Richard Thaler wins the Nobel prize for economic sciences

THE credit-card bill arrives. You have enough money in a savings account to pay it off—the sensible thing to do, arithmetically speaking, since the interest rate on the credit-card balance far exceeds that earned on the savings. Yet you leave the savings untouched, and pay only as much of the bill as your current-account balance […]

Richard Thaler wins the Nobel prize for economic sciences

THE credit-card bill arrives. You have enough money in a savings account to pay it off—the sensible thing to do, arithmetically speaking, since the interest rate on the credit-card balance far exceeds that earned on the savings. Yet you leave the savings untouched, and pay only as much of the bill as your current-account balance […]

How Mentorship Looks Different in the Sciences

Every day, scientists pour their energy and effort into work that might prove to be life-changing, or a complete disappointment. It is a dynamic that can be difficult to sustain. And encouraging new scientists, even when the payoff of research might remain elusive for years, requires a specific type of guidance and encouragement. Allison Powell […]

Analysis of meta-analyses identifies where sciences’ real problems lie

(credit: Harvard University) Science is in a phase of pretty intense soul-searching. Over the past few years, systemic problems that lead to unreliable scientific results have become more and more obvious. There’s a litany of woes for good science: publication bias leads to buried data, single studies don’t stand well on their own yet not enough […]

People have no idea which sciences are robust

Enlarge / Imprecise (credit: Dean Calma / IAEA) If there’s one thing everyone needs to understand about science, it’s that science is uncertain. It’s a process of gradually getting closer to the truth, with self-correcting mechanisms built in. Unfortunately, communicating this uncertainty without undermining trust in science is tricky. People who hear that climate science has […]