An infuriating editorial in Science

I’m not just disappointed with an editorial published by the journal Science on November 14, I’m angry. Irrespective of whether the Republican Party in the US has shifted more or less rightward on specific issues, it has certainly shifted towards falsehoods on many of them. Party leaders, including Donald Trump, have been using everything from …

Violence shuts science? Err…

Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is news. I’m reminded of this adage of the news industry – and Nambi Narayanan’s comment in August 2022 – when I read reports like ‘Explosion of violence in Ecuador shuts down science’ (Science, January 13, 2024). An “explosion of violence” in a country should reasonably be …

What’s with superconductors and peer-review?

Throughout the time I’ve been a commissioning editor for science-related articles for news outlets, I’ve always sought and published articles about academic publishing. It’s the part of the scientific enterprise that seems to have been shaped the least by science’s democratic and introspective impulses. It’s also this long and tall wall erected around the field …

Prestige journals and their prestigious mistakes

On June 24, the journal Nature Scientific Reports published a paper claiming that Earth’s surface was warming by more than what non-anthropogenic sources could account for because it was simply moving closer to the Sun. I.e. global warming was the result of changes in the Earth-Sun distance. Excerpt: The oscillations of the baseline of solar …