Essays
De Minimis, or "Sheer Nonsense"
The origin of the threshold below which a chemical in food need not be tested
Essays
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
External Publications
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
Essays
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
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
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.
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