Science
Here's an image from a paper that was published by Nature Scientific Reports on November 19 and retracted on December 5: This paper made it through peer review at the journal. Let that sink in for a moment. Perhaps the reviewers wanted to stick it to the editors.
Scicomm
Once Isaac Newton showed that a single gravitational law plus his rules of dynamics could reproduce the orbits of planets that Johannes Kepler had predicted, explain tides on Earth, and predict that a comet that had passed by once would return again, physicists considered Newtonian mechanics and gravitation to have
Analysis
A.K. Anil Kumar, the director of ISRO's Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Network (a.k.a. ISTRAC), has reportedly made some seriously misleading comments as part of his convocation address at a Maharishi University in Lucknow.* Kumar's speech begins at the 1:38:10 mark in
Analysis
Individuals can’t master the mathematics of cryptography or the molecular biology of vaccines, yet they still trust these fields of science and the suggestions of their exponents to make decisions.
Op-eds
From ‘7 basic science discoveries that changed the world’, Nature, October 29, 2025: Basic research is easily mocked because it can seem impractical, but, in fact, it is a major driver of economic growth. “The return on investment in basic research — the return to society — is very high, typically multiple
Analysis
Jane Goodall was a celebrated figure in conservation. Her work with chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania redefined primatology. However, more than a few publications as well as conservation experts writing on social media platforms have since her passing on October 1 called attention to the ways
Analysis
We often understand science primarily in terms of its tangible successes, looking to it for advances in medicine, for the foundations of technologies, and for the tools with which to predict and manage our environment. This perspective views science as a potent problem-solving enterprise. In his chapter in a new
Analysis
The American-Israeli economic historian Joel Mokyr has been awarded one half of the 2025 special Nobel Prize for economics "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress". Now, by rewarding particular achievements over others, the Nobel Prizes are in general guilty of rendering them seemingly
Analysis
Bayes's rule is one of the most fundamental principles in probability and statistics. It allows us to update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. In its simplest form, the rule tells us how to revise the probability of a hypothesis once new data becomes available. A
Analysis
The double-slit experiment has often been described as the most beautiful demonstration in physics. In one striking image, it shows the strange dual character of matter and light. When particles such as electrons or photons are sent through two narrow slits, the resulting pattern on a screen behind them is
Analysis
India has won 22 Ig Nobel prizes to date. These awards, given annually at Harvard University by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, honour studies that "first make people laugh, and then make them think" — a description that can suggest the prizes are little more than jokes whereas
Analysis
Maxwell’s demon is one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of physics, a puzzle first posed in the 1860s that continues to shape scientific debates to this day. I’ve struggled to make sense of it for years. Last week I had some time and decided