"Compromised science" news/opines (includes retractions, declining academic standards, pred-J, etc)

Science Is Drowning in AI Slop
https://archive.ph/4eweT

EXCERPTS: For more than a century, scientific journals have been the pipes through which knowledge of the natural world flows into our culture. Now they’re being clogged with AI slop. Scientific publishing has always had its plumbing problems. [...] But the editors and unpaid reviewers who act as guardians of the scientific literature are newly besieged. Almost immediately after large language models went mainstream, manuscripts started pouring into journal inboxes in unprecedented numbers...

[...] Given that it’s so easy to publish on preprint servers, they may be the places where AI slop has its most powerful diluting effect on scientific discourse. At scientific journals, especially the top ones, peer reviewers like Quintana will look at papers carefully. But this sort of work was already burdensome for scientists, even before they had to face the glut of chatbot-made submissions, and the AIs themselves are improving, too. Easy giveaways, such as the false citation that Quintana found, may disappear completely. Automated slop-detectors may also fail. If the tools become too good, all of scientific publishing could be upended... (MORE - details)

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Lithium mining study is retracted despite authors’ protests
https://cen.acs.org/research-integrity/Lithium-mining-study-retracted-despite/104/web/2026/01

EXCERPT: . . . earlier this month, the journal retracted the paper, prompting one of the study authors to claim that parties with vested interests in mining projects are responsible for the move.

Rio Tinto welcomes the decision. “The original paper misrepresented scientific principles and presented incomplete and inaccurate data, deliberately fueling misinformation and misleading the Serbian public,” Chad Blewitt, Rio Tinto’s managing director for the project, says in a statement.

Blewitt’s statement continues: “This decision is a clear reminder of the harm caused when false information is presented as science. Jadar is one of the most studied lithium deposits in the world and has been designated as a strategic project by the European Union. The retraction reinforces the critical need for fact-based dialogue and transparency in responsibly assessing opportunities for critical minerals development.” (MORE - details)
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Dr. Michael Greger’s bias is food for thought
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/m...oscience/dr-michael-gregers-bias-food-thought

INTRO: How can we distinguish between a sufficiently objective science communicator and an advocate? Communicating science to the public means choosing scientific papers, reading them, and appraising their worth before synthesizing all of this knowledge. We try to do it as impartially as we can… but what if we are ideologically biased?

Dr. Michael Greger is a well-known physician and communicator online. Since 2011, he has been the founder (and now Chief Science Officer) of NutritionFacts.org, which he calls a non-commercial public service meant to educate people on nutrition. It’s a slick, multimedia empire: over a dozen employees and volunteers managing near-daily video uploads, as well as articles and podcast episodes (although the same content ends up feeding all of these platforms).

Outside of the Internet, Greger also gives talks. In early March, he will be part of the Holistic Holiday at Sea, a cruise that will take wellness hopefuls from Galveston, Texas, to Mexico and Honduras and back. Greger’s videos—where he discusses scientific studies in voiceover—are clear, well-produced, and short. So, what’s the problem?

Greger is a vegan, which in itself is not troublesome. But it seems to motivate him to say things that are not borne out by the data... (MORE - details)
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Back and forth on the value of replication
https://goodscience.substack.com/p/back-and-forth-on-the-value-of-replication

My friend Jordan Dworkin recently wrote an excellent piece titled, “How Much Should We Spend on Scientific Replication?” It is the first attempt to model the probability that funding replication studies will be more impactful than just funding new scientific studies...

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Five major challenges for medical bibliometrics
https://ugeskriftet.dk/dmj/five-major-challenges-medical-bibliometrics

A fundamental requirement for bibliometric measurements is, of course, their reliability, which is closely related to their value. As described below, however, bibliometrics now faces an increasing number of serious problems and pitfalls that question its value – and hence its usefulness and very existence...

