science+

Widespread mockery of AI-generated rat with giant penis in one paper brings problem to public attention

"The people that control the journals, in particular the editors, often have an interest in promoting a narrative," says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

Psychologists have known that something was wrong with their field since at least 2011. Now, there's a real plan to fix things, and it seems to be working.

The latest wave of explanations for the apparent slowdown in technological progress posits that science is broken, having become less productive in terms of generating significant advances in our understanding of how our world works.

A new report released this week by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is weighing in on a contentious debate within the science

Richard Harris has an elephant’s memory for busted scientific claims. In his new book on the replication crisis, Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science...

The way we pay for science does not encourage the best results

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Over the last decade, scientists have been grappling with the problems in their disciplines, and trying to find ways to overcome them.

There’s no incentive to fix the system, which was never designed to catch fraud anyway.

Astronomers have been confounded by recent evidence that the universe expanded at different rates throughout its life. New findings risk turning the tension into a crisis, scientists say.

Scientists and researchers have been left baffled and shocked after learning the sun is broken, and there's no clear explanation as to why it's happened

Norms are made to be broken in a time of emergency; so too for the idea that science must float above politics.

Harvard’s dishonest expert on honesty is a poignant symbol of a far larger problem in academia: ideological allegiance replacing the quest for truth.

pemScience is ruled by a small club of insiders who decide what kinds of research are getting us closer to the truth—and they’re getting it wrong. Brilliant ideas are shut out, innovation is stalled, and billions are wasted chasing safe bets. If we want real progress, from cancer research to cosmology, we should move to a radically egalitarian method of funding scientists, argues philosopher of science Jamie Shaw. We need to break the monopoly, spread the funding more widely, and start trusting scientists to be as wild, diverse and unpredictable as the world they seek to explain./em/pp /ppstrongScience funding is broken/strong/ppIn 2022, the US, China, the EU, Japan, and Russia together spent around two trillion dollars on science. While this may make one think that scientists are spoiled with riches, this is far from enough to go around. Scientists often clamor for funds, with one estimate suggesting that they a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29707193/" target="_blank"spend upwards of 60% of their time just applying for funding/a, and it is rare that more than a href="https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/5/e002800" target="_blank"20% of submitted applications receive funding/a. This forces tough decisions about where funds should be prioritized within science./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"While a lot of innovation happens in science, most of it gets blocked by peer review./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/ppAlmost universally, these decisions are made or informed by consulting scientists who act as “peer reviewers” to tell funding institutions what is worth their investments. The idea behind it is simple: scientists know the science best, so they have the authority to decide what sorts of science are getting us closer to the truth. This justifies giving them power to make funding decisions. On top of this, scientists are assumed to know where the most emimportant /emtruths lie. Asking scientists to review the project proposals of other scientists, therefore, can seem to be the best way to get the most bang for our buck. Governments and funding agency spokespeople routinely use peer review to promise publics that their tax dollars are going to the most important scientific projects that are out there./pp span class="article-content-box" a href="video/truth-science-and-reality" target="_blank" class="iai-related-in-article click_on_suggestion_link--gtm-track" span class="iai-card" span class="iai-card--image iai-related--video-play" style="display: block;" img src="/assets/Uploads/46.Truth-science-and-reality.webp" class="iai-related--primary-image" alt="related-video-image" /span span class="iai-card--content" style="display: block;" span class="iai-card--title" style="display: block;"SUGGESTED VIEWING/span span class="iai-card--heading" style="display: block;"Truth, science, and reality/span span style="display: block;"With Hilary Lawson, John Ioannidis, Jess Wade/span /span /span /a /span /ppBut there are several very serious problems with peer review. One is how expensive it is. One study found that a href="https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2" target="_blank"over 100 million working hours went into peer reviewing journal articles in 2020/a—and this is an underestimate and the numbers are growing. Reviewing grant proposals is similarly time consuming. And this is just the reviewing side of things. Writing grant proposals takes much more work. That’s a lot of time that could have been spent on other things, like doing the actual science./ppAnother worry is that peer review tends to be biased against scientists from specific social groups. If you’re a woman, person of color, person with disabilities, non-native speaker, or a person from a “less prestigious” institution, a href="https://www.cmaj.ca/content/190/16/e489" target="_blank"odds are you will have a tougher time getting funding/a, regardless of how capable you are. Many scientists do not advance in their career because peer review blocks them from getting a chance. This gets called the “Matthew Effect”: to the rich go the spoils! If you don’t start off “rich” (e.g., at a prestigious university), you have worse odds of proving your capabilities. While, in theory, focusing on the science should make peer review more “objective,” peer reviewers are humans and, like all humans, have biases that they do not fully recognize./ppMaybe this would be tolerable if peer review made sure that huge government expenditures on science