Jason Daley

It takes researchers years, sometimes decades, to pin down subtle, important findings about your health, but it takes bumbling journalists (or their editors) just a few seconds to screw it all up. Here, a selection of the most misleading headlines, and a few tips to help you spot the hype early.

Mudslide

Situation: Your split-level Shangri-la with a view is about to head to the valley floor on the back of a mudslide.

It might seem sad, after years of study, to wind up gathering sewer rats or burning great, stinking heaps of urine samples and bloody gauze. But that’s the path some professionals choose—and you’re lucky they did.

After several centuries of casting and counting ballots, it’s shocking that we still haven’t mastered what seems to be a simple task. But anyone who lived through the 2000 presidential election, in which a mishmash of flawed voting machines, contradictory county procedures, and unclear state laws in Florida led to the least reliable outcome in history, knows that 21st century voting is no better than the era when we shouted out our votes at the courthouse steps.

When Neil Armstrong pressed the first bootprint into the Sea of Tranquility, most of humanity watched the televised low-res blob and felt pride welling up in their chests. But a few watchers felt something entirely different—an unconfirmed, squinty-eyed skepticism that something about the whole deal smelled fishy. How could the United States, which could barely put a chimp into space in 1961, get two full-grown men on the surface of the moon eight years later? How could anyone confirm that men actually made it to the moon? And, how, exactly, had that $25 billion Apollo budget been spent?

As a newly minted WoW-head (that's World of Warcraft for you noobs), I've always wondered just how all those "gold farmers" who try to sell virtual gold within in the game came by their vast, ill-gotten riches. I'd heard rumors of sweatshops in China where people are forced to drink Mountain Dew and kill Fel Orcs for 16 hours straight, but that sounded too strange to be true -- and, at the same time, not too different from the average college dormitory.

The problem with cancer surgery, or so we hear, is that it's difficult for surgeons to know if they've removed all of a tumor, especially in late-stage cancers when the edges get indistinct. But a new imaging technology developed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's Center for Imaging Technology and Molecular Diagnostics in Boston is giving cutters visual cues on just where to aim their scalpels.