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Category: Science/mathematics

Here’s why weather forecasts have seemed so inaccurate lately

Here’s why weather forecasts have seemed so inaccurate lately

Gizmodo reports: Is there anything more annoying than leaving the house in shorts and flip flops, only to get caught in an unexpected downpour? The weather report is rarely spot-on, but if forecasts have seemed particularly inaccurate recently, it’s because they have been. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was among several agencies gutted by the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency in 2025. That February, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management abruptly fired 880 NOAA employees. Two months…

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Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species

Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species

Science reports: From half-meter-long moths to fairy wasps smaller than sand grains, insects come in a stunning variety of shapes and sizes and constitute the most diverse animal group on Earth. But the insect species discovered so far may represent just a fraction of the total crawling, flying, and burrowing around the planet, according to a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using statistical methods borrowed from another field, a team of entomologists…

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Beyond denial: How oil industry executives shaped a landmark climate study

Beyond denial: How oil industry executives shaped a landmark climate study

By Katie Worth This story was originally published by ProPublica It is rare that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge as daunting as climate change. But one, known as “Wedges,” published 22 years ago by researchers at Princeton University, told an irresistible story.  It made solving climate change seem possible, even simple. It claimed that the world didn’t have to wait for innovation because it had the tools to start work immediately. The trick was to…

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Why science needs the humanities more than ever

Why science needs the humanities more than ever

Xin Fan writes: A narrative has taken hold that science and the humanities are at odds. In universities around the world, investment in cutting-edge technologies often comes at the expense of retrenchment in philosophy, history, literature and the arts. Contraction of the humanities is presented as an unavoidable cost of modernization. But that ‘zero sum’ logic is flawed. As science and technology race ahead, the world needs humanities research to understand the reasons and implications. My experience at ShanghaiTech University…

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An EPA researcher details the agency’s assault on science

An EPA researcher details the agency’s assault on science

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: Thomas Luben is an epidemiologist who for nearly 20 years worked for the scientific arm of the Environmental Protection Agency — the Office of Research and Development — in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. His work focused on what are known as the “criteria pollutants,” which are regulated, under the Clean Air Act, by the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, often shortened to NAAQS (pronounced “nacks”). At the start of the second Trump administration, life for most…

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Trump is taking aim at forest and wildfire research just as the West is poised to burn

Trump is taking aim at forest and wildfire research just as the West is poised to burn

NPR reports: Few public universities get more federal research funding than the University of Washington. So as President Trump has already cancelled or suspended about a quarter of all funding for the National Science Foundation and National Institutes for Health, the atmosphere on this leafy Seattle campus is tense. White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought appears before the House Budget Committee at the U.S. Capitol on April 15. The budget office recently proposed a rule change…

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Profits before people: EPA scientists are being pushed to downplay potential risks of household products

Profits before people: EPA scientists are being pushed to downplay potential risks of household products

CNN reports: Inside the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, scientists say they’re under pressure to alter safety reviews of chemicals commonly found in consumer products like household cleaners and cosmetics to make risks to human health and the environment disappear on paper. Multiple current and former career employees at the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention recounted being pushed by supervisors to downplay the potential risk of chemicals that are already used in products on shelves. With President…

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White House seeks to impose political test on billions in federal grants

White House seeks to impose political test on billions in federal grants

The New York Times reports: The White House is seeking to exert more control over billions of dollars in annual government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding — in health, housing, science and transportation — so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump. While the administration says that its primary goal is to safeguard taxpayer money, its proposal amounts to a major escalation in its attempt to reimagine the nation’s spending,…

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Trump is destroying ‘the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems’

Trump is destroying ‘the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems’

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate. The National Science Foundation said it would send ships in June to begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea. Scientists have used…

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Federal judge blocks breakup of National Center for Atmospheric Research

Federal judge blocks breakup of National Center for Atmospheric Research

The Colorado Sun reports: A federal judge in Denver on Monday blocked federal officials from breaking up Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research by handing over a renowned supercomputing center to the University of Wyoming, in a 38-page injunction raking the Trump administration for enacting political revenge on Colorado. Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson issued an injunction because the National Science Foundation divesting the supercomputing center was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance…

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For Sergiu Klainerman, mathematics is not a human invention

For Sergiu Klainerman, mathematics is not a human invention

Steve Nadis writes: The equations that govern black holes were true before there were black holes. That claim is hotly contested, and cuts through one of the deepest fault lines in the philosophy of mathematics. On one side are those who hold that mathematical structures, including well-established principles and basic geometric shapes like the tetrahedron, exist independently of human thought – not as a language we invented to describe reality, but rather as the substrate of reality itself. On the…

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What do Gödel’s incompleteness theorems truly mean?

What do Gödel’s incompleteness theorems truly mean?

Natalie Wolchover writes: In 1931, by turning logic on itself, Kurt Gödel proved a pair of theorems that transformed the landscape of knowledge and truth. These “incompleteness theorems” established that no formal system of mathematics — no finite set of rules, or axioms, from which everything is supposed to follow — can ever be complete. There will always be true mathematical statements that don’t logically follow from those axioms. I spent the early weeks of the Covid pandemic learning how…

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Lessons in resistance for the scientific community — a conversation with Timothy Snyder

Lessons in resistance for the scientific community — a conversation with Timothy Snyder

  H. Holden Thorp writes: Federal grant cancellations, restrictions on immigration for foreign scientists, and attempts to cut the budgets of science funding agencies by 60%—the past 18 months have been tumultuous for American science. Even after Congress restored the budgets, following the successful lobbying by leaders of the scientific community, universities are still hampered by the slow dispersal of the appropriated funds. Meanwhile, the continual attacks on science and the uncertainty brought on by the Trump administration have put…

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Thoreau the scientist – how environmental research informed ‘Walden’ and later works

Thoreau the scientist – how environmental research informed ‘Walden’ and later works

Henry David Thoreau investigated the Sudbury River as America’s first river scientist. Robert M. Thorson By Robert M. Thorson, University of Connecticut The steam locomotive chugged its way toward Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Aug. 15, 1859. On board was an impatient young scientist wanting to understand the math and science governing how river channels should behave. After disembarking at Harvard College and searching the stacks of its library, Henry David Thoreau checked out “Principes D’Hydraulique,” a three-volume tome of hydraulic engineering….

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What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting

What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting

Charlie Wood writes: Before he changed the way we understand lightning on Earth, Joseph Dwyer studied the weather in more cosmic settings. Using the sensors on NASA’s Wind satellite, orbiting a million miles away, he watched flares shoot out from the sun and analyzed the particles that stream from the sun’s surface. But when he relocated to Florida around the turn of the millennium, Dwyer felt ready for something new — something he and his students could investigate on their…

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Physicists discover the most complex forms of ice yet

Physicists discover the most complex forms of ice yet

Shalma Wegsman writes: Ice comes in more forms than what you’ll find in a freezer or a glacier. Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity. Ice is the name for any phase of water that is solid and crystalline, meaning that it has a repeating molecular structure. Over the past decade, computer simulations have predicted tens of…

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