Many studies are not fabulous. Most are not dramatic. Most never see the media spotlight for good reason. I enjoy reading the daily research feeds but I wouldn’t dream of foisting the grand majority of findings on you. The media does a pretty good job spiffing them up but most are either small, limited in scope, rigor or application, or pretty dull basic research that a mere decade or so ago nobody would see on their homepage.
Most published studies never make it to even the science news distributors. On any given day the ones that do get included in research updates aren’t terribly important or ground-breaking.
Consider these fascinating discoveries (not!) over the past week:
The pee study obviously got thrown in so the summer intern could write pee. None are highly newsworthy. Sure the the last one, the first online autism study (oh my!) can play the first card but as for the actual results? Nothing special.
And so it goes day after day on the science feeds and yet the media must make news.