A p-value is the probability of data at least as extreme as the observed data if the null hypothesis were true — not the probability that the hypothesis is true, and not the size of the effect.
The SELECT trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2023, found semaglutide cut major cardiovascular events by a fifth in adults with existing heart disease and overweight — a benefit independent of diabetes.
Peer review is a check by outside experts on a study's methods and reasoning before publication — a filter that improves papers but cannot verify data, replicate results, or catch deliberate fraud.
Fossils are almost never dated directly. Geologists date the rock around them instead, and the method depends entirely on what happens to be nearby.
Before a scientific claim reaches print, an editor and a small group of outside experts read it first — a filter meant to catch errors, not to guarantee a finding is correct.
Animal research is an indispensable early filter, yet the large majority of promising animal results never become useful human therapies, and the reasons are structural.
Observational studies vary enormously in quality; their strength is decided by confounding control, timing of measurement, and whether the design matches its causal question.
Disclosures are standardized statements of financial and personal ties, built to reveal influence before readers judge the work, and they work only when asked for and checked.
Roughly ninety percent of the excess energy trapped by greenhouse gases ends up in the sea — and a global fleet of autonomous floats, plus satellite altimetry, measures it.
A 2025 analysis in PNAS finds reviewers often disagree with each other — and shows which specific fixes actually help.
The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 set the route from federal grant to patent to licensed startup — and federal records track the paperwork far better than the outcomes.
A 2026 study in Nature Medicine tracked a man with ALS using a brain-computer interface independently at home for nearly two years — a long-term, single-participant test of whether such systems can work outside the lab, not yet a device anyone else can buy.
Direct air capture fights thermodynamics before it fights economics: carbon dioxide is vanishingly dilute in air, and every ton collected must be paid for in energy, materials, and machines.
After decades of near-silence, new antibiotic classes are reaching patients — not by overpowering resistance, but by finding targets the older drugs never touched.
By reading gene activity one cell at a time, researchers discovered that 'identical' cells differ in ways that average measurements had smoothed away — reshaping how disease is classified.
A five-step checklist — source, study, design, size, conflicts — separates checkable findings from marketing wearing science's clothes.
Writing down the plan before the data arrive — outcomes, sample size, analysis — forecloses the quiet ways results get shaped afterward.
Exaggeration often enters the pipeline before any journalist writes a word — in the university's own announcement.
Science is cumulative by design: single findings are provisional by default, and the checks that confirm or retire them take time.
Since 2022, infrared surveys have turned up galaxies that appear surprisingly bright and mature within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang — and cosmologists are still arguing about why.
Laser altimetry from ICESat-2 and radar from Europe's Sentinel constellation track Antarctica's floating ice fronts from orbit — and their measurements define what 'collapsing' means.
LISA, adopted by ESA in 2024 for launch around 2035, will listen to spacetime ripples from space with arms 2.5 million kilometers long; on Earth, the Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer aim to follow LIGO.
Federal statistics show scientists born abroad make up a disproportionate share of the U.S. research workforce, especially at the doctoral level.
Two-year institutions train a large share of the nation's science technicians and serve as the entry ramp for transfer students who later earn STEM degrees.
Test-score declines from pandemic school closures were among the largest ever measured, and the newest national data show recovery has stalled well short of the starting line.
Since the 2013 Next Generation Science Standards, U.S. classrooms have been pushed toward students investigating rather than reciting, and the evidence behind that shift has a long paper trail.