by supersaturating their pictures or photoshopping animals into the frame.

Companies will test which version of an earworm is better at getting stuck in your head.

For years, the best strategy for science reporting was in finding the most exaggerated headlines. News aggregators throw astrophysics headlines amidst other trending topics as if they’re things we should gossip about. Yahoo news has made some of the most absurd combinations, over the years:

The world is a wild place, full of politicians, terrorists, cougars, and black holes. It’s hard to describe the universe really, but thinking of the Eiffel Tower should give the general idea.

Sensational headlines were the best way to get clicks until we found a stimulus that gets people even more engaged — the culture war.

Who needs science, when you have drama?

Anger is the emotion that spreads best on the internet. An enraged user is an engaged user. Facebook has found that the best way to keep people enraged is to promote any content that divides people into two opposed, angry groups. CGP grey offers a short video explaining how this works:

Facebook has increasingly divided liberals from conservatives, perhaps driving the increasing political polarization we see today. Social media has also divided men from women, whites from minorities, and driven any group conflict that gets clicks (Facebook has even been implicated in creating actual refugee crises).

So, why not make science reporting about the culture war, next?

Enter Katie Bouman, a scientist on the Event Horizon Telescope. A viral image states that she’s the scientist behind the image:

The image is great, it conveys a sense of glee at the discovery. But wait, this project was also a very large collaboration:

EHT 2016 meeting

Why are we posting memes as if she were the sole contributor that needs to be celebrated? Katie herself quickly remarks that “No one algorithm or person made this image, it required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop”. Before long, reddit and 4chan users are digging through code repositories to find men who seemingly did more work, or posting memes about this:

It’s sexist, but funny social commentary. Women take more selfies than men, and generally receive more attention for what they share. This isn’t a uniquely female thing, though — social media has turned most of us into narcissists, compared to previous generations. (Neil Armstrong walked on the moon but only had 5 photos taken of himself, some of us can’t eat breakfast without posting that many)

As a response, we start seeing dozens of articles defending Bouman, suggesting either that she was indeed the key contributor, or that seeking credit for the rest of the team is motivated purely by misogyny.

Was Bouman the key figure behind the black hole image? I suspect she’s one of many smart people, of both genders, that made this happen. What’s sad is that we’ve turned a cool scientific discovery into yet another argument about gender, the patriarchy, and “those angry incel losers”, and we’re doing this because drama gets more clicks than good science reporting.

A brief guide to finding where you are in the universe

Here’s your homework, should you choose to accept it. I want you to step away from the culture war, step away from the computer, go outside and find M87, the galaxy that contains the black hole everyone’s been talking about.

I can’t promise anything sensational, all you’ll get is a walk in the dark, with some stars overhead. The moon won’t be enormous, just a typical size. Actually, the stars will be much better if you pick a night when the moon’s not up. You can find the Virgo constellation yourself, it’s easy to see it in the Spring. Find the big dipper, follow the arc of stars to the next bright star (arcturus), then follow a straight line down to Spica.

To see M87, you’ll need some good binoculars (10x50 would be good) or a telescope and you’ll still only see a faint glowing cloud. A skilled amateur with a telescope can even take a picture that shows the enormous gas jet coming out of the black hole in the center of M87. But whatever you see will be real and, with a little effort, you now know where the black hole everyone’s talking about is.

If you don’t have binoculars, there are galaxies you can see with the naked eye. Get out of town and find the darkest sky you can and look at the milky way, glowing across the sky. In summer (or very late on a spring night), you can easily find the constellation Sagittarius (the “teapot”). Notice how the milky way seems to get thicker around this point, with big dust clouds — you’re looking at the center of our galaxy, in this direction, which has another massive black hole that we orbit around.

In winter, you can still see the milky way, but you’ll be looking the opposite way, off to the edge of the galaxy.

Find the constellation Andromeda (which rises early in the fall, right now you’d have to get out before dawn), and look for M31, the Andromeda galaxy, which you can see with the naked eye. You are looking 2 million light years away, 2 million years into the past. The faint glow you are seeing is only the bright center of the galaxy, with a large enough telescope and a dark sky you can see the spiral shape of the galaxy, which is larger in the sky than the full moon (but dim enough that you can’t see the whole thing without optical help).

This is remarkable, because Andromeda is 60 trillion times further away than the moon is.

Even if you can’t get away from the city, you can still find the planets in the sky. Look up the rising and setting times. Right now, Venus is brightest, but only visible before dawn. Jupiter is also bright, rising after midnight. Planets are identifiable, in part, because they don’t twinkle as much as stars do (this is a quirk of how the atmosphere distorts small or large points of light, the stars aren’t actually twinkling).

Notice how the planets, sun, and moon all travel in the same arc through the sky. Think about how you’re observing the plane of the solar system. Notice how this plane relates to the milky way— now you can picture the orientation of our solar system, in the galaxy.

Now you have some personal connection to the stars, and some context about where everything is. Would people know more about science if we taught it as something you can actually see in the world?