Alexander "Sasha" Kaurov is a PhD astrophysicist. He is a fellow at Motu Research and an affiliate scientist at Blue Marble Space. Currently, he is a PhD student at the School of Science and Society, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
On 24 July 2026, Syngenta announced it was withdrawing every paraquat product it sells in Australia and New Zealand. The reason given by the company's managing director for the region was not safety: “Regulatory constraints, combined with a highly complex and increasingly expensive supply chain, have made the
AI
The word “hallucination” has gotten a lot of mixed rep in science. “Hallucinated” references are a tell of lousy research, and vibe-written papers flooding the journals. At the same time, the word was used in the 2024 Nobel-winning method for deep-network “hallucinating” of proteins (Anishchenko et al.
Essays
What is an acceptable risk? We, as individuals, can adopt different operational heuristics for handling risk in our daily lives, when it comes to personal, financial or health choices. But environmental and pollution issues affect whole communities, or even the whole planet, so we have to arrive at some common
External Publications
In this piece for The Conversation NZ, I show how bad science (manufactured mostly in the US) penetrates regulation worldwide, and how small countries without their own research capacity become dependent on it. New Zealand's approval of Roundup rests on three Monsanto-shaped reviews we've written
Essays
What does it mean for a chemical to be safe? The chemical industry as we know it is largely a child of the Second World War. The capacities built for the war effort — synthetic organic chemistry at industrial scale, nerve-agent research having common origin with pesticide research, polymer and
AI
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.
Sketch
Records kept for harvests, gods, festivals, and trade now tell us about the changing climate.
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
Our research
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?
Our research
The editor told us that we were the first ones to ask for retraction.
AI
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
News
The FCC public comment period for two major satellite proposals is closing fast.