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The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

The safety of glyphosate is not settled science.

In a statement, Monsanto said, “Glyphosate is not a carcinogen.”

That was the purpose of a recent oral history event at the Royal Society, involving four senior scientists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than simply reminiscing, they were asked to recall their publishing experiences in scientific periodicals over the last fifty years. How have things changed since they published their first paper?

It became clear that the hierarchy of journals has changed over the last fifty years, and the pressure to publish in those considered to have the highest impact has increased considerably, partly a result of the increased volume of data being produced and the need for readers to filter relevant information from the copious amounts of less pertinent stuff available.

What have also changed are the technologies available to write a paper. Frith related the process she went through in writing her first paper: “I wrote my papers by long hand and then typed them myself.” Writing a biological paper before computers is one thing, but Ashmore remembered the problems of producing mathematical formulae in a typed manuscript, explaining that “you wrote the paper and probably took it along to somebody to be typed… And then it came back with spaces where you had to write in the equations.”

but this has come with the side effect of a toxic combination of confirmation bias and Google, enabling us to easily find a study to support whatever it is that we already believe, without bothering to so much as look at research that might challenge our position

Indeed, this is a statement oft-used by fans of pseudoscience who take the claim at face value, without applying the principles behind it to their own evidence.

at present, most published findings are likely to be incorrect.

before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.

he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.

Members of the committee agreed with their assessment. “I think this is really coming to a head,” said Dr. Roberta B. Ness, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health. And Dr. David Korn of Harvard Medical School agreed that “there are problems all through the system.”

Last year the journal Nature reported an alarming increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers — a tenfold rise in the previous decade, to more than 300 a year across the scientific literature.

two scientists and a medical communications consultant analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in the biomedical and life sciences. They found that misconduct was the reason for three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause. “We found that the problem was a lot worse than we thought,”

the rising rate of retractions reflects perverse incentives that drive scientists to make sloppy mistakes or even knowingly publish false data.

Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.He raised questions with the lab’s director. He reran the calculations on his own. He looked askance at the articles arising from the research, which were published in distinguished journals. He told his colleagues: This doesn’t make sense.“At first, it was like, ‘Okay — but I don’t really see it,’ ” Yuan recalled. “Then it started to smell bad.”

The passions of scientific debate are probably not much different from those that drive achievement in other fields, so a tragic, even deadly dispute might not be surprising.But science, creeping ahead experiment by experiment, paper by paper, depends also on institutions investigating errors and correcting them if need be, especially if they are made in its most respected journals.If the apparent suicide and Yuan’s detailed complaints provoked second thoughts about the Nature paper, though, there were scant signs of it.The journal initially showed interest in publishing Yuan’s criticism and told him that a correction was “probably” going to be written, according to e-mail rec­ords. That was almost six months ago. The paper has not been corrected.The university had already fired Yuan in December 2011, after 10 years at the lab. He had been raising questions about the research for years. He was escorted from his desk by two security guards.

Last year, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud had increased tenfold since 1975. The same analysis reviewed more than 2,000 retracted biomedical papers and found that 67 percent of the retractions were attributable to misconduct, mainly fraud or suspected fraud.

For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Enlarge This Image Josh Haner/The New York Times A technician at a Department of Energy site in Oklahoma launching a weather balloon to help scientists analyze clouds. More Photos » Temperature Rising Enigma in the Sky This series focuses on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences. More From the Series » if (typeof NYTDVideoManager != "undefined") { NYTDVideoManager.setAllowMultiPlayback(false); } function displayCompanionBanners(banners, tracking) { tmDisplayBanner(banners, "videoAdContent", 300, 250, null, tracking); } Multimedia Interactive Graphic Clouds and Climate Slide Show Understanding the Atmosphere Related Green Blog: Climate Change and the Body Politic (May 1, 2012) An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change (May 1, 2012) A blog about energy and the environment. Go to Blog » Readers’ Comments "There is always some possibility that the scientific consensus may be wrong and Dr. Lindzen may be right, or that both may be wrong. But the worst possible place to resolve such issues is the political arena." Alexander Flax, Potomac, MD Read Full Comment » Post a Comment » Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.

They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.

At gatherings of climate change skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Lindzen has been treated as a star. During a debate in Australia over carbon taxes, his work was cited repeatedly. When he appears at conferences of the Heartland Institute, the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism, he is greeted by thunderous applause.

