For Yet Better Science

Elizabeth Holmes tried finding a workaround, but the disgraced Silicon Valley entrepreneur must finally report to prison  on Tuesday. Silicon Valley, for its part, has barely paused to notice.

For scientists whose warnings failed to check the depletion of some of the United States' richest fisheries over the past 15 years, a panel convened by the National Research Council (NRC) has some advice: Take a broader scientific approach and reduce the uncertainty in your forecasts. More confident forecasts are needed to catch the attention of regulators, the panel says in a new report.

For over 20 years, ESIP meetings have brought together the most innovative thinkers and leaders around Earth science data, forming a community dedicated to making Earth science data more discoverable, accessible and useful to researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and the public. The theme of the January meeting was  "Opening Doors to Open Science."  

Zhenan Bao is a chemical engineer. She serves as K. K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, with courtesy appointments in Chemistry and Material Science and Engineering. She served as the Department Chair of Chemical Engineering from 2018 to 2022.

Gender bias in science has resulted in drug tests that treat the female body as an aberration, and search algorithms that perpetuate discrimination, but the solution is simple: increase the numbers of women working in the field and support the girls hoping to join them one day.   

Naomi J. Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry and physics at Rice University. She is also the founding director of Rice University Laboratory for Nanophotonics, and the Smalley-Curl Institute.

Nina Marie Tandon is an American biomedical engineer. She is the CEO and co-founder of EpiBone. She currently serves as an adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering at Cooper Union and is a senior fellow at the Lab for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering at Columbia. 

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin  (born  Cecilia Helena Payne ;  May 10, 1900 –  December 7, 1979) was a British-born American  astronomer  and  astrophysicist  who proposed in her 1925  doctoral  thesis that  stars  were composed primarily of  hydrogen  and  helium .  Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the  Sun  and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct. Her work on the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.

In this position paper, I argue that the main purpose of research is to discover and report on phenomena in a truthful manner. Once uncovered, these phenomena can have important implications for society. The utility of research depends on whether it makes a contribution because it is original or can add to cumulative research efforts, is rigorously and reliably done, and is able to inform basic or applied research and later policy. However, five serious “diseases” stifle the production of useful research. These diseases include:  significosis , an inordinate focus on statistically significant results;  neophilia , an excessive appreciation for novelty;  theorrhea , a mania for new theory;  arigorium , a deficiency of rigor in theoretical and empirical work; and finally,  disjunctivitis , a proclivity to produce large quantities of redundant, trivial, and incoherent works. I surmise that these diseases have caused immense harm to science and have cast doubt on the role of science in soc