The origin of the threshold below which a chemical in food need not be tested

On 24 July 2026, Syngenta announced it was withdrawing every paraquat product it sells in Australia and New Zealand. The reason given by the company's managing director for the region was not safety: ...

The word “hallucination” has gotten a lot of mixed rep in science. “Hallucinated” references are a tell of lousy research, and vibe-written papers flooding the journals. At the same time, the word wa...

Half the world now uses generative AI assistants (Stanford HAI, 2026). Many of the queries ordinary people ask land on questions about science, including the contested-science topics this newsletter c...

The editor told us that we were the first ones to ask for retraction.

The FCC public comment period for two major satellite proposals is closing fast.

Astronomy may be the natural science which AI rewires first. Its infrastructure is unusually open. Most data is public. The scientific record is mostly open through online preprint servers. Core softw...

Climate change is no longer a distant “global issue.” It is local emergencies that carry the names of friends and neighbors. Heat waves, wildfires, flash floods, and other extreme weather events are b...

Mars has been a place for dreams for a long time. A god of war, a planet, the home of invaders in science fiction, more recently the scientific and space exploration frontier. The details change, but ...

Science is often spoken of as if it were a single institution: what science says, what science has shown. In practice, it is a tangle of labs, companies, contracts, grants, and norms that fall, broadl...

Climate change, as a topic, is virtually absent from discourse in the U.S. Catholic Masses. This is despite Pope Francis's strong emphasis on environmental stewardship in his two encyclicals Laudato S...

Opinion | A downsized EPA faces a deadline to review the herbicide’s safety without much of its in-house expertise.