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Are India’s private universities hacking global rankings?
https://www.financialexpress.com/jo...universities-hacking-global-rankings/4119122/

In most global rankings – such as the QS and ARWU (Shanghai Ranking) – IITs and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) are the best India has to offer to the world. [...] But a startling trend that has raised eyebrows amongst academics is that these novice institutes posted ‘Research Quality’ scores that rival the likes of Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale, and far surpass IISc and IITs...
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The UK government is backing AI that can run its own lab experiments
https://www.technologyreview.com/20...cientists-that-can-run-their-own-experiments/

“There are better uses for a PhD student than waiting around in a lab until 3 a.m. to make sure an experiment is run to the end,” says Ant Rowstron, ARIA’s chief technology officer...

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Fudging or fraud?
https://fosci.substack.com/p/fudging-or-fraud

Irrespective of the approaches taken, research fraud will continue to pose a problem for universities and the higher education sector as a whole. There is much to be said for the threat of potential criminal prosecution...

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Critical social-media posts linked to retractions of scientific papers
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04146-6

Posts on social-media platform X that are critical of scientific research can act as early warning signs of problematic articles, according to two large studies. The findings reflect how post-publication commentary can help to identify errors nd fraudulent results, say scientists...
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Betting blind on AI and the scientific mind
https://www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-intelligence/betting-blind-on-ai-and-the-scientific-mind/

EXCERPTS: . . . we were debating whether to ban AI use for thesis proposals and dissertations, despite the technical impossibility of enforcing a ban. [...] The worry of “cognitive debt,” or skill decay, or however you want to frame the general issue, feels legitimate to me. But so does the counterargument that these worries are overblown. And the more I’ve looked for evidence that might settle the question, the more I’ve come to believe that the evidence doesn’t exist—at least not for the population actually practicing science.

Anyone who writes seriously will recognize how useful writing can be in the thinking process. You’re working on an aims page that seemed clear in your head, but it’s just not working when you try to write it down. The logic that felt sturdy in your mind keeps crumbling on the page. You rearrange, and now something else breaks. After an hour of struggle, you realize that what felt like a communication problem is turning out to be a thinking problem, one you couldn’t see until the writing forced you to confront it.

The writing-as-thinking assertion has many proponents—whom we might call in this context the “cognitive traditionalists.” As the writer Flannery O’Connor memorably put it: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Or as Richard Feynman said of his notebooks: “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process.” (MORE - details)
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C C said:
Betting blind on AI and the scientific mind
https://www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-intelligence/betting-blind-on-ai-and-the-scientific-mind/

EXCERPTS: . . . we were debating whether to ban AI use for thesis proposals and dissertations, despite the technical impossibility of enforcing a ban. [...] The worry of “cognitive debt,” or skill decay, or however you want to frame the general issue, feels legitimate to me. But so does the counterargument that these worries are overblown. And the more I’ve looked for evidence that might settle the question, the more I’ve come to believe that the evidence doesn’t exist—at least not for the population actually practicing science.

Anyone who writes seriously will recognize how useful writing can be in the thinking process. You’re working on an aims page that seemed clear in your head, but it’s just not working when you try to write it down. The logic that felt sturdy in your mind keeps crumbling on the page. You rearrange, and now something else breaks. After an hour of struggle, you realize that what felt like a communication problem is turning out to be a thinking problem, one you couldn’t see until the writing forced you to confront it.

The writing-as-thinking assertion has many proponents—whom we might call in this context the “cognitive traditionalists.” As the writer Flannery O’Connor memorably put it: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Or as Richard Feynman said of his notebooks: “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process.” (MORE - details)
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This is obviously true. Writing something down so that it can be understood by another reader is critical to getting one's ideas straight. When one does this, one implicitly plays devil's advocate, thinking about clarity and how what one says might be open to being misconstrued. Unlike when one is in conversation, in writing one cannot go back and add supplementary statements to clarify meaning, correct misunderstandings or errors in communication. It has to be right first time.

I have quite frequently found that when I try to commit an argument to paper it doesn't stand up, initially. So then I have to revise it, find supporting justification or whatever else is lacking.
 
