Topic: peer review
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AI is overwhelming peer review. Can it survive?
A health economist's study found that HPV vaccine mandates for elementary students do little to reduce cervical cancer rates, but a peer reviewer misinterpreted the work as questioning the vaccine itself rather than analyzing policy effectiveness. The peer review system is strained by a massive s...
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Science Needs You: Have Your Say
The OMB proposed rule would prioritize political objectives over scientific peer review, allowing political appointees to control grant funding decisions and revoke grants at any time. If finalized, the rule would impose new bureaucratic hurdles on routine research activities like publishing and ...
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AI conference papers caught using hallucinated citations
An AI detection startup found 100 fabricated references across 51 papers at a major AI conference, indicating researchers may be using AI tools for tasks like bibliography formatting and introducing errors. While the fake citations are a small fraction of the total, their presence undermines acad...
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New Declaration Warns AI Could Threaten Math's Foundations
A group of 16 mathematicians released the Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics, which outlines challenges AI poses to the field and offers recommendations for researchers, institutions, and governments. The declaration warns that AI threatens mathematical autonomy by producing proofs that don...
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Scientific Societies Protest Trump's Executive Order
A coalition of over fifty scientific organizations opposes a new executive order that imposes political controls on federal research grant funding, arguing it undermines the integrity of the independent, peer-review system. The order requires agency heads or political appointees to review and app...
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Did Perseverance Find Life on Mars?
NASA's Perseverance rover has found chemical and mineral evidence in Mars' Jezero Crater that aligns with ancient microbial activity, suggesting past habitable environments. While not definitive proof, the observed features are considered potential biosignatures, with conclusive answers expected ...
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OpenAI's New Tool Sparks "AI Slop" Fears in Science
OpenAI's new Prism workspace, a free AI tool for researchers, has sparked debate by potentially worsening the flood of low-quality, "AI slop" academic papers, as its ease of use may lower the barrier for producing polished but hollow manuscripts. The tool integrates GPT-5.2 into a LaTeX editor to...
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AI Research Boom: More Papers, Less Progress?
The adoption of AI language models has led to a significant increase in the number of research papers (preprints) produced by scientists, but a decline in their acceptance into peer-reviewed journals. Researchers developed a detection tool by training a model to distinguish between human-written ...
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Geoengineering Can't Solve Climate Change Alone
A recent study by leading scientists questions the effectiveness of geoengineering proposals for protecting polar ice, warning they may cause dangerous side effects rather than meaningful solutions. Proposed interventions, such as spreading reflective particles or building underwater barriers, co...
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Climate Scientists Condemn New US Climate Report as "Mockery of Science"
Over 85 climate scientists criticized the Department of Energy's climate report as unfit for policy due to selective data use and lack of credible scientific support. The report was accused of misrepresenting established climate science and ignoring decades of peer-reviewed research on climate ch...
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Trump Medical Research Grant Lawsuit Settled
A legal settlement requires the National Institutes of Health to restart reviews for research grants that were previously blocked on ideological grounds, ensuring they undergo standard peer review. The dispute originated from a policy that broadly canceled or blocked grants related to topics like...
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Male Mosquitoes Also Drink Human Blood
New research challenges the long-held belief that only female mosquitoes bite, revealing that **male mosquitoes are also capable of drinking human blood**, particularly when triggered by dehydration. Evidence from both lab experiments and wild-caught specimens confirms this behavior and shows mal...
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Tesla's FSD Safety Data: Progress Made, But Questions Remain
Tesla has launched a new online safety hub to provide transparent, verifiable data on Autopilot and FSD, reporting that FSD Supervised enables significantly fewer collisions per mile than the average U.S. driver. Independent experts express skepticism, noting the data lacks independent verificati...
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Tiny Chips Ride Immune Cells to Fight Inflammation
MIT researchers led by Deblina Sarkar have developed microscopic electronic devices that can be injected into the bloodstream to treat brain inflammation non-invasively, combining electronics with biological cells for natural navigation. The project faced significant initial skepticism and 35 gra...
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Waymo Hits 170 Million Miles With Zero Serious Crashes
Waymo's autonomous vehicles have driven over 170 million miles without a serious crash, with data showing they are involved in 92% fewer serious-injury crashes compared to human drivers. Despite this safety record, recent incidents involving collisions and operational errors, such as blocking an ...
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Artificial Cell Achieves Multiple Rounds of Division
A key unresolved puzzle in the origin of life is how early cells formed membranes that could enclose genetic material while still allowing the exchange of nutrients and waste. University of Minnesota researchers have created a simplified system where a membrane encloses DNA and can continuously i...
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Google AI Study: Lost Clicks Not Lower Quality
A randomized field experiment found that AI Overviews cause a 39.8% drop in organic clicks, but the extra clicks gained when they are removed are equally valuable, with no significant difference in click quality metrics like back-button rate, short visits, or time on site. The traffic loss is con...
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New Paper: Microsoft Exaggerated Its Quantum Claims a Year Ago
A peer-reviewed critique in "Nature" by physicist Henry Legg challenges Microsoft's claim that its Majorana 1 chip successfully created a topological qubit, arguing the original data lacks conclusive evidence. Microsoft had touted the topological qubit as a revolutionary breakthrough for quantum ...
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AI Researchers Withhold 'Dangerous' AI Incantations
Researchers discovered that crafting harmful prompts into poetry can bypass the safety guardrails of major AI systems, exposing a critical weakness in their alignment. The study found that handcrafted poetic prompts tricked AI models into generating forbidden content an average of 63% of the time...
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Aether AI secures $20M for causal world model development
Aether AI has secured a $20 million seed round to build AI based on understanding cause and effect, challenging the industry’s focus on scaling up larger models. The startup is initially targeting robotics, where causal reasoning can be tested through physical actions, with a long-term goal of cr...
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