Essays
De Minimis, or "Sheer Nonsense"
The origin of the threshold below which a chemical in food need not be tested
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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.
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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.
AI
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.
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Accidental climate science
Records kept for harvests, gods, festivals, and trade now tell us about the changing climate.
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?