Machine learning based screening of potential paper mill publications in cancer research: methodological and cross-sectional study
https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj-2025-087581

OBJECTIVE: To train and validate a machine learning model to distinguish paper mill publications from genuine cancer research articles, and to screen the cancer research literature to assess the prevalence of papers that have textual similarities to paper mill papers. [...] Paper mills are a large and growing problem in the cancer literature and are not restricted to low impact journals. Collective awareness and action will be crucial to address the problem of paper mill publications... (MORE - details)

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Largest leucovorin-autism trial retracted
https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/largest-leucovorin-autism-trial-retracted/

EXCERPTS: The largest study to date of leucovorin’s effectiveness for treating autism traits has been retracted because of data inconsistencies and statistical issues, according to a notice posted last week by the European Journal of Pediatrics. [...] “The retraction of this paper removes a significant portion of the already weak evidence supporting the value of folinic acid as a treatment for autism,” Thomas Challman, a pediatrician at Geisinger College of Health Sciences who specializes in neurodevelopmental conditions, wrote in an email to The Transmitter. “Until we have acceptable evidence of safety and effectiveness, folinic acid use as a treatment for autism is not appropriate outside of a well-designed clinical trial.” (MORE - details)

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Citation cartels use fake author names to target chemistry journals
https://cen.acs.org/research-integrity/Citation-cartels-use-fake-author/104/web/2026/02

INTRO: Citation cartels—shady companies that sell citations in papers to academics willing to pay—are targeting chemistry journals run by prominent academic publishers. These cartels are exploiting the waivers that scholarly journals offer to academics from war-torn regions or low-income countries to publish papers in open-access journals that typically charge an article-processing charge (APC).

Since last May, at least 20 such papers listing fake author names have been published in chemistry journals put out by prominent academic publishers. The purpose of the scheme is to artificially boost the citation counts of researchers who are cited in the papers, says Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at the Free University of Berlin and a well-known research integrity sleuth who uncovered the trend. These citation cartels typically charge researchers $5–$10 per reference, she says... (MORE - details)

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Back to basics: Why AI disclosures in publishing should center on accountability, not reporting
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org...hat-publishers-should-not-do-about-it-part-2/

INTRO: This article is the second in a two-part series on AI disclosures in scholarly publishing. In Part 1, I argued that despite widespread AI use by researchers, author disclosure remains the exception rather than the norm. I explored why current disclosure guidelines are failing and why fear, ambiguity, and burden are driving AI use underground rather than making it transparent. In this follow-up, I turn to the more challenging question: what publishers should do about it.

The central mistake publishers make is assuming that more detailed reporting of AI use will lead to greater research integrity. In practice, the opposite seems to be happening. Overly demanding and vague disclosure requirements have created a transparency vacuum while doing little to protect what matters most in science: replication, reproducibility, and trust in the scholarly record. The way forward is not more surveillance of authors’ workflows, but a renewed emphasis on author responsibility and outcome-based integrity... (MORE - details)
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Scientists could help reveal fraud — and get paid for it
https://undark.org/2026/02/09/opinion-whistleblower-university/

EXCERPT: Are universities and their scientists eligible to receive rewards like those that whistleblowers who expose fraud receive? Only in limited circumstances. Even when successful, it’s a challenging process that may, for example, involve the need to file a lawsuit, and so discourages scientists from participating. Yet, WVU and its researchers did a tremendous public service, and in order to encourage other universities to do the same, we should change the whistleblower statutes to help them access a share of the fines paid to the government for such egregious public cheating and fraud... (MORE - details)
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AI is not a peer, so it can’t do peer review
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/ai-not-peer-so-it-cant-do-peer-review

If we still believe that science is a vocation grounded in argument, curiosity and care, we can’t delegate judgement to machines, says Akhil Bhardwaj...

