14 blurbs
‘ Biology is more theoretical than physics ’ was the provocative title of an article several years ago that laid out some examples of biological theories that preceded or predicted the discovery of important entities in …
On Think Tanks published its State of the Sector report last week, surveying 299 think tanks across 94 countries. Two thirds of the respondents named funding as a challenge this year, and almost half expect the environme…
Back in May I wrote about David Bessis’ essay “ The fall of the theorem economy ”. In it, he argued that theorem proving has historically been a reliable proxy for producing conceptual innovation and insight in mathemati…
Jordan Dworkin: Four years ago, in “ A Vision of Metascience ”, Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu asked the reader to imagine they were “ a science fiction writer depicting a scientific discovery made by an alien species. ”…
Nisha Austin: This week I wish I were reading something about which ~five numbers tell you a policy field is growing rather than just getting louder. I'd like to see some metrics around things like how many paid jobs the…
Back in May, science sleuth Sholto David came across a suspicious image from the major life-sciences supplier Thermo Fisher. It was a Western blot showing the performance of one of their antibodies that is commonly used …
There’s been a lot of writing lately on what AI is going to do to the university. The most recent entry is from Kevin Munger, who writes in Asterisk that the threat isn’t that AI replaces universities or makes them obsol…
Last week the NIH released an RFI proposing a change to how it uses and reports peer review scores. Instead of receiving a numerical impact score and percentile, applicants would learn only which of three bins their prop…
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past week, it’s that people love quote round-ups. If there’s another thing I’ve learned, it’s that scientists have a lot of feelings about AI in science. With their powers combine…
Last week Refine announced partnerships with the AEA and the Econometric Society, both of which will now use its AI-assisted technical review in their publication process. The current implementation is narrow, only a “pr…
Meme from the Internet The science sleuth Sholto David recently uncovered a mix up that’s affected hundreds of papers in biology. Scientists who were intending to work with the p16-INK4a antibody, to flag a tumor suppres…
On a happier note: This week the Astera Institute announced Radial , a new division committing up to $500M over the next decade to experimenting with how life sciences research is organized, funded, and shared. Early pro…
There was a good back-and-forth on NIH funding in the Good Science Project last week. Aishwarya Khanduja and Stuart Buck first made the case that science funders would benefit from adopting some VC-style practices, then …
STAT reports on a growing number of state-level science funding proposals. Massachusetts’ governor has proposed a $400 million DRIVE initiative, a coalition of medical schools and researchers is pushing New York to creat…