What Grokipedia Says About Science

Wikipedia's value is in its shared, if imperfect, factual reality, with edits tracked in public and editors who are, for all their biases, still human.

Accidental climate science

Records kept for harvests, gods, festivals, and trade now tell us about the changing climate.

The Editorial that Defends a Ghostwritten Paper by Citing Additional Ghostwritten Papers

A few days ago, sixty-four individuals co-signed an editorial in Archives of Toxicology calling for the reversal of the November 2025 retraction of Williams, Kroes & Munro 2000 (hereafter WKM2000), published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. The editorial, authored by Christopher Borgert and 63 others, appeared on the

When a Chatbot Says Water Is More Dangerous Than Glyphosate

Half the world now uses generative AI assistants (Stanford HAI, 2026). Many of the queries ordinary people ask land on questions about science, including the contested-science topics this newsletter covers. So we decided to check something simple: how do these everyday AI assistants answer? Do they give consistent answers? How

Penny wise, pound foolish

How much does it really cost to answer a tough scientific question? We recently attended a glyphosate symposium. It was fascinating to hear the state of modern science around glyphosate from toxicologists, epidemiologists, regulatory scientists, and advocates. One theme that caught our attention was how "expensive" these experiments

“Everybody's business is nobody's business, and nobody's business is my business”

The editor told us that we were the first ones to ask for retraction.

“Health for all, Hunger for None.”

The Bayer slogan behind a federal act invocation. Here Nina B. Elkadi and Naomi Oreskes discuss President Trump's invocation of the Defense Production Act to boost glyphosate (Roundup) production, arguing that the "national security" framing is unwarranted since the herbicide is primarily used on crops for

How AI Unsettles the Apprenticeship in Astronomy

This essay is part of Observing AI Entering Astrophysics series. Astronomy apprenticeship in the United States is facing a perfect storm. Federal funding for graduate training has contracted sharply: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards in physics and astronomy were cut roughly in half in 2025, and the proposed FY2026

EPA throws out science in favor of anti-regulatory ideology

In her latest opinion piece for The BMJ (British Medical Journal), Naomi Oreskes examines the US Environmental Protection Agency's recent actions on climate science and glyphosate. These moves, she argues, are not really about science — they are about dismantling the regulatory state. The administration repealed the greenhouse gas

Let's stop doing irreversible things. Do we need a million satellites?

The FCC public comment period for two major satellite proposals is closing fast.

Observing AI Entering Astrophysics:A Series Introduction and Request for Perspectives

Astronomy may be the natural science which AI rewires first. Its infrastructure is unusually open. Most data is public. The scientific record is mostly open through online preprint servers. Core software is open-source. Nearly every step of the workflow is digitalized. This reduces friction for AI agents to participate. This

Private money cannot replace public funding of science

In a recent Science essay, Naomi Oreskes argues that private philanthropy and corporate investment cannot replace sustained federal funding for research. Drawing on U.S. history, she shows how public support built the long-term research infrastructure that serves a wide range of national needs, from national defense to environmental protection.