“Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?” Popular Mechanics (6/8/25) asks. Spoiler alert: No.
I like to read science stories, even (maybe especially) when they’re not politically earthshaking. But sometimes what’s on the label is not what’s in the tin.
Take a Popular Mechanics story, “The Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests” (6/8/25). The subhead asks the question, “Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?”
To answer that, PM reports on a paper from 2023: “The study uncovered that the feral dogs living near the Chernobyl Power Plant showed distinct genetic differences from dogs living only some 10 miles away in nearby Chernobyl City.” That is literally all we learn about the findings of the study that the headline is based on.
It does go on to say that a newer study finds that the answer to the subhead’s question is “no”:
A study published nearly two years later confidently asserts that we can cross radiation off the list of explanations for the current state of the Chernobyl canine population…. This new genetic analysis looked at the chromosomal level, the genome level and even the nucleotides of the Chernobyl dogs, and found no abnormalities indicative of radiation-induced mutation.
Oh. Never mind!
I guess an accurate headline—”Study Finds No Sign Chernobyl’s Dogs Are Radioactive Mutants”—wouldn’t have gotten as many clicks.
“Dinosaurs didn’t rule the Earth,” Big Think (6/10/26) argues, because someone found a fossil of “a badger-like mammal…biting a small horned dinosaur.”
Another piece appeared in Big Think (6/10/26) under the headline “A Mesozoic Myth: Dinosaurs Didn’t Rule the Earth Like We Think.” Intriguing! Tell us more?
It turns that the argument is basically that even though none of them were “larger than the size of a house cat,” during the age of dinosaurs “there were ancient mammal equivalents of squirrels, shrews, otters, aardvarks, flying squirrels and more.” I put it to you, though, that none of these are the kind of creatures that we think of today as “ruling the Earth.”
I’m still waiting on the flying cars that Popular Mechanics and Popular Science dust-off every 5 or 10 years to proclaim that they’re going to change our lives into something like the old ‘Jetsons’ comedy program. And it’s gotten 2X or 3X worse on the Internet, with content providers on places like YouTube just trying to be more outrageous than the next to glean views.
CNN lied about psychedelic affects on brain activity the CNN site (still) shows misleading images that lay readers would mistakenly interpret to mean that psychedelics make the brain light up like a Christmas tree. However if you go look at the source of the studies you’ll see the scientists who ran the experiments conclude that the opposite occurs. Even if it was inhibitory processes that were picked up by scanners as less dynamic electrical activity, there should still be increases somewhere in brain metabolism and one study after the other has shown psychedelics to correlate with decreases in all brain activity, not some decrease in some brain activity, but a global decrease of all brain activities across the entire organ. Because these findings contradict what we’ve all been misled to believe about the brain and so-called causally closed metaphysical claims, the fix is in and CNN has to tow that line that metaphysical materialist line of reasoning, which apparently CNN would cease to exist without, lol. (Materialism is by the way an arguably incoherent and long since discredited philosophical worldview, at least since David Chalmers won the bet he placed with Christof Koch in the 90s, that someday science would solve the hard problem of consciousness, no, because science cannot test for the nature of reality at best all that science can do is speak on the behaviors of nature, behaviors on their own tell you very little about the nature of the thing behaving lol.)