While I was registering to the list in order to reply to this post, I had been watching shows on Hulu...after the Simpsons, on came The Colbert Report....he must have spent 15 minutes on this mistake.  A few things worth noting:

1.  The study was never peer reviewed
2.  This is highly political...it is being claimed that this study was the basis for austerity measures throughout the world (affecting a lot of people).
3.  The error was found by a phd student...a professor had assigned him to replicate someone elses paper.  After compiling the data from public sources and applying what he thought were the proper analysis, he couldn't make things work.  He contacted the original authors, and they supplied their spreadsheet...he said that once he and his girlfriend started looking at the spreadsheet, it was easy to find the error (he was looking for it and had already tried to figure it out).

OK, enough science sourced from a comedy show.  When Allen posted this, I immediately thought of this study:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0041250

Which really is just reanalyzing the data from:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0032962

...the Mattila study found a large number of bacteria that had never been found in bees...and found that gut communities are more diverse in colonies with multiply mated queens.

The Moran lab, using the same collected data set, found (based on their analysis) that neither claim was true.  Fortunately, this was a more interesting problem than a wrong formula in a spreadsheet.  I can't claim expertise in the techniques used, nor am I qualified to call a winner in this one....other than to say that the work out of the Moran lab has been very well done as far as I can tell. 

deknow

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