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 th…
Science
363 posts
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 docume…
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 th…
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 sen…
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 massi…
The devil's lassi
‘The Devil’s Milkshake’, Tarence Ray in The Baffler, February 23, 2023: You’ve seen it before. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try…
Some science prizes are only for men
Say Someone has won the Nobel Prize for physics, perhaps the most prestigious honour (as awards go) for a physicist. What would it mean for all the future awards given to this Someone? One thing that…
Keep working. Don't get up.
'Inside Meta’s Push to Solve the Noisy Office', WSJ, February 16, 2023: Coming to the campuses of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. is a contraption that can block sound, shield workers fro…
Whose fault is a retraction?
A journal called Advances in Materials Science and Engineering retracted a paper it published and issued the following notice, excerpted from Retraction Watch, December 22, 2022: Advances in Material…
Something more foolish than completing phase 3 trials in 1.5 months?
That the Union government and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had entered into a more intimate, but not necessarily more beneficial, relationship became evident in 2019 when then ISRO ch…
The identity of scientific papers
This prompt arose in response to Stuart Ritchie's response to a suggestion in an editorial "first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter" – that scientists s…
Science's humankind shield
"Science benefits all of humanity," they say.…