Blogs
In March, Science published a news story and an editorial about how the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been investigating researchers in the United States—mostly Chinese or of Chinese descent—who were identified as violating grant funding policies. Today’s editorial in Science highlights a conversation that I had with Michael Lauer, the deputy director for Extramural
I've written here many times about varieties of fraud in the literature. It ranges from retail (someone faking a Western blot band in a single paper to make a key figure say something it wouldn't have) to industrialized wholesale, and that latter style is what this new preprint addresses. (News item here at Science). Over the last ten to twenty years, the rise of "paper mills", who tend to call th
It looks as if we’re going to get some important data on Alzheimer’s, and this time from a clinical trial that isn’t targeting amyloid. As those who have followed the field well know, tau is another protein that seems to be involved in the disease (and perhaps others as well - there’s an extensive literature on “tauopathies). Aggregated and hyperphosphorylated tau, as
Editor's Blog
In March, Science published a news story and an editorial about how the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been investigating researchers in the United States—mostly Chinese or of Chinese descent—who were identified as violating grant funding policies. Today’s editorial in Science highlights a conversation that I had with Michael Lauer, the deputy director for Extramural
Scientific research is a social process that occurs over time with many minds contributing. But the public has been taught that scientific insight occurs when old white guys with facial hair get hit on the head with an apple or go running out of bathtubs shouting “Eureka!” That’s not how it works, and it never has been. Rather, scientists work in teams, and those teams share find
Amna Nawaz is an American broadcaster and journalist, who is currently a co-anchor of PBS NewsHour. She has had an illustrious career covering politics and foreign affairs and has received numerous awards for her work, including a Peabody Award and an Emmy. Today’s editorial in Science highlights her thoughts about journalism expressed to me in a recent conversation and s
Several months ago, I published an editorial calling out Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo for publicizing an unreviewed and unattributed study that supported his view that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were not recommended for males aged 18 to 39. Ladapo has followed a familiar playbook in spreading misinformation: He leverages his scientific credentials to take unreviewed science and promote it in
In 1999, historian Londa Schiebinger summed up two decades of feminist analyses of science by asking Has Feminism Changed Science? (1). The answer was “yes, but…” there was still work to do. Indeed, the study of sex and gender continues to affect scientific thought, and in 2023, Science will explore some of these influences in a limited podcast series. The team behind the series
Ottoline Leyser has not only had an outstanding career in plant biology at the Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, but she has been the Chief Executive Officer of UKRI (United Kingdom Research and Innovation) since 2020. Today’s editorial in Science highlights her hopes for UK science, expressed to me in a recent conversation and shown below (lightly edi
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Visuals
The design team at Science works with a vibrant, talented community of illustrators every week. Their work captures the complex, often nuanced stories of research findings, policy changes, and the scientific community at large. Here are a few of the illustrations that stood out in our team’s minds from 2022.
2022 was a banner year for the Science family of journals′ social media: We hit 3 million followers on Science Twitter. News from Science Twitter reached half a million followers, and Science Instagram grew to 200K (and then some). We experimented with new ways to accurately communicate science in visually engaging ways, promoting short-form video and audio for the first time, as well as Twitter threads.
The graphics team at Science creates scientific visualizations that convey complex concepts with the highest standards for both accuracy and aesthetics. Using a multitude of creative disciplines and visual resources, we use graphic design, cartography, and data visualizations to tell beautiful and informative scientific stories. Our favorites from 2022 covered a range of research areas, from astro
The multimedia team produces the Science Podcast; creates videos on research, news, and original stories; and helps enrich Science content with audio and video. We asked the team to choose a few memorable highlights from throughout the year. Here are their picks for 2022.
Audio
After looking back through the year, Science Podcast host Sarah Crespi produced an entire segment of her favorite podcas
In the Pipeline
I've written here many times about varieties of fraud in the literature. It ranges from retail (someone faking a Western blot band in a single paper to make a key figure say something it wouldn't have) to industrialized wholesale, and that latter style is what this new preprint addresses. (News item here at Science). Over the last ten to twenty years, the rise of "paper mills", who tend to call th
It looks as if we’re going to get some important data on Alzheimer’s, and this time from a clinical trial that isn’t targeting amyloid. As those who have followed the field well know, tau is another protein that seems to be involved in the disease (and perhaps others as well - there’s an extensive literature on “tauopathies). Aggregated and hyperphosphorylated tau, as
Since I wrote that blog entry on the re-evaluation of the Wasserman catenane synthesis, I’ve had the pleasure of hearing from Ed Wasserman himself (via his son Stephen). He’s 90 and was quite struck to hear about this work, and he sent along the statement below:
“What a delightful surprise. The paper of Prof. Leigh and his colleagues is most impressive. The group’s use of m
I noticed a headline this morning that BenevolentAI is laying off staff and reorganizing to deal with a recent clinical failure. I've written about them from time to time over the years (here's an early post), and what mostly caught my eye about them was the level of hype in their press releases (as that last link will demonstrate). The company was developing a pan-Trk inhibitor for atopic dermati
OK, there’s a lot of stuff going on out there in biopharma, but as for me, I’m going to take a day to talk about purple carrots. Seriously, because there is a paper on them in synthesis in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, and it makes me wish I had a need to use them in the lab.
Some of the synthetic organic chemists in the crowd will have guessed what I’m referring to. There are
I was happy to see this piece in Nature because I have been going around saying almost exactly the same thing in pretty close to the same words (most recently at a talk at a recent Free Energy Perturbation conference that I was invited to speak at). The subhead says it all: “Machine-learning systems in chemistry need accurate and accessible training data. Until they get it, they won’t