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The Lancet refuses to retract Banerjee’s fraud
https://drpeterwilmshurst.wordpress.com/2026/02/09/the-lancet-refuses-to-retract-banerjees-fraud/

In the last blog, I also wrote that Banerjee and his research supervisor, Professor Tim Peters, sent a letter to the Lancet to say that their data, which we now know were entirely fabricated, supported research claims of another prominent research fraudster, Andrew Wakefield...

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Libraries on the frontline: protecting research integrity
https://www.researchinformation.inf...-the-frontline-protecting-research-integrity/

You’d have to have a laser focus elsewhere not to notice the growing concern about research integrity. In recent months there have been many reports, conference sessions and webinars all looking at the risks institutions and researchers face when research is of uncertain quality or dubious provenance. Librarians are at the forefront of addressing this challenge: they lead their institutions in understanding its causes and confronting strategic risks to trust, reputation and funding...

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A framework for assessing the trustworthiness of scientific research findings

ABSTRACT: Vigorous debate has erupted over the trustworthiness of scientific research findings in a number of domains. The question “what makes research findings trustworthy?” elicits different answers depending on whether the emphasis is on research integrity and ethics, research methods, transparency, inclusion, assessment and peer review, or scholarly communication.

Each provides partial insight. We offer a systems approach that focuses on whether the research is accountable, evaluable, well-formulated, has been evaluated, controls for bias, reduces error, and whether the claims are warranted by the evidence. We tie each of these components to measurable indicators of trustworthiness for evaluating the research itself, the researchers conducting the research, and the organizations supporting the research.

Our goals are to offer a framework that can be applied across methods, approaches, and disciplines and to foster innovation in development of trustworthiness indicators. Developing valid indicators will improve the conduct and assessment of research and, ultimately, public understanding and trust.

FULL TEXT

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What science should learn from the Epstein files
https://cen.acs.org/policy/research-funding/science-should-learn-Epstein-files/104/web/2026/02

EXCERPT: The latest release of files relating to Jeffrey Epstein includes yet more examples of how entwined the financier and child sex offender was with the scientific establishment. No doubt the scientists who feature in the newly released documents, including several chemists, will come under scrutiny now—though having your name in the files is hardly conclusive evidence of any guilt.

Researchers can’t be blamed for writing to Epstein, at least before his 2008 conviction. But Epstein continued to donate money and cultivate networks of power and influence up to his 2019 arrest and death.

Let’s be clear: Epstein’s crimes were reprehensible. His influence on the world of science was also corrosive. But the case lays bare the realities of power and patronage that have been true for centuries... (MORE - details)
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Could we get ahead of research integrity issues?
https://scholarlyfutures.substack.com/p/could-we-get-ahead-of-research-integrity

INTRO: Research integrity is a shifting goal. Every few years, new ways in which trust in research has been breached come to light, and this is speeding up as generative AI becomes a larger player in the research ecosystem. Is there a way we can get ahead of it, while maintaining a system based on trust that does not overly burden the majority of authors who are honest? (MORE - details)

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China to punish universities that fail to sanction research misconduct
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00321-5

INTRO: China’s science ministry will crack down on universities that fail to investigate or sanction researchers who are involved in serious research misconduct. The move is part of a renewed push to get academics and their institutions to take scientific integrity more seriously. The nation’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) said in a notification on its website that institutions should focus on investigating papers that are retracted in international science journals as a result of misconduct. The results of those investigations will be publicized to enhance deterrence. Institutions will face serious penalties if they conceal or tolerate wrongdoing by their researchers, the note states, although it does not reveal what those penalties might be....(MORE - details)

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How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03967-9

EXCERPT: Computer science was a growing field before the advent of LLMs, but it is now at breaking point. The 2026 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) has received more than 24,000 submissions — more than double that of the 2025 meeting. One reason for the boom is that LLM adoption has increased researcher productivity, by as much as 89.3%, according to research published in Science in December1.

