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There’s no doubt that getting tipsy while pregnant is a seriously bad idea. Alcohol is a toxin that can pass through the placenta to the foetus and cause damage to the developing brain.  For women who are regular heavy drinkers or binge drinkers, there is a risk that the child will develop foetal alcohol syndrome , a condition that affects physical development and is associated with learning difficulties. But what of more moderate drinking? The advice is conflicting. Many doctors take the view that alcohol is never going to be good for the developing foetus and they recommend complete abstention during pregnancy as a precautionary measure. Others have argued, though, that this advice is too extreme, and that moderate drinking does not pose any risk to the child. Last week a paper by Lewis et al was published in PLOS One providing evidence on this issue, and concluding that moderate drinking does pose a risk and should be avoided. The methodology of the paper was complex and it’s ...

I just love the fact that the BBC have a Democracy Live channel where you can watch important government business. The Public Accounts Committee may sound incredibly dull, but I found this footage riveting. The committee grills executives from Starbucks, Amazon and Google about their tax arrangements. Quite apart from the content, it provides a wealth of material for anyone interested in how we interpret body language as a cue to a person's honesty. But for me it raised a serious issue about Starbucks. Is it run by aliens?

Early in October a weird story hit the media: a nation’s chocolate consumption is predictive of its number of Nobel prize-winners, after correcting for population size. This is the kind of kooky statistic that journalists  love, and the story made a splash. But was it serious? Most academics initially assumed not. The source of the story was the New England Journal of Medicine , an august publication with stringent standards, which triages a high proportion of submissions that don’t get sent out for review. (And don't try asking for an explanation of why you’ve been triaged). It seemed unlikely that a journal with such exacting standards would give space to a lightweight piece on chocolate. So the first thought was that the piece had been published to make a point about the dangers of assuming causation from correlation, or the inaccuracies that can result when a geographical region is used as the unit of analysis. But reading the article more carefully gave one pause. It did have...