The Next Regeneration

One major obstacle in the "infotainment versus critical science writing" debate is that there is no universal definition of what constitutes "critical analysis" in science writing. How can we decide whether or not critical science writing is adequately represented in contemporary science writing or science journalism, if we do not have a standardized way of assessing it. For this purpose, I would like to propose a following checklist of questions that one would find in a news article or […]

I recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Guardian in which I suggested that there is too much of an emphasis on ‘infotainment’ in contemporary science journalism and there is too little critical science journalism. The response to the article was unexpectedly strong, provoking some hostile comments on Twitter, and some of the most angry comments seem to indicate a misunderstanding of the core message. One of the themes that emerged in response to the article was the Us-vs.-Them perception... […]

I came across an interesting study about the consensus in the scientific community on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), i.e. the idea that human activity is very likely causing most of global warming. What makes this study so interesting is the fact that it involved a “citizen science” approach. Volunteers who contributed to the Skeptical Science website were asked to grade the abstracts of 11, 944 scientific papers on global climate change that were published in the years 1991-2011.  […]

Medieval alchemists devoted their lives to the pursuit of the infamous Philosopher's Stone, an elusive substance that was thought to convert base metals into valuable gold. Needless to say, nobody ever discovered the Philosopher’s Stone. Well, perhaps some alchemist did get lucky but was wise enough to keep the discovery secret. Instead of publishing the discovery and receiving the Nobel Prize for Alchemy, the lucky alchemist probably just walked around in junkyards, surreptitiously collected […]

An editorial in the journal Nature published on April 24, 2013 announces an important new step in the scientific peer review process for manuscripts that are being submitted to Nature and other Nature research journals. Authors of scientific manuscripts will now be required to fill out a checklist before they can submit their work to the journal. The title of the editorial, "Announcement: Reducing our irreproducibility", reveals the goal of this new step - addressing the problem of […]