Unclear science

Scientific papers frequently have a line to this effect, often in the same syntax: “While we know X, why Y happens is unclear.” The papers then proceed to elucidate Y. Sometimes a paper comes along that makes you ask, “Unclear according to whom?”. A few weeks ago, there was a dubious paper in Nature Communications …

A well-meaning manel is not a good panel

It’s time the good intentions of the organisers cease to matter.

What ‘The Kerala Story’ and ‘The Old Guard’ share

I was rewatching The Old Guard last week; the film is a bit of a favourite because a) Charlize Theron and b) it explores, even if in passing, the sometimes horrific terms on which science feels free to progress. But last week, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported something that …

Can we ‘redistribute’ prestige?

Pudding.cool has a good visual essay on the yard-sale model of economics, which shows that wealth has a tendency to accumulate more in the hands of people who are already wealthier. This is because a richer person has more opportunities to regain lost wealth than a poorer person. The wheels of the model turn every …

Gender equity in retractions

From the abstract of a fascinating study published in PLoS ONE on May 3, 2023: … this study investigated gender differences in authorship of retracted papers in biomedical sciences available on RetractionWatch. Among 35,635 biomedical articles retracted between 1970 and 2022, including 20,849 first authors and 20,413 last authors, women accounted for 27.4% [26.8 to …

Another reason to point lights down

‘Skyward light, wayward light’, this blog, December 14, 2022: One of the simplest ways [to prevent light pollution] is in fact to have no public lighting installation that casts light upward, into the sky, but keeps it all facing down. Doing this will subtract the installation’s contribution to light pollution, improve energy-use efficiency by not …

Where do scientists communicate their work?

A group of Spanish researchers analysed the mentions of scientific papers authored by scientists (affiliated with Spain) on the social media, on Wikipedia, and on news outlets, blogs and policy documents to understand where the consumers of such scientific information were located. They selected 3,653 authors, and the following platforms/modes in their analysis: Twitter, Facebook …

Who’s to blame for the American right’s distrust of science?

This study unambiguously suggests that scientific journals do the institution of science no favor when they insert themselves so directly in the political debate, especially at a time when trust in the scientific community continues to decline on the right wing. This is the surprisingly misguided interpretation, in an article published by Politico, of a …

AI v. our ability to build AI

A lot of this article, by Sean Ekins, Filippa Lentzos, Max Brackmann, and Cédric Invernizzi, published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on March 24, makes good sense – except the following two sentences: Nature took millions of years to design proteins. AI can generate meaningful protein sequences in seconds. The bigger question to ask …

Nature paper says bad news is good news

‘Negativity drives online news consumption’, Claire E. Robertson et al., Nature Human Behaviour, March 16, 2023: Here we analyse the effect of negative words on news consumption using a massive online dataset of viral news stories from Upworthy.com—a website that was one of the most successful pioneers of click-bait in the history of the Internet23. …