Hacking Into the Science Publicity Machine

One of the weirder revelations to come from the spate of recent hacking incidents was a press release from the University of Montreal claiming a possible link between watching too much television as a child and being bullied in middle school. The release, which came to light in a Sept. 9 hack, was stamped with an embargo -- it wasn’t supposed to be released until the following week, when the finding was to be officially published in a journal.

Maybe the most shocking thing about that finding was that you weren’t supposed to know about it -- at least for a few days. But the hack itself generated some eye-opening discussion about the way science and medical news gets made.