Shaken Baby Syndrome

…in the late 1990s, Plunkett — a forensic pathologist in Minnesota — began to have doubts about the diagnosis. He started investigating cases in which children had died in a manner similar to the way accused caregivers had described the deaths of the children they were watching — by short-distance falls. What he found alarmed him. In 2001, Plunkett published a study detailing how he had found symptoms similar to those in the SBS diagnosis in children who had fallen off playground equipment. It was a landmark study. If a short-distance fall could produce symptoms similar to those in SBS cases, the SBS diagnosis that said symptoms could only come from shaking was wrong. By that point, hundreds of people had been convicted based on SBS testimony from medical experts. Some of them were undoubtedly guilty. But if Plunkett was right, some of them almost certainly weren’t.

 

Naturally, defense attorneys began asking Plunkett to testify. He obliged. The same year his study was published, Plunkett testified in the trial of Lisa Stickney, a licensed day care worker in Oregon. She had been charged with murder for the death of a young boy in her care. According to Stickney, she was in another room when she heard a thud. She rushed over and found the boy on the floor near an overturned chair, with blood coming from his head. But according to prosecutors, an autopsy showed the boy had the symptoms that conventional wisdom held could only have come from violent shaking. Thanks in large part to Plunkett’s testimony, Stickney was acquitted.

 

The acquittal was another landmark moment in the SBS story. Plunkett was now a threat to SBS cases all over the country. The office of Deschutes County, Ore., District Attorney Michael Dugan responded with something unprecedented — it criminally charged an expert witness over testimony he had given in court.

Of course they did — he was a denier.

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h/t TimR

Science News;

The abundance of recent discoveries of dinosauromorphs, a group that includes the dinosaur-like creatures that lived right before and alongside early dinosaurs, does more than call diagnostic features into question. It is shaking up long-standing ideas about the dinosaur family tree.
To Nesbitt, all this upheaval has placed an even more sacred cow on the chopping block: the uniqueness of the dinosaur.
“What is a dinosaur?” Nesbitt says. “It’s essentially arbitrary.”

Studies say;

Recently, more than 270 psychologists set out to repeat 100 experiments to see if they could generate the same results. They successfully replicated only 39 of the 100 studies.
Over several years, failed attempts to replicate published studies have caused generally accepted bodies of research to be called into question — or rejected outright.
One example is the idea that your willpower is a limited resource that, like a muscle, becomes exhausted when it is used. Another is that power posing — standing like a superhero for two minutes — makes you feel bolder, reduces stress hormones and increases testosterone. Both have fallen aside due to failed replications.
These aren’t dusty, arcane findings limited to academic journals; a TED talk by social psychologist Amy Cuddy on the effectiveness of power posing has been viewed over 45 million times and is near the top of the list of the most popular TED talks of all time.

Morally Irresponsible Science

In this incident, what I see is a field of study that has apparently taken a values-position on a research topic and allowed that values-judgement to bias and taint their work to the point that their findings are knowingly or unknowingly, intentional or unintentionally, skewed to agree with their political advocacy goals and support their value-judgement. The prevailing bias in the field, in this case demography, thus leads to attacks on any research finding contrary to the bias — on moral grounds.
This situation may remind you of another field of study — Climate Science.

Sorry, Quebec is still with us: Long-lost chunk of Canada found in Australia

A new study has found that parasites carried by rats were probably not behind the outbreak of plague in Europe.
h/t nv53