Overblown headlines

[Tweefo]

The headline in my newsfeed reads "Moon landing SCHOCK: NASA tapes lost in 1970 expose biggest SECRET of the century. The story under the headline? Not the biggest expose of a secret. https://news.google.com/articles/CBMiWmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmV4cHJlc3MuY28udWsvbmV3cy9zY2llbmNlLzk3MTUwNy9Nb29uLWxhbmRpbmctTkFTQS10YXBlcy1BcG9sbG8tc3BhY2UtbWlzc2lvbtIBngFodHRwczovL3d3dy1leHByZXNzLWNvLXVrLmNkbi5hbXBwcm9qZWN0Lm9yZy92L3Mvd3d3LmV4cHJlc3MuY28udWsvbmV3cy9zY2llbmNlLzk3MTUwNy9Nb29uLWxhbmRpbmctTkFTQS10YXBlcy1BcG9sbG8tc3BhY2UtbWlzc2lvbi9hbXA_YW1wX2pzX3Y9MC4xI3dlYnZpZXc9MQ?hl=en-ZA&gl=ZA&ceid=ZA%3Aen

[brianvds]

Oh, the papers are great at this: creating juicy headlines that make you almost desperate to read the story, which inevitably disappoints. Click bait has been around for longer than computer mice. :-)

[Tweefo]

And there I was, expecting at least all future Powerball numbers, chiseled into the moon rock at the Apollo landing sites, by our cosmic overlords.

[BoogieMonster]

General rules: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with "No". Any headline containing the words shocking, amazing, "will blow you away", crazy, etc.. will not be.

[Brian]

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr5Pj6GQL2o
What do you think?

[BoogieMonster]

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr5Pj6GQL2o
What do you think?

The title seems fairly accurate.

[brianvds]

And here we go again:

Massive Genetic Study Reveals 90 Percent Of Earth’s Animals Appeared At The Same Time
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/228798/20180530/massive-genetic-study-reveals-90-percent-of-earth-s-animals-appeared-at-the-same-time.htm

But if you look through the original study linked to from that article, you see that it is not what it says at all.

[BoogieMonster]

analyzing millions of DNA barcodes

Right there in the first sentence is the first hint that this article is going to suck...

Correcting myself: This is apparently a thing.

[brianvds]

analyzing millions of DNA barcodes

Right there in the first sentence is the first hint that this article is going to suck...

Correcting myself: This is apparently a thing.

Yup, I also initially thought that's crap, but apparently it's a thing. Nevertheless, the original research does not, as far as I can work out, state that almost all species appeared at the same time. It states that almost all species are descended from small founder populations that existed at the same time, which is not the same thing as saying they all came into existence at the same time. Might simply be genetic bottlenecks - perhaps there was a major natural catastrophe which hugely reduced almost all populations.

I can bet the creationists are going to be all over this before long. :-)