De Minimis, or "Sheer Nonsense"

The origin of the threshold below which a chemical in food need not be tested

AI’s x-ray vision into Texas’ air limits

Texas sets its own limits for hundreds of industrial chemicals. Where they can be compared with EPA's and ATSDR's, 36 of 41 come out the same or weaker. The reasoning is buried in thousands of pages of assessment.

When starving birds started eating plastic

Seabirds picked up off Wellington beaches between 1958 and 1977 turned out to hold a record of the decade plastic arrived in the ocean.

How Australia and NZ weighed the paraquat and Parkinson's evidence

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

Hallucination and Scientific Integrity at Both Ends of the Ocular

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.

One in a Million: How we choose what risk is acceptable

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

Imported Science: How Compromised American Science Underwrites New Zealand's Regulation

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

Managing the pitfalls of private money

In a new piece in Science, Naomi Oreskes argues that the postwar bargain between American science and the federal government can no longer be taken for granted. As public funding falters, private money is moving to fill the gap. That brings a familiar risk: funders quietly reshaping the research agenda.

Of Mice and Men and Round Numbers

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

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

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?

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

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.

“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

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

External Publications

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

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.

External Publications

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

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