Science

Discover the best articles, videos on science and the latest scientific findings from around the web. Follow along on Refind to get the most relevant new links picked for you.
9 Best Articles in 2021
nature
Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solvingnature
4 min read · Apr 8th · People tend to solve problems by adding features.
design
science
visual design
Most highlighted
we propose that the bias towards additive solutions might be further compounded by the fact that subtractive solutions are also less likely to be appreciated.
Across a series of similar experiments, the authors observe that people consistently consider changes that add components over those that subtract them
Moreover, people could assume that existing features are there for a reason, and so looking for additions would be more effective.
XKCD Comic
Types of Scientific PaperXKCD Comic
Apr 28th · This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details.
humor
science
comics
Science Magazine
Artificial intelligence is evolving all by itselfScience Magazine
3 min read · 2020-04-13 · Advance replicates decades of AI research in days
science
artificial intelligence
Quanta Magazine
Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made RealQuanta Magazine
7 min read · Jul 30th · Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.
technology
science
The New Yorker
The Day the Dinosaurs DiedThe New Yorker
20+ min read · From 2019 · A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth.
biology
science
dinosaurs
nature
How philosophy is making me a better scientistnature
4 min read · Apr 27th · Rasha Shraim’s education helped her to think more deeply about ethics, logic and other big questions.
philosophy
science
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Philosophy has expanded my critical and creative thinking. Philosophical arguments often lead to imaginative edge cases and a dive into hypotheticals, which I frequently find creatively stimulating.
Thinking creatively while maintaining a critical and methodical approach carried over into my research. For example, studying instrumentalism — the philosophical idea that science does not uncover fundamental truths about the world, but merely provides us with tools to help us navigate it — helped me to adopt a more fluid approach to research and look for useful tools wherever I could find them.
Nautilus Magazine
Is Matter Conscious?Nautilus Magazine
~13 min read · 2020-02-28 · The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation…
brain
science
neuroscience
The Atlantic
Neuroscientists Have Discovered a Phenomenon That They Can’t ExplainThe Atlantic
7 min read · Jun 9th · “Scientists are meant to know what’s going on, but in this particular case, we are deeply confused.”
science
neuroscience
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“Our favored interpretation is that drift is a manifestation of learning,” he told me. “It’s not learning itself; it’s the smoke that comes out of learning.”
“Just because we can decode that information doesn’t mean the brain is doing that,”
“Mainstream neuroscience relies on taking very specific methods and results and packaging them in a vague cloud of concepts that are only barely agreed upon by the field,” he said. “In a lot of neuroscience, the premises remain unexamined, but everything else is impeccable.”
The New Yorker
The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump AdministrationThe New Yorker
5 min read · 2020-03-29 · Richard Epstein, a professor at N.Y.U. School of Law, discusses two articles he wrote, on the Hoover Institution Web site, entitled “Coronavirus Perspective” and “Coronavirus Overreaction,” and his…
coronavirus
science
New this week
The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
Quanta Magazine
No time to die: An in-depth analysis of James Bond's exposure to infectious agents
sciencedirect.com
Scientists Built an AI to Give Ethical Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist
Futurism
How Wavelets Allow Researchers to Transform — and Understand — Data
Quanta Magazine
What Scientists Know About the Risk of Breakthrough Covid Deaths
The New York Times
What is Neural Network? How does it understand things?
glweb.eu
Opinion | What We Know About Covid, the Flu and the Air We Breathe
The New York Times
Learning from mistakes in climate research
link.springer.com
Mix-and-Match Covid Boosters: Why They Just Might Work
The New York Times
COVID lesson: trust the public with hard truths
nature
Physicists make most precise measurement ever of neutron’s lifetime
nature
Recently popular
PNASNews
Slowed canonical progress in large fields of sciencePNASNews
Oct 7th · The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas. Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon. Scholars in fields where many papers are published annually face difficulty getting published, read, and cited unless their work references already widely cited articles. New papers containing potentially important contributions cannot garner field-wide attention through gradual processes of diffusion. These findings suggest fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas.

Web of Science data are available from Clarivate Analytics (<https://clarivate.libguides.com/rawdata>). Disruption score data ([4][1]) are from Lingfei Wu, with replication data at <https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JPWNNK>. Aggregate data used to produce figures are available at <https://github.com/advrk/PNAS2021>.

 [1]: #ref-4
science
innovation
Aeon+Psyche
Why is simplicity so unreasonably effective at scientific explanation?Aeon+Psyche
~12 min read · Oct 11th · Does the existence of a multiverse hold the key for why nature’s laws seem so simple?
science
Most highlighted
facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
The New York Times
Opinion | What We Know About Covid, the Flu and the Air We BreatheThe New York Times
4 min read · Oct 19th · We have more power than we thought against the flu and other respiratory viruses.
science
health
Most highlighted
It will be a challenge to rethink the design and operation of buildings to account for air quality, but it is not insurmountable.
Making air quality healthier as a way to cut down on disease should be a public health focus for this century.
The most important message is that if you feel sick, even if just a little bit, stay home so that you don’t spread disease to others.
BBC News (World)
Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid miracle drugBBC News (World)
8 min read · Oct 7th · Thousands worldwide have taken ivermectin to fight Covid. But what's the evidence?
science
coronavirus
Tim Harford
How to spot scientists who peddle bad dataTim Harford
4 min read · Oct 7th · I never planned to fake my data. My project involved interviewing the customers visiting a games shop in central London, then analysing the distance they had travelled. Arriving at the location wit…
science
Most highlighted
Fraudulent research wastes the time of scientists who try to build on it and the money of funding agencies who support it. It undermines the reputation of good science. Above all, if the insights produced by good science make the world better, then false beliefs produced by fraudulent science make the world worse.
Our current scientific institutions reward originality, curiosity and inventiveness, which are classic scientific virtues. But those virtues also need to be balanced with the virtues of rigour, scepticism and collaborative scrutiny.
glweb.eu
What is Neural Network? How does it understand things?glweb.eu
~16 min read · Oct 16th · One of our great scientists, Stephen Hawking, said that “The development of full Artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human...
science
artificial intelligence
nature
‘I hope you die’: how the COVID pandemic unleashed attacks on scientistsnature
~13 min read · Oct 13th · Dozens of researchers tell Nature they have received death threats, or threats of physical or sexual violence.
science
Futurism
Scientists Built an AI to Give Ethical Advice, But It Turned Out Super RacistFuturism
4 min read · Oct 22nd · Researchers at the Allen Institute for AI created Ask Delphi to make ethical judgments — but it turned out to be awfully bigoted and racist instead.
artificial intelligence
science
Most highlighted
After all, the model didn’t learn its judgments on its own out of nowhere. It came from people online, who sometimes do believe abhorrent things.
For now, Delphi exists as an intriguing, problematic, and scary exploration. If we ever get to the point where computers are able to make unequivocal ethical judgements for us, though, we hope that it comes up with something better than this.
nature
How AI is helping the natural sciencesnature
9 min read · Oct 13th · Collaborations across disciplines