We are in a special moment that will not last beyond the end of this century: Paper books are plentiful. They are cheap and everywhere, from airports to drug stores to libraries to bookstores to the shelves of millions of homes. There has never been a better time to be a lover of paper books. But very rapidly the production of paper books will essentially cease, and the collections in homes will dwindle, and even local libraries will not be supported to house books -- particularly popular titles. Rare books will collect in a few rare book libraries, and for the most part common paper books archives will become uncommon. It seems hard to believe now, but within a few generations, seeing a actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion.

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

Dr. Oreskes is fast becoming one of the biggest names in climate science — not as a climatologist, but as a defender who uses the tools of historical scholarship to counter what she sees as ideologically motivated attacks on the field.

Formally, she is a historian of science

Dr. Oreskes’s approach has been to dig deeply into the history of climate change denial, documenting its links to other episodes in which critics challenged a developing scientific consensus.

You know the situation is getting desperate when three bioethicists propose genetically modifying humans to reduce our environmental impact. In a bizarre paper titled ‘Human engineering and climate change’, Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache argue we should seriously consider technologies to engineer human bodies to reduce carbon emissions.

The paper, to be published in a respectable journal, is beyond satire and its only likely effect is to bring the philosophy profession into disrepute. Philosophy, it seems, does not have a ‘laugh test’ for filtering out whacky proposals. So why stop at cat’s eyes and midget babies? Why not genetically modify people to make them white in order to cool the Earth by increasing its reflectivity?

The three bioethicists suggest that people who are appalled at the idea of human engineering may have a “status quo bias”, resisting their innovative ideas because of an inherent conservatism.

How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you

studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes.

A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found

Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability.

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged.

it’s increasingly clear that many academics know exactly what they’re getting into, which explains why these journals have proliferated despite wide criticism. The relationship is less predator and prey, some experts say, than a new and ugly symbiosis.

“When hundreds of thousands of publications appear in predatory journals, it stretches credulity to believe all the authors and universities they work for are victims,” Derek Pyne, an economics professor at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, wrote in a op-ed published in the Ottawa Citizen, a Canadian newspaper.

The journals are giving rise to a wider ecosystem of pseudo science. For the academic who wants to add credentials to a resume, for instance, publishers also hold meetings where, for a hefty fee, you can be listed as a presenter — whether you actually attend the meeting or not.

Although there are plenty of grounds for rage against the big banks, the challenge is to sort out which are the activities that grow the real economy of goods and services, and which are the activities that are essentially a zero-sum game of socially useless gambling?

The situation today is that the zero-sum games of the financial sector aren’t just a tiny sideshow. They have grown exponentially and have become almost the main game of the financial sector.

When finance becomes the end, not the means, then the result is what analyst Gautam Mukunda calls “excessive financialization” of the economy, as his excellent article by “The Price of Wall Street Power” in the June 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review makes clear.

Any discussion of Einstein should begin with what is probably his single greatest contribution to physics—the theory of relativity.

Between the late 1600s and the beginning of the 20th century, the field of physics was dominated by the ideas of Isaac Newton. The Newtonian laws of motion and gravitation had, up to that point in time, been the most successful scientific theory in all of history.

Newton’s ideas were, of course, challenged from time to time during those two centuries, but these ideas always seemed to hold up

Albert Einstein is justly famous for devising his theory of relativity, which revolutionized our understanding of space, time, gravity, and the universe. Relativity also showed us that matter and energy are just two different forms of the same thing—a fact that Einstein expressed as E=mc2, the most widely recognized equation in history.

Credit for inventing paper towels goes to the Scott Paper Company of Pennsylvania, which introduced the disposable product in 1907 as a more hygienic alternative to cloth towels. But in the very first physics article that Einstein ever published, he did analyze wicking: the phenomenon that allows paper towels to soak up liquids even when gravity wants to drag the fluid downward.

Again, Einstein didn’t invent solar cells; the first crude versions of them date back to 1839. But he did sketch out their basic principle of operation in 1905. His starting point was a simple analogy: If matter is lumpy—that is, if every substance in the universe consists of atoms and molecules—then surely light must be lumpy as well.

Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes.

Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.” Now in college, they represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.

the decline in cursive seems inevitable. Writing is, after all, a technology, and most technologies are sooner or later surpassed and replaced.

Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved

The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue

Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.

stock would crumble like a paper bag."

"big tax shelter" for Amazon since the paper is "losing a fortune."

Amazon is a "no profit" company.