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.
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.
A 2025 analysis in PNAS finds reviewers often disagree with each other — and shows which specific fixes actually help.
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.
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.
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.
A five-step checklist — source, study, design, size, conflicts — separates checkable findings from marketing wearing science's clothes.
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.
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.
After decades of near-silence, new antibiotic classes are reaching patients — not by overpowering resistance, but by finding targets the older drugs never touched.
Observational studies vary enormously in quality; their strength is decided by confounding control, timing of measurement, and whether the design matches its causal question.
Federal statistics show scientists born abroad make up a disproportionate share of the U.S. research workforce, especially at the doctoral level.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Implants that translate brain signals into action pass through years of bench work, animal studies, and small human trials under close regulatory watch — the record so far is promising but short.
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.
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.
A preprint is a manuscript posted publicly before any journal has examined it, a deliberate shortcut with real speed and real hazards for readers.
Science is cumulative by design: single findings are provisional by default, and the checks that confirm or retire them take time.
Fake peer review leaves fingerprints: promises of days-fast review, unlisted editors, and fees that surface only after acceptance.
The National Ignition Facility proved ignition in 2022, and proved it again — but each shot fights a margin measured in millions of joules against imperfections measured in nanometers.
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.
An independent review put the joint NASA-ESA program's cost as high as eleven billion dollars; NASA spent 2024 dismantling and rebuilding the plan.
A meta-analysis pools the results of comparable studies into a single weighted estimate, and its findings are only as sound as the studies and the searching underneath it.
The range around a study's headline number — not the number itself — shows how much the result could plausibly move.
Earning college credit in high school has grown into one of the largest accelerated-learning channels in the country, and research links it to higher completion rates.
AlphaFold solved a fifty-year problem of predicting protein shapes from their sequences — and the harder questions it exposed are about dynamics, interactions, and what laboratories still must do.
Predoctoral stipends in the low tens of thousands filter the pool before talent ever gets tested, and federal pay tables show how slowly the numbers have moved.
Permanently shadowed craters near the Moon's south pole appear to hold water ice — a resource for science and, possibly, for future crews.
Reproducibility is checked by redoing the work under agreed conditions, and the checked results are humbler than the originals far more often than anyone expected.
The same finding can be reported as a 50 percent increase or as a few extra cases per thousand — both true, only one honest without the other.
Replacing a battery's liquid electrolyte with a solid promises safer, denser electric vehicles — but dendrites, interfaces, and manufacturing stand in the way.
As papers move from subscriptions to per-article fees, university libraries have become the parties paying to make research free, and their budgets show the strain.
Every few nights for ten years, Rubin's 3.2-gigapixel camera will re-image the entire southern sky — and flag whatever moved or brightened since the last look.
Small studies are not modest versions of large ones; they measure effects badly, exaggerate them often, and miss them entirely more than anyone plans for.
A single vivid story carries a hidden sample of one — and often a sample that survived a filter the listener never sees.
Federal rules, professional guidelines and fatal incidents have slowly pushed academic labs from informal apprenticeship toward structured chemical safety training.
Standard CRISPR cuts both strands of DNA and waits for the cell to repair the break; base and prime editing rewrite letters directly, with far fewer cuts — and different risks.
Headlines turn associations into causes because causes read better — three habits of mind restore the distinction.
A 1980 law quietly turned universities into managers of inventions, and the offices it spawned now touch everything from patents to grant budgets.
The Psyche mission, launched in October 2023, is headed for a 220-kilometer world that appears to be rich in iron and nickel — possibly the exposed core of a shattered protoplanet.
Cohort studies follow people forward through real lives, which makes them unmatched for questions randomized trials cannot ask and unreliable for claims of cause.
Microfluidic chips that shrink a wet laboratory onto a slip of plastic and glass have already changed infectious disease testing — and their hardest problems are now economic, not physical.
A three-pass strategy — abstract, figures, limitations — extracts most of a paper's value before the methods section slows a reader down.
A statistically significant result says an effect probably is not zero; the effect size says how large it actually is, and that is the number a reader needs.
Behind every federal research grant sits a layered system of expert review that decides which proposals are funded, and the process is more transparent than most readers may expect.
The 2022 T2T consortium sequence filled the last eight percent of the human genome — centromeres, satellite arrays, and other tracts the 2003 draft could not read.
Ariel will watch a thousand alien worlds cross their stars and read the light that filters through their atmospheres — a method called transit spectroscopy, and the first time it has been attempted at survey scale.
Machines that read the body's faint magnetic fields have moved from physics laboratories into early clinical studies, though regulatory approval remains limited.
Every arm of a randomized trial is a predefined group living under one rule, and the comparison between arms, not any single result, is what a trial actually measures.
Explore the data · Source: OurResearch