Sketch
Accidental climate science
Records kept for harvests, gods, festivals, and trade now tell us about the changing climate.
Alexander "Sasha" Kaurov
Alexander "Sasha" Kaurov is a PhD Astrophysicist and Affiliate Research Scientist at the Blue Marble Institute of Science. Currently, he is a PhD student at the School of Science and Society at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
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
Our research
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
Our research
“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.
AI
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
News
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.
AI
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
Our research
Unspoken Crisis: What Our Analysis of 700,000 U.S. Catholic Services Did Not Find
Climate change is no longer a distant “global issue.” It is local emergencies that carry the names of friends and neighbors. Heat waves, wildfires, flash floods, and other extreme weather events are becoming more frequent worldwide and more attributable to climate change. And yet, hardly anyone is talking about it,
Astro
Mars as a Red Herring in Climate Conversations
Mars has been a place for dreams for a long time. A god of war, a planet, the home of invaders in science fiction, more recently the scientific and space exploration frontier. The details change, but the function remains the same. Mars is a projection surface. It absorbs whatever story
Essays
Lineages of Science in a Warming World: Who Owns Climate Knowledge?
Science is often spoken of as if it were a single institution: what science says, what science has shown. In practice, it is a tangle of labs, companies, contracts, grants, and norms that fall, broadly, into three lineages. One lineage is public and mostly open. It lives in universities, government
News
Launching Reckoning Science
We believe in science and its achievements, but also in the need to examine how it is actually made, including its limits and its entanglements with politics, money, and power.
AI
AI will soon be able to audit all published research – what will that mean for public trust in science?
Self-correction is fundamental to science. One of its most important forms is peer review, when anonymous experts scrutinise research before it is published. This helps safeguard the accuracy of the written record. Yet problems slip through. A range of grassroots and institutional initiatives work to identify problematic papers, strengthen the