“It’s a volume far beyond what the current review system was designed to handle,” and makes “thorough and careful evaluation increasingly infeasible”, says Seulki Lee, a computer scientist at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea. Volume is not the only problem. Many authors fail to properly validate or verify AI-generated contents, says Lee... (MORE - details)

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Why India tops the charts in retracted health research papers
https://www.theweek.in/news/health/...ealth-research-papers-or-expert-insights.html

EXCERPTS: Scientific retractions, once considered rare corrective measures, have quietly emerged as one of the strongest indicators of stress within global research ecosystems.

Today, they reflect deeper challenges around research integrity, publication pressure, and peer-review accountability. India has been increasingly in the spotlight for this trend. According to a study published in PLOS Biology, “The number of retracted papers per year is increasing, with more than 10,000 papers retracted in 2023. The countries with the highest retraction rates (per 10,000 papers) are Saudi Arabia (30.6), Pakistan (28.1), Russia (24.9), China (23.5), Egypt (18.8), Malaysia (17.2), Iran (16.7), and India (15.2).”

This phenomenon is not limited to one domain; life sciences and healthcare research in India have also seen a marked increase in retractions. [...] Such trends are concerning because life sciences research plays a pivotal role in understanding diseases, improving human health, and developing new therapeutic methods.

[...] Plagiarism and compromised peer review were identified as the leading causes, highlighting the need for “stricter regulatory frameworks and better research practices.” In medicine alone, India ranks third globally, with 769 retractions out of over 23 million publications... (MORE - details)
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Medical associations trusted belief over science on youth gender care
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/...e_code=1.PFA.6rPE.8CEelUSCjZr9&smid=url-share

INTRO (excerpts): American advocates for youth gender medicine have insisted for years that overwhelming evidence favors providing gender dysphoric youth with puberty blockers, hormones and, in the case of biological females, surgery to remove their breasts.

It didn’t matter that the number of kids showing up at gender clinics had soared and that they were more likely to have complex mental health conditions [...] complicating diagnosis. ... the most important professional medical and mental health organizations in the country had been singing a similar tune...

But something confounding has happened in the last few weeks: Cracks have appeared in the supposed wall of consensus.

After expressing concerns about the evidence base in 2024, on Feb. 3, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major American medical group to publicly question youth gender medicine since its widespread adoption...

[...] The next day, the American Medical Association — which has long approved of such procedures — announced that “in the absence of clear evidence, the A.M.A. agrees with A.S.P.S. that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”

These statements were released days after a woman named Fox Varian became the first person to win a malpractice case after undergoing gender transition care and later regretting it. [...] The jury’s $2 million award will most likely give pause to hospitals and clinics that continue to provide these treatments without substantial guardrails.

The science doesn’t seem so settled after all, and it’s important to understand what happened here. The approach of left-of-center Americans and our institutions — to assume that when a scientific organization releases a policy statement on a hot-button issue, that the policy statement must be accurate — is a deeply naïve understanding of science, human nature and politics, and how they intersect.

At a time [...] when our own government is pushing scientifically baseless policies on childhood vaccination and climate change — it’s vital that the organizations that represent mainstream science be open, honest and transparent about politically charged issues. If they aren’t, there’s simply no good reason to trust them... (MORE - details)
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Two new papers are wrong about cancer risk from nuclear plants
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/two-new-papers-are-wrong-about-cancer

INTRO: In December 2025, researchers led by Yazan Alwadi at Harvard’s T.H Chan School of Public Health published a paper in Environmental Health that claimed to find that cancer incidence increased for people living closer to nuclear power plants in Massachusetts. Just this past week, the same researchers published an expanded nationwide study claiming a similar result -- this time looking at cancer mortality rates, rather than incidence -- in Nature Communications.

If these findings were true, the research would support the fringe idea that nuclear power is actively harmful to the general population even without a catastrophic failure, which has not been confirmed by past research. Anti-nuclear activists would no longer need to point to the possible risk of meltdowns; they can simply point to increased cancer risks just from living close to a plant.

That is an extraordinary claim. But the studies’ design cannot support that claim.

The problem is not that the authors found a statistical pattern. The problem is that their research design cannot determine whether proximity to a nuclear plant is the cause of that pattern. It can only show that cancer rates vary geographically and that cancer detection rates have increased over the past few decades, which we already know.

