news 2022

Swiss people's interest and confidence in science increased during the pandemic but has now returned to pre-Covid levels, the 2022 edition of the Science Barometer Switzerland has shown.

Researchers Lorena Cano Orón (University of Valencia) and Emilia H. Lopera Pareja (Energy, Environmental and Technological Research Centre) highlight that the media have changed from a mainly favourable attitude towards alternative medicine, a series of practices deviant from integrated medicine in the western health system, to another more sceptical.

Over the last few decades, there has been a change in the way in which we relate to death. Newspaper articles provide an insight into what we consider a 'good' or 'dignified' death. According to research carried out by Radboud university medical center and Radboud University, the articles have revealed that, in the case of the elderly, a good death is primarily associated with having lived a full life and a self-chosen end of life.

It's no secret that the internet and social media fuel rampant spread of misinformation in many areas of life. A collective of researchers, including Catherine Scott , Postdoctoral Fellow in McGill University's Lyman Lab, have explored this phenomenon as it applies to news about spiders. The verdict? Don't blindly trust anything you read online about these eight-legged arthropods-or anything else for that matter-and always consider the source.

During the Covid pandemic, media stories have been proven to inspire young people to help others. Helping others also often gave them a feeling of satisfaction. This is the conclusion of researchers from Radboud University and Erasmus University Rotterdam in a newly published article. The research sheds new light on the effects of the pandemic on young people, according to Rebecca de Leeuw, Assistant Professor of Communication Science at Radboud University.

Flawed research not retracted fast enough to prevent spread of misinformation, study finds Could Twitter discourse function as a 'red flag' system for problematic research? Retracting academic papers does not dampen the reach of problematic research in online platforms as intended. Instead, research that is later retracted is often widely circulated online, both by news outlets and social media, and the cycle of attention that it receives typically dies away before the retraction even happens, according to research by the University of Michigan and Northwestern University.

Nearly one-third of young people in Switzerland have little to no interest in the news. Various studies show that daily world events are of secondary importance to them. They rarely use information sources and thus develop limited literacy in dealing with and processing news, which makes them more susceptible/vulnerable to misinformation.