ESMH regularly publishes articles on topics related to science and new technologies that provoke a lot of media attention and that are important in the European context. Most importantly, the articles are written with the help of science writers in journalistic style and always provide the opinion of one or more scientists on the topic. The publications are accompanied by a selection of links to related information and with a focus on European research and knowledge in the field.
Articles
Mike S. Schäfer: “Science is a matter of facts, not opinions”
Mike S. Schäfer from the University of Zurich talks about why the pandemic has amplified science journalists’ fatigue, how accelerated science affects the quality of reporting, and how politics can ease the burden. How has the pandemic affected science journalism? The pandemic has changed science journalism’s standing in society. We are now living at a ...
Provenance: ‘Stop and think’ before sharing online content
Challenging dis- information in the news requires a multi faceted, multi disciplinary and multi media approach. The EU funded project ‘Provenance’ focuses on helping people evaluate online content, equipping them with media literacy skills and discouraging the sharing of unreliable information. Could interventions like this change the dynamics of social sharing by encouraging engagement with high-quality content?
Walter Quattrociocchi on the Infodemic and how disinformation spreads on different social media
Associate Professor Walter Quattrociocchi of the Sapienza University of Rome recently published a study called ‘The COVID-19 social media infodemic’. By analysing massive amounts of data on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Gab, Quattrociocchi and his team assessed the global evolution of discourse for each platform and its users. For him understanding the social dynamics ...
Studying the exposome: ‘On the front line for people and the planet’
Climate and public health cannot be considered separately. The scientific community is increasingly talking about the need to study the so called exposome (the sum of all environmental factors we are exposed to) with the same level of attention with which the human genome has been studied up to now. A new European science network aims to respond to this multidisciplinary challenge.
How the coronavirus pandemic is changing us
These stressful and unprecedented circumstances we are living in due to the current pandemic have a deep internal effect on us, which is altering who we are as individuals, our relationships with others, and how we perceive our place in society. Even our brain's hippocampus may have shrunk — but are these changes in our brains and behaviour short-term effects or could they change us and society more profoundly?
Prof. Wayne Koff : “AI can help us design better, safer and faster vaccines”
Wayne Koff, PhD, is the founding president and Chief Executive Officer of the Human Vaccines Project. Human Vaccines Project Prior to joining the Project, from 1999 to 2016, Koff served as Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Vice President of Research and Development at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) in New York City, leading IAVI’s ...
Professor Heidi Larson: “This is a key moment to build trust in countries and socio-economic groups with relatively low confidence in vaccines.”
For over a decade, Heidi Larson, Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has been leading global efforts to monitor public confidence in immunisation programmes. As COVID-19 vaccination programmes are rolled out across the EU, this is a key moment to build trust in countries and ...
Joana Gonçalves de Sá: “Mitigate the misinformation pandemic by ‘vaccinating’ the susceptible individuals first.”
Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Invited Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and was the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant to study human behavior using the online spread of ’fake news’ as a model system. Disinformation and misinformation are not a new problem, so why did ...
