Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Popular Science writer William Weed "spent a day ... recording every scientific claim he encountered in stores, in ads, in newspapers and on TV, radio and the internet. Then he enlisted experts to help him evaluate their veracity." He concluded, "A good number were patently false. ... Advertisers probably feed more science to Americans than anyone else." But learning science from ads, according to Weed, is "like learning the fundamentals of automobile engineering from a used-car salesman. ... The marketing imperative is, of course, antithetical to the scientific method."
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