Metascience

Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.

Multiple myeloma is brutal. We may finally have a cure, but American regulatory inertia means that it was discovered abroad.

In the 1940s, scientists made a discovery now fundamental to biology: genes are encoded in DNA. The story involves bacteria, dead mice, and a kitchen cream separator.

A disease that was once a death sentence is increasingly treatable.

Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia. By speeding up Darwin’s clock, scientists have watched evolution happen in real time, and it’s changed how we understand natural selection.

Millions of years of evolution have given us genomes that are like giant datasets for drug development. Finally, we are learning how to study them.

Science has forgotten that the greatest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who are able to take a fresh perspective.

How a dubious theory of radiation damage based on fruit flies and a secretive weapons testing program came to be – and why its time may now be up.

We’re looking for new authors and article pitches.

We now have the power to genetically modify entire species by inserting certain genes into them with brute force. Doing this to malaria-carrying mosquitoes could allow us to wipe out humanity’s most deadly killer.

Inventing new materials is only the first step. Getting them into mass production and use is just as hard.

I was deliberately infected with Zika to test a vaccine. Human challenge trials like my one could save millions of lives by developing prophylactics more quickly.

Many scientific papers receive little attention initially but become highly cited years later. What groundbreaking discoveries might have already been made, and how can we uncover them faster?

Mathematics was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry, modernity, and the world we inhabit today.

Hundreds of thousands of people die from malaria each year, but it took 141 years to develop a vaccine for it. Advance market commitments could speed things up next time.

Thomas Edison is often accused of not having invented the things he gets credit for. He did something even harder: he built the systems needed to get them to market.

ARIA is the UK’s visionary new scientific funding body. It has £800m and the freedom to make big bold bets on the scientific trajectories it thinks will benefit Britain – and change the future. We interviewed chief executive Ilan Gur and chairman Matt Clifford, to better understand what inspired ARIA and how they aim to make it a success.

International development was revolutionized by experiments and evaluations of its methods. Meta-science can learn from it.

Though we tend to see history as just one political event after another, it’s technology and ideas, not politics, that change our lives the most. History should reflect that.

Scientific papers are dense, jargon-filled, and painful to read. It wasn’t always this way – and it doesn’t have to be.

Outdated forms of peer review create bottlenecks that slow science. But in a world where research can now circulate rapidly on the Internet, we need to develop new ways to do science in public.

History’s most famous innovation prize—the longitude rewards—is misunderstood. Innovation prizes are best at promoting refinements, not revolutions.

Some think of advances in science and technology through the metaphor of low-hanging fruit: we “picked” the easy ones, and the rest will be very difficult.

Plagiarism is unforgivable in academia but it’s not plagiarism itself that should trouble us. It’s carelessness and a lack of originality.

Our success is based on scientific discovery, so it’s not surprising how much faith we put into it. But we now trust science so implicitly that our trust undermines the institution itself.

How do technologies get off the ground? As well as seed funding, many of the best technologies require Buyers of First Resort, which buy products until they improve enough to get to efficient scale.

The conversation around science is full of ideas for reform, but how do we know which ones will be effective? To find out what works, we need to apply the scientific method to science itself.

Critics of scientific reform say that transparency comes at the cost of speed. What can disciplines learn from each other to break away from this crisis?

Alongside all the successes of science in the Covid era, the pandemic has also sparked an outbreak of viral misinformation and sloppy research, revealing the glaring flaws in our scientific system.

Crises upend plans, force people to re-evaluate their priorities, and bring into focus new goals. Financial markets give us hints of what we can expect from the aftermath of Covid-19.

Bad incentives, muddled theory and no practical use. The condition of the social sciences has been blamed on a great variety of things; what’s really at fault and how do we know?

Scientific research today is afflicted by poor reliability and low utility, despite the best efforts of individual researchers.

Many have argued that innovation develops in a simple linear fashion – from research to experimentation to engineering.

Modern psychiatry appears to be at a standstill, wanting for better treatment and a substantive theoretical framework. Evolutionary theory has the potential to reinvigorate the field.

For a time in recent history, R&D labs seemed to exist in a golden age of innovation and productivity. But this period vanished as swiftly as it came to be.