Question: what is science in your opinion?

Julian Rayner answered on 16 Mar 2011:

Barbarastreisand? As in Duck Sauce? Darn, that track is stuck in my head now.

Science is the process of trying to explain the world and universe around us using experiments and data to test hypotheses.

What that means is that science is not just about learning a whole string of facts – it is a way of looking at the world, of weighing up evidence, and it can be applied to absolutely everything.

If you see a story online saying acaia berries are superfoods that help you lose weight, or a story in the paper that measles vaccines give you autism, your first instinct should always be “show me the data”, and to not make up your mind on it until you know the data (and nine times out of ten with stories like these, there just isn’t any data behind it). The media in particular present lots of science as “fact” when it is mostly “hypothesis”. Learning to think objectively and scientifically about such things is a really useful skill, and it makes you a scientist!