went to the most deserving places. Research piling up since the 1970s, however, suggests that a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030631277900900203" target="_blank"peer review often does not do this particularly well/a. Scientists tend to be pretty bad at predicting which projects will succeed or fail and they disagree, more often than not, about which projects are the best or the worst. This poses a serious challenge to their claim of authority. Not only this, but peer reviewers often decide that ground-breaking, innovative research is not worth funding. The most famous recent example of this is Drew Weismann and Katalin Karikóa’s research on mRNA vaccines, the basis of the COVID vaccines that eventually won a Nobel prize, which a href="https://ideas.repec.org/h/nbr/nberch/14573.html" target="_blank"failed to get funding over ten times/a. Similarly, Ed Boydon’s work on expansion microscopy, which eventually won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, a href="https://nintil.com/discoveries-ignored/" target="_blank"failed to get funding nine times/a. Brian Kobilka’s work on G-Protein Coupled Receptors, essential for understanding a diverse array of drugs and physiological processes, which won a Nobel prize in 2012, took over 15 years of persistent effort to get noteworthy funding. While a lot of innovation happens in science, most of it gets blocked by peer review. There are pockets of times when peer review works as we would hope, but it is increasingly looking like this is the exception rather than the rule./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"Scientists not only have no entitlement to speak with authority on where science should go next, but the scientists who do end up with such authority have extreme amounts of unjustified power./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/ppThese problems are a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2643622/" target="_blank"becoming better recognized/a, and many who work at science funding institutions are trying to fix them. But in most cases, they merely tinker with peer review by changing some parts of it, in the hope of retaining the original aspirations of an objective guardian of the responsible use of public monies in science. They remain convinced that peer reviewers deserve the power often granted to them. This might include making reviewers take “implicit bias” tests, giving them slightly different instructions, or having them mark somewhat different things. These small adjustments are not unimportant. But people have underestimated how deep the problems with peer review go. Because of this, they miss out on just how radically we need to transform science-funding policy./pp /ppstrongThe battle over power, authority and truth /strong/ppOne philosopher who recognized the root problems was Paul Feyerabend. He argued that scientists doa href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Against_Method.html?id=8y-FVtrKeSYC&redir_esc=y" target="_blank" not follow a fool-proof “method” that leads them to truth/a. Because of this, they have no authority to speak about what is true or which pursuits are worthwhile. Moreover, scientific progress does not involve a href="http://iai.tv/video/science-trust-and-truth" target="_blank"a gradual accumulation of more and more truths about the world/a. Using landmark examples from the history of science, he shows that science advances in a more unpredictable way. Science is constantly changing, and so are its methods. This means that there are no solid benchmarks in science that we can use to evaluate what research we think is going to go somewhere important or reach a dead end. Moreover, when we do use benchmarks based on what we emthink /emwe know, we artificially limit scientific creativity. The strongest resistance Galileo faced when he tried to show that the earth rotated on its axis was from those who wished to enforce the most popular physics of the time—that of Aristotle. If we constantly imposed currently entrenched standards, we would not make progress./ppWhat becomes upsetting is that scientists not only have no entitlement to speak with authority on where science should go next, but the scientists who do end up with such authority have extreme amounts of unjustified power. Science, says Feyerabend and many others since him, is a diverse practice with many conflicts of opinion and interests. Giving a small handful of peer reviewers power over others is not only unwarranted but actively harmful. Diversity becomes silenced because of power politics, not because some scientists are especially in touch with “the truth.”/ppThis point is even salient for urgent areas of research, like medicine. Trillions of dollars have been spent on research on cancer but progress has been painfully slow. This is partly because so many of the resources get funnelled into the same couple of research programs (mostly chemotherapy and radiation therapy). As we now know, a href="https://

The fatal flooding this weekend in Central Texas was a tragedy. As of this writing, at least 80 are dead. After every such crisis, it’s important to assess how it occurred and identify ways to p

Over the first half of 2025, the USA has cut science as never before. This disaster for American science is a gift to the rest of the world.

Congress is now considering significant cuts to federal research funding. These decisions, if approved, won’t just stall scientific progress in the short term—they would mark a strategic r

The Trump administration's plans to slash science funding could end up liberating researchers from the corrupting influence Dwight Eisenhower warned about.

Opinion | Severe cuts in research funding will cause a complex cascade of effects across the United States and the world.

Physics is dying. It’s mathematical fiction. Science is failing. Most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit. I don’t trust scientists. Would you believe me if I

Only two days after the Journal of the Academy of Public Health's official launch, Science Magazine criticised it in a news item. A scientist I had recommended as a member of our Academy wrote to me

archived 16 Mar 2025 22:47:55 UTC

Recent whistleblower testimonies have revealed the anatomy of corruption within the FDA

I chose a career in public health because of its power to improve lives, as the field did in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by controlling infectious diseases such as chol