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Media coverage of scientific retractions risks feeding a narrative that academic science is broken – a narrative which plays into the hands of those who want to cut science funding and ignore scientific advice. So say Joseph Hilgard and Kathleen Hall Jamieson in a book chapter called Science as “Broken” Versus Science as “Self-Correcting”: How Retractions and Peer-Review Problems Are Exploited to Attack Science Hilgard and Jamieson discuss two retraction scandals ...read more

(Credit: Arthimedes/Shutterstock) If you smoke cigarettes, you’re putting yourself at a heightened risk for heart disease. That correlation is well-known and unchallenged today, but that wasn’t always so. It took an ambitious, years-long project, the Framingham Heart Study to uncover the link, and it only happened because of the study’s commitment to comprehensive data collection. The Framingham study is a near-canonical example of the power of longitudinal studies, those tha ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Physicists aren’t often reprimanded for using risqué humor in their academic writings, but in 1991 that is exactly what happened to the cosmologist Andrei Linde at Stanford University. He had submitted a draft article entitled ‘Hard Art of the Universe Creation’ to the journal Nuclear Physics B. In it, he outlined the possibility of creating a universe in a laboratory: a whole new cosmos that might one day evolve its own stars, planets and intell ...read more

A new study fills gaps in the when and where of cat domestication, explaining how the animals went from lean hunters to, uh, this. (Credit G. Tarlach…yes, it’s my cat, but don’t kvetch about his obesity. I took the photo shortly after I adopted him. Thanks to careful management he is now several pounds lighter.) The truth about cats and dogs is this: despite being the two species that humans are most likely to have as pets, Rex and Ruffles had very different paths from t ...read more

When Disney’s animators were creating Timon, the energetic meerkat sidekick in The Lion King, the part where he turns his anal pouch inside-out and marks his territory must have been left on the cutting room floor. Not once does Timon smear scented butt paste on a branch. But real meerkats use their anal scent glands to communicate with each other. And each animal’s distinctive scent seems to come from its personal community of bacteria. Both male and f ...read more

In 1984, geneticists recovered 229 base pairs of genetic code from a quagga, a subspecies of zebra extinct since the late 1800s. The achievement proved DNA could survive in dead things and spurred a new field of science: paleogenetics. Today, technological advances allow scientists to read billions of letters from the genomes of ancient humans and other organisms, transforming our view of history and evolution. The genetic record is “like a lost library ... and we’re just starting to ...read more

How we're powering up our lives. Batteries symbolize our love affair with convenience. They liberate us from wires by juicing up our smartphones, laptops and cars. With gadgets fully charged, we can go anywhere, do anything. One hundred percent power feels secure. But when the charge runs dry, we’re screwed. The good news? Engineers are trying to create the perfect battery. It is efficient and safe, and it packs a lot of oomph using little space. It’s made from abundant, cheap a ...read more

Humans have used marijuana, or Cannabis sativa, for thousands of years, for religious purposes, medicinal remedies or simply getting high. These days, 1 in 8 Americans ingest or smoke marijuana, and the drug faces renewed scrutiny as more states wrestle with legalization. While the legislative battles rage on, scientists continue to study the effects this plant can have on us, therapeutic and otherwise. But the work isn’t easy. The U.S. government hasn’t legalized marijuana and still ...read more

A Century of Autism 1911 Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coins the word autism — from the Greek autos, meaning “self” — to describe extreme self-obsessiveness and anti-social behavior in children. 1943 Leo Kanner at Johns Hopkins Hospital publishes the first case studies of autism as a medical condition. 1944 Austrian scientist Hans Asperger describes a disorder called Asperger’s syndrome, which, in older diagnostic criteria, had similar but milder symptoms than au ...read more