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 environmental and pollution issues affect whole communities, or even the whole planet, so we have to arrive at some common

Imported Science: How Compromised American Science Underwrites New Zealand's Regulation

In this piece for The Conversation NZ, I show how bad science (manufactured mostly in the US) penetrates regulation worldwide, and how small countries without their own research capacity become dependent on it. New Zealand's approval of Roundup rests on three Monsanto-shaped reviews we've written

Managing the pitfalls of private money

In a new piece in Science, Naomi Oreskes argues that the postwar bargain between American science and the federal government can no longer be taken for granted. As public funding falters, private money is moving to fill the gap. That brings a familiar risk: funders quietly reshaping the research agenda.

Of Mice and Men and Round Numbers

What does it mean for a chemical to be safe? The chemical industry as we know it is largely a child of the Second World War. The capacities built for the war effort — synthetic organic chemistry at industrial scale, nerve-agent research having common origin with pesticide research, polymer and

What Grokipedia Says About Science

Wikipedia's value is in its shared, if imperfect, factual reality, with edits tracked in public and editors who are, for all their biases, still human.

Accidental climate science

Records kept for harvests, gods, festivals, and trade now tell us about the changing climate.

The Editorial that Defends a Ghostwritten Paper by Citing Additional Ghostwritten Papers

A few days ago, sixty-four individuals co-signed an editorial in Archives of Toxicology calling for the reversal of the November 2025 retraction of Williams, Kroes & Munro 2000 (hereafter WKM2000), published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. The editorial, authored by Christopher Borgert and 63 others, appeared

When a Chatbot Says Water Is More Dangerous Than Glyphosate

Half the world now uses generative AI assistants (Stanford HAI, 2026). Many of the queries ordinary people ask land on questions about science, including the contested-science topics this newsletter covers. So we decided to check something simple: how do these everyday AI assistants answer? Do they give consistent answers?

Penny wise, pound foolish

How much does it really cost to answer a tough scientific question? We recently attended a glyphosate symposium. It was fascinating to hear the state of modern science around glyphosate from toxicologists, epidemiologists, regulatory scientists, and advocates. One theme that caught our attention was how "expensive" these experiments

“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.

“Health for all, Hunger for None.”

The Bayer slogan behind a federal act invocation. Here Nina B. Elkadi and Naomi Oreskes discuss President Trump's invocation of the Defense Production Act to boost glyphosate (Roundup) production, arguing that the "national security" framing is unwarranted since the herbicide is primarily used on crops for

How AI Unsettles the Apprenticeship in Astronomy

This essay is part of Observing AI Entering Astrophysics series. Astronomy apprenticeship in the United States is facing a perfect storm. Federal funding for graduate training has contracted sharply: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards in physics and astronomy were cut roughly in half in 2025, and the proposed FY2026