Science Ranks Grow Thin in Trump Administration
Hundreds of scientists across the federal government have been forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office.
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Hundreds of scientists across the federal government have been forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office.
Eight years ago, President Vladimir Putin decreed that Russia must become a leading scientific power. That meant at least five top-100 Russian universities by 2020, and a dramatic increase in the number of global citations of Russian scientific papers. Now a group at the center of Putin’s aspirations, the Russian Academy of Sciences, has dropped a bombshell into the plans. A commission set up by the academy has led to the retraction of at least 869 Russian scientific articles, mainly for plagiarism.
Facing unbearable heat, Qatar has begun to air-condition the outdoors"><meta name="description" content="For Qatar, global warming is an engineering problem. But while it may be able to cool outdoor malls and stadiums, it cannot cool the entire country.
In the spirit of acknowledging and normalizing failure in the process, a doctoral student defended her dissertation in a skirt made of rejection letters from the course of her PhD.
President Trump revived the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology on Tuesday after nearly two years without it.
A decades-long ecological experiment in South Carolina has shown the power of a straightforward way to improve wildlife habitats: connect them. Scientists say the study’s results, published Thursday in the journal Science, offer the most compelling evidence yet that connected habitats flourish for years.
Presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology acknowledged in separate announcements this week that their connections to financier Jeffrey Epstein went deeper than previously revealed, further entangling the elite institutions with a donor who was a convicted sex offender.
Nearly a week before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicly backed President Trump over its own scientists, a top NOAA official warned its staff against contradicting the president. This happened hours after Trump asserted, with no evidence, that Alabama "would most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated" by hurricane Dorian, and days before he showed a hurricane map modified with a hand-drawn, half-circle around Alabama.
The Trump administration is limiting scientific input to the 2020 dietary guidelines, raising concerns among nutrition advocates and independent experts about industry influence over healthy eating recommendations for all Americans.
New Jersey may seem an unlikely place to measure climate change, but it is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation. Its average temperature has climbed by close to 2 degrees Celsius since 1895 — double the average for the Lower 48 states.
Targeting a general audience, this opinion piece argues that with more transparency about the publication process, we might have a more nuanced understanding of how knowledge is built - and fewer people taking “peer-reviewed” to mean settled truth.
A team of researchers inside Pfizer made a startling find in 2015: The company’s blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis therapy Enbrel, a powerful anti-inflammatory drug, appeared to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 64 percent.
Science is never the work of one person; it is the collaborative effort of students, technicians, professors, librarians and the support networks around them. This week, millions of girls and women around the world who have been told science is not for them found a new role model in Bouman - a new data point that told them yes you can.
Shell, citing its positions on climate change, quits an industry trade group. But critics say the oil giant should leave other trade groups as well. Shell said it used four markers in evaluating its trade group memberships: support for the Paris climate agreement, support for carbon taxes, policies encouraging low-carbon technologies and a continuing role for natural gas, which now makes up more than half of Shell’s business.
The extraordinary standoff between the CDC and a drug company over patent rights raises a big question for the Trump administration: How aggressively should the government attempt to enforce its patents against an industry partner?
The White House is working to assemble a panel to assess whether climate change poses a national security threat, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, a conclusion that federal intelligence agencies have affirmed several times since President Trump took office.
While 18,000 retractions may sound like a lot, that amount is clearly just a fraction of the total number of papers that are a problem, as surveys indicate.
They refuse to see me as a member of the professional and intellectual community.
Over the last decade, Russian academics and activists have built free, remarkably comprehensive online archives of scholarly works.
From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.
Information about participants in the unprecedented “All of Us” study is protected from inquiries by law enforcement, officials said.
A revolution in college course materials is raising questions about cost, access, and fairness. Publishers say their high-tech courseware - electronic books glowing with videos and interactive study guides - can improve the quality of learning at a small fraction of the cost of traditional textbooks. But student advocates call for adoption of open-source textbooks that can be downloaded for free and worry that the same companies that drove up the price of print textbooks are dominating the digital space and will ultimately introduce higher costs there.
Agency analysts are told to avoid these 7 banned words and phrases in budget documents.
The awarding of the grants comes as the Trump administration has proposed slashing federal science budgets and has dropped out of the Paris climate accord.
The Financial Times disclosed that Springer Nature has blocked access in China to at least 1,000 articles from the websites of two of its journals in response to Beijing’s censorship demands.