Editing science stories

Doug at Common Sense Journalism has a reminder on editing science stories:

If you do nothing else as a copy editor, stay abreast of the science stories out there. The embarrassment you save will never be repaid in full, but it will be worth it.

Then he gives a few real-world examples of mistakes that should have been caught before publication.

For copy editors, science is math's equally scary and ignorable cousin. But it's hard to find the mistakes in these stories if we're not giving them a critical look. (Know something about everything and everything about something.)