The earliest detection of plastic inside animals dates to around 1960s. Starving prions started eating plastic pellets probably confusing them with food. Read more in our new post: reckoningscience.org/when-starvin...
Reckoning Science
@reckoningscience.org
Publication by @naomioreskes.bsky.social and @kaurov.org
Australia's regulator dropped nine positive studies from its review not for their methods, but because one co-author was later found to have faked data in a different paper. Same review kept negative studies we'd argue have integrity problems it never addressed: reckoningscience.org/how-australi...
How Australia and NZ weighed the paraquat and Parkinson's evidence
On 24 July 2026, Syngenta announced it was withdrawing every paraquat product it sells in Australia and New Zealand. The reason given by the company's managing director for the region was not safety: ...
reckoningscience.org
Hallucination gets credited as AI's creativity and blamed for vibe-papers flooding the journals. This essay collects episodes from the history of astronomy where imagination reaching beyond the data (aka hallucinations) both made and unmade science. reckoningscience.org/hallucinatio...
Hallucination and Scientific Integrity at Both Ends of the Ocular
The word “hallucination” has gotten a lot of mixed rep in science. “Hallucinated” references are a tell of lousy research, and vibe-written papers flooding the journals. At the same time, the word wa...
reckoningscience.org
Is one in a million a good chance? It depends and it's subjective. Yet it's the standard widely adopted for public exposure to harm. How it came to be: nuclear tests, Dutch dikes, carcinogens. ➡️ reckoningscience.org/one-in-a-mil...
One in a Million: How we choose what risk is acceptable
What is an acceptable risk? We, as individuals, can adopt different operational heuristics for handling risk in our daily lives, when it comes to personal, financial or health choices. But environment...
reckoningscience.org
How did an arbitrary factor of 100 get engraved into chemical safety law worldwide? Our new essay digs into the origins. Of Mice and Men and Round Numbers 💯 reckoningscience.org/of-mice-and-... With @naomioreskes.bsky.social and Katya Khramtsova
Cherry blossom dates, wine harvests, lake freezes, river breakups — records kept for harvests, gods, festivals, and trade, never meant as climate science. Together, they now show how much the climate has shifted within a single lifetime. ➡️ reckoningscience.org/accidental-c...
We emailed a journal editor asking to retract a ghostwritten Monsanto paper on glyphosate safety. He told us we were the first to ask — eight years after the fraud was exposed. By @kaurov.org, Jason MacLean & @naomioreskes.bsky.social 🔗 reckoningscience.org/everybodys-b...
“Everybody's business is nobody's business, and nobody's business is my business”
The editor told us that we were the first ones to ask for retraction.
reckoningscience.org
SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites. Reflect Orbital wants 50,000 giant mirrors. Neither properly consulted scientists. Public comment closes this week: March 6 (SpaceX) and March 9 (Reflect Orbital). Your voice matters. reckoningscience.org/lets-stop-do... 🔭 #DarkSkies #LightPollution
Let's stop doing irreversible things. Do we need a million satellites?
The FCC public comment period for two major satellite proposals is closing fast.
reckoningscience.org
Calling for opinions from astronomers, astrophysicists, and scientists in related fields: How is AI reshaping what it means to do astronomy? Read more about our call on @reckoningscience.org reckoningscience.org/observing-ai...
Observing AI Entering Astrophysics:A Series Introduction and Request for Perspectives
Astronomy may be the natural science which AI rewires first. Its infrastructure is unusually open. Most data is public. The scientific record is mostly open through online preprint servers. Core softw...
reckoningscience.org
My latest: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Next column will address needed guardrails for private funding of science, esp. in light of #Epstein/ #Summers etc.
Private money cannot replace public funding of science
Who should pay for American science? In the current political climate, many are looking to the private sector to compensate for cuts in public funding. At the Harvard School of Public Health—particula...
science.org
We analyzed 700,000 U.S. Catholic services to ask a simple question: how often do congregations hear about climate change? The answer: almost never. Read more: reckoningscience.org/unspoken-cri... With @naomioreskes.bsky.social at @reckoningscience.org
Unspoken Crisis: What Our Analysis of 700,000 U.S. Catholic Services Did Not Find
Climate change is no longer a distant “global issue.” It is local emergencies that carry the names of friends and neighbors. Heat waves, wildfires, flash floods, and other extreme weather events are b...
reckoningscience.org
Is Mars just a red herring in climate conversations? With @naomioreskes.bsky.social for @reckoningscience.org 👉 reckoningscience.org/mars-as-a-re...
Mars as a Red Herring in Climate Conversations
Mars has been a place for dreams for a long time. A god of war, a planet, the home of invaders in science fiction, more recently the scientific and space exploration frontier. The details change, but ...
reckoningscience.org
When corporate science eclipses public data and models, it shapes who knows climate risk and how decisions get made. Read more: "Lineages of Science in a Warming World: Who Owns Climate Knowledge?" by @kaurov.org and @naomioreskes.bsky.social 👉 reckoningscience.org/lineages-of-...
Lineages of Science in a Warming World: Who Owns Climate Knowledge?
Science is often spoken of as if it were a single institution: what science says, what science has shown. In practice, it is a tangle of labs, companies, contracts, grants, and norms that fall, broadl...
reckoningscience.org
Excited to announce that my post doc, Sasha Kaurov, and I are launching reckoningscience.org/launching-re... Please take a look, read, and subscribe! All proceeds will go to supporting the underfed post-doc.
Launching Reckoning Science
We believe in science and its achievements, but also in the need to examine how it is actually made, including its limits and its entanglements with politics, money, and power.
reckoningscience.org