What the Science Says About Sleep and Health
Sleep was long treated as wasted time. Decades of research now place it alongside diet and exercise as a pillar of health…
Health & Science Editor · Cubed News
public health, medicine, climate, space, research
Daniel Okoro leads health and science coverage at Cubed News, a desk that sits where the stakes for readers are often most personal and the temptation to oversell is greatest. His remit runs from public health and medicine to climate and the environment, from space and astronomy to the research enterprise itself. He approaches the work with a simple discipline: science journalism should leave readers better able to judge evidence, not merely impressed or alarmed by it.
His central conviction is that the unit of trustworthy science reporting is the body of evidence, not the single dramatic study. Okoro is wary of the press cycle that turns one preliminary paper into a breakthrough and then, when it fails to replicate, into a scandal. He pushes his writers to weigh studies rather than chase them, to distinguish correlation from causation, to convey uncertainty honestly, and to tell readers what scientists actually know with confidence versus what remains open. A finding's caveats, in his newsroom, are part of the finding.
On standards he is exacting, and the bar rises with the stakes. Because health and climate touch decisions people make about their own lives, he treats accuracy here as a duty of care. Claims are grounded in named, authoritative sources — the World Health Organization, peer-reviewed journals, the IPCC's assessment reports, national health agencies and the major space agencies — and attributed precisely. He forbids the invention of statistics or study results outright, insists that medical and scientific consensus be represented as it genuinely stands, and is careful never to let a striking number outrun what the evidence supports. Where the science is unsettled, he wants that said.
Okoro frames the beat through the publication's three dimensions: the context of how a scientific question or a public-health situation came to matter, the perspectives of the researchers, clinicians, patients and communities involved, and the stakes for the health of people and the planet. His view is that the best science writing respects both the subject and the reader — refusing to condescend, refusing to sensationalise, and trusting that an honest account of what is known is more useful than a thrilling account of what is not. His work spans the publication's health and science coverage.
12 articles · [email protected]
Sleep was long treated as wasted time. Decades of research now place it alongside diet and exercise as a pillar of health…
Peer review is the quality-control system behind almost every study you read about. It is more human, more flawed and more important…
Most wealthy nations promise that no one should be ruined by getting sick — but they keep that promise in strikingly different…
A useful quantum computer would not be a faster laptop. It would excel at a narrow set of problems in chemistry, materials…
Almost every modern treatment owes its existence to clinical trials. Their design — randomisation, control groups, blinding — is built to outsmart…
CRISPR has already moved from the lab into approved medicine, but its real capabilities are narrower, and its ethical questions sharper, than…
When the drugs that kill bacteria stop working, routine infections turn dangerous again. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the slowest-moving and most…
Carbon capture is neither a silver bullet nor a hoax. It is a real, working set of technologies with a narrow, expensive…
Mental-health conditions are common everywhere, yet access to care is among the most unequal in all of medicine. The reasons are part…
It is not just a bigger Hubble. By seeing in infrared, Webb looks further back in cosmic time and into places visible…
The IPCC does not run experiments or set policy. It synthesises the published science — and its conclusions are more measured, and…
A vaccine moves from laboratory bench to clinic through years of staged testing and independent review. Here is what each step is…