Different audience means different knowledge

A recent finding that a particular type of staph infection is prevalent in the men-who-have-sex-with-men community (as you'll see when reading the story, I'm being deliberate about not saying "gay men") led to some interesting commentary about how the same scientific information can create different "knowledge" in different communities, partially based on different understandings of the same set of words.

After Linking New Strain of Staph to Gay Men, University Scrambles to Clarify

Too much aspirin? Or too little?

One of the standard complaints about science journalism is the "last week they said coffee is good for you, this week they say coffee is bad for you" complaint. But I always forget to document these back-and-forth claims. Blogger Craig Hildreth, MD, has a nice post about one of these episodes, involving aspirin:
The Cheerful Oncologist

Interaction of popularizing and creating knowledge

WILLIAM K. HARTMANN PROFILE: Renaissance Man of the Solar System -- Kerr 315 (5810): 326 -- Science

This profile describes a scientist who helped developed our current understanding of how impacts (such as with comets and meteoriods) affect planetary surfaces (including, perhaps, the creation of the moon out of impact debris from the Earth). More interesting for this class, he is also a painter and popularizer, and describes his painting helps shape his SCIENTIFIC understanding of what's happening. "Hartmann sees a productive interaction between 'the painter's eye versus the scientist's eye.' For instance, sometimes he understands planetary photometry--the interaction of light and surface--'experientially' by noting how the color of a terrestrial dune he's painting changes with changing sun angle. And trying to paint an alien scene not yet visited by a lander 'forces you to ask what we actually know.' "