The two papers make the fundamental mistake of confusing correlation with causation.... (MORE - details)
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Poison breast milk reports turn out to be bogus science.

retractionwatch.com

Lancet flags long-scrutinized report of infant poisoned by opioids in breast milk

The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto The Lancet has put an expression of concern on a 2006 case report of a baby’s death purportedly from morphine poisoning through breast milk. The decision c…
retractionwatch.com retractionwatch.com

What brought this mess to wider attention was a New Yorker article in January.

www.newyorker.com

Did a Celebrated Researcher Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning?

After a newborn died of opioid poisoning, a new branch of pediatrics came into being. But the evidence doesn’t add up.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com

Interesting it took the New Yorker to get Lancet to retract....NOT the decade long effort of an expert in pediatric toxicology and pharma. (Cynical laugh)
 
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Two new papers are wrong about cancer risk from nuclear plants
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/two-new-papers-are-wrong-about-cancer

INTRO: In December 2025, researchers led by Yazan Alwadi at Harvard’s T.H Chan School of Public Health published a paper in Environmental Health that claimed to find that cancer incidence increased for people living closer to nuclear power plants in Massachusetts. Just this past week, the same researchers published an expanded nationwide study claiming a similar result -- this time looking at cancer mortality rates, rather than incidence -- in Nature Communications.

If these findings were true, the research would support the fringe idea that nuclear power is actively harmful to the general population even without a catastrophic failure, which has not been confirmed by past research. Anti-nuclear activists would no longer need to point to the possible risk of meltdowns; they can simply point to increased cancer risks just from living close to a plant.

That is an extraordinary claim. But the studies’ design cannot support that claim.

The problem is not that the authors found a statistical pattern. The problem is that their research design cannot determine whether proximity to a nuclear plant is the cause of that pattern. It can only show that cancer rates vary geographically and that cancer detection rates have increased over the past few decades, which we already know.

The two papers make the fundamental mistake of confusing correlation with causation.... (MORE - details)
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I get so fed up with this junk epidemiology. We see it in breathless newspaper reports all the time. My personal approach is to demand to see not only a correlation but a plausible mechanism supported by evidence as well, before I take it seriously.
 
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UH researcher disputes claim that multilingualism promotes better brain aging
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1119284

EXCERPTS: “We took a closer look and argued that the study’s conclusions go further than the data can support,” said Hernandez. [...] “There is a real temptation in science to find individual behavioral solutions: learn a language, do a puzzle, take a supplement - are all suggested as solutions to problems that are fundamentally structural,” said Hernandez. “When those solutions get oversold, it can erode public trust in science and distract from the harder work of building the conditions that actually support healthy aging: Access to healthcare, good nutrition, economic stability. We wanted to make sure the public gets an accurate picture of what the evidence shows.” (MORE - details, no ads)
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Another journal drinks the Kool-Aid: “There is no consensus on biological sex”
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2026...that-there-is-no-consensus-on-biological-sex/

INTRO: Ecology Letters, which I thought was a reasonably respectable journal, has now accepted a “viewpoint” article arguing that there is no consensus on biological sex, and that a definition based on gamete size-a consensus if ever there was one-is just viable as “multivariate” definition that incorporates a combination of chromosomes, genetics, and morphology.

They’re wrong and misguided in many ways, but, as Colin Wright notes in a tweet at bottom, there are so many mistakes and misconceptions in this paper that it would take a full reply to the journal to correct them. I’ll just tender a few comments here... (MORE - details)

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Scare science: Claims about the human health dangers of microplastics are collapsing
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/...alth-dangers-of-microplastics-are-collapsing/

INTRO: Since the rise of MAHA in US policy, journalists have been starting to question the findings of activist scientists, and instead of amplifying their campaigns and scary conclusions (as scandals and crises make better headlines), they are shining a spotlight on the nonsense being published, propagated and promoted on behalf of some undisclosed funders and special interests.

