For Yet Better Science

Engineering organisms leading to the restoration of extinct species like dodos and dinosaurs is an impulsive idea with less clarity on its potential benefits.  

When science is viewed in isolation from the past and politics, it’s easier for those with bad intentions to revive dangerous and discredited ideas.  

At the heart of the Open Science movement is the conviction that  Open Science is better science . More rigorous. More inclusive. More efficient. More trustworthy. More reproducible. And more impactful for society.  

The “New Statistics” emphasizes effect sizes, confidence intervals, meta-analysis, and the use of Open Science practices. We present three specific ways in which a New Statistics approach can help improve scientific practice: by reducing overconfidence in small samples, by reducing confirmation bias, and by fostering more cautious judgments of consistency. We illustrate these points through consideration of the literature on oxytocin and human trust, a research area that typifies some of the endemic problems that arise with poor statistical practice.  

I often like to discuss science online and I’m also rather partial to topics that promote lively discussion, such as  climate change ,  crime statistics  and (perhaps surprisingly) the  big bang . This inevitably brings out the  trolls .  

To understand disease, scientists are producing comprehensive  omics  datasets. However, the majority of these are Eurocentric. Recently, the inclusion of patients from Asia and the Middle East in genomic analyses uncovered unique loci linked to COVID-19 severity. This demonstrates that focusing on diversity and underrepresented populations can benefit all.  

Conducting research with human subjects can be difficult because of limited sample sizes and small empirical effects. We demonstrate that this problem can yield patterns of results that are practically indistinguishable from flipping a coin to determine the direction of treatment effects. We use this idea of random conclusions to establish a baseline for interpreting effect-size estimates, in turn producing more stringent thresholds for hypothesis testing and for statistical-power calculations. An examination of recent meta-analyses in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine confirms that, even if all considered effects are real, results involving small effects are indeed indistinguishable from random conclusions.  

Collaborations between the academy and governments promise to improve the lives of people, the operations of government, and our understanding of human behavior and public policy. This review shows that the evidence-informed policy movement consists of two main threads: ( a ) an effort to invent new policies using insights from the social and behavioral science consensus about human behavior and institutions and ( b ) an effort to evaluate the success of governmental policies using transparent and high-integrity research designs such as randomized controlled trials. We argue that the problems of each approach may be solved or at least well addressed by teams that combine the two. We also suggest that governmental actors ought to want to learn about  why  a new policy works as much as they want to know  that  the policy works. We envision a future evidence-informed public policy practice that ( a ) involves cross-sector collaborations using the latest theory plus deep contextual knowled

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn ,  AC   FRS   FAA   FRSN  (born 26 November 1948) is an  Australian-American  Nobel laureate who is the former president of the  Salk Institute for Biological Studies .  In 1984, Blackburn co-discovered  telomerase , the  enzyme  that replenishes the telomere, with  Carol W. Greider . For this work, she was awarded the 2009  Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine , sharing it with Greider and  Jack W. Szostak , becoming the first Australian woman Nobel laureate.  

Irène Joliot-Curie  ( née   Curie ; 12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French  chemist ,  physicist  and politician, the elder daughter of  Pierre Curie  and  Marie Skłodowska–Curie , and the wife of  Frédéric Joliot-Curie . Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the  Nobel Prize in Chemistry  in 1935 for their discovery of  induced radioactivity , making them the  second-ever married couple  (after her parents) to win the Nobel Prize, while adding to the  Curie family legacy  of five Nobel Prizes. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date.  She was also one of the first three women to be a member of a French government, becoming  undersecretary  for Scientific Research under the  Popular Front  in 1936.  Both children of the Joliot-Curies,  Hélène  and  Pierre , are also prominent scientists.

Scientific quality is hard to define, and numbers are easy to look at. But bibliometrics are warping science — encouraging quantity over quality. Leaders at two research institutions describe how they do things differently.  

At the heart of the Open Science movement is the conviction that  Open Science is better science . More rigorous. More inclusive. More efficient. More trustworthy. More reproducible. And more impactful for society.  

Co-founders of the fecal testing startup uBiome, Jessica Richman and Zachary Apte, are facing a 47-count federal indictment accusing them of defrauding insurers and investors. The U.S. says they are hiding in Germany. 

Concerns were raised about the origin of stool samples used to generate the microbiome dataset. Specifically, concerns were raised about the possible inclusion of samples from participants affected by health conditions or antibiotic usage, and non-humans. The first author has stated that an audit of customer service data held at uBiome in August 2019 identified information indicating that one of the samples submitted by a uBiome user, and labelled as a human gut sample, may have had a non-human origin.

There are two main reasons that articles submitted to  Healthcare Policy/Politiques de Santé  are rejected before going to peer review: they are outside the scope of the journal's mandate or they do not follow established quality guidelines for research reporting. The latter are evolving and expanding over time, as illustrated by the fact that the EQUATOR Network now includes 345 guidelines in their library.

Scientific progress has yielded technological innovations that have improved the lives of billions of people. But often, those people feel detached from how scientific research is done. EU-funded researchers aim to close the gap by involving citizens more directly in scientific research.