In particular, in 2026, journalists are starting to wake up to the poor research, bad methodology and lack of integrity of scientists publishing their insignificant findings and questionable conclusions from “research” on microplastics and nanoplastics claimed to be present in humans and the environment.

The realization of bad science was slow to arrive. The Firebreak was one of the few sources to report last October about the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) literature review that concluded that almost all published microplastic and nanoplastic studies were littered with mistakes, poor methodologies and unjustifiable conclusions... (MORE - details)
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The academic publishing system’s most pointless bottleneck
https://academeblog.org/2026/03/13/the-academic-publishing-systems-most-pointless-bottleneck/

INTRO: Peer-reviewed scholarship remains the central currency of academic life. It advances careers, drives innovation, informs policy, stimulates economies, and lays the groundwork for the next generation of inquiry. Yet the very system designed to vet and disseminate knowledge increasingly drains enthusiasm from scholars—especially early-career investigators—by subjecting them to burdensome, time-consuming, and often pointless article submission portals. The problem is not peer review. It is the bureaucratic machinery that now precedes it... (MORE - details)
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C C said:
INTRO: Since the rise of MAHA in US policy, journalists have been starting to question the findings of activist scientists, and instead of amplifying their campaigns and scary conclusions (as scandals and crises make better headlines), they are shining a spotlight on the nonsense being published, propagated and promoted on behalf of some undisclosed funders and special interests.

In particular, in 2026, journalists are starting to wake up to the poor research, bad methodology and lack of integrity of scientists publishing their insignificant findings and questionable conclusions from “research” on microplastics and nanoplastics claimed to be present in humans and the environment.

The realization of bad science was slow to arrive. The Firebreak was one of the few sources to report last October about the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) literature review that concluded that almost all published microplastic and nanoplastic studies were littered with mistakes, poor methodologies and unjustifiable conclusions
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Just an FYI that this is from the GLP, which is far from a nonpartisan group. Founded by a conservative from the American Enterprise Institute, Jon Entine, and co-founded and funded by the Templeton Foundation, a RWE group which promotes evangelical Christian goals, climate change denial, and generally promoting corporate interests. Under Entine, the GLP has generally cherrypicked scientific results which favor its corporate sponsors in the petrochemical industry, and also Big Agri companies like Monsanto. Sure, a lot of science reporting on microplastics is scaremongering (as even The Guardian has reported), and there's a lot of research that needs to be done, or hasn't been done at all well, but this doesn't mean that plastic has been decisively proven safe and does no harm lodged in animal tissues. If anyone here read the whole article, they found later passages that practically hyperventilate on the perfidy of scientists who are really Leftist political conspirators out to ruin the happy paradise capitalism has in store for us.

Really unfortunate when the Right accuses scientists of ideological agendas when it's abundantly clear that they themselves are quite driven by such agendas. And corporate money. Lots and lots of it.

Quick quiz: what substance are almost all pesticides, plastics, and PFAS type chemicals derived from?

Bonus question: what sorts of organizations do the makers of this substance fund to the tune of 100s of millions billions of dollars?
 
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TheVat said:
[...] Sure, a lot of science reporting on microplastics is scaremongering (as even The Guardian has reported), and there's a lot of research that needs to be done, or hasn't been done at all well, but this doesn't mean that plastic has been decisively proven safe and does no harm lodged in animal tissues. [...]
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On the flip-side, when progressive Mother Jones reproduced the Guardian article a day later, it apparently changed the title and added a subtitle to highlight the "bad" of reporting about the poor science: "Legit challenges to sloppy work are a part of science the plastics industry can easily weaponize."

They derived that from a statement in Carrington's article itself: "It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded." Since the coordinated rebuttal that the Guardian also published was over a week later (no influence from that).
Anyway, that double-edged sword approach of MJ is certainly better than either entirely ignoring or suppressing a calling out of invalid science and contingent "friendly fire" criticism of the anti-plastics movement, for fear of such being utilized by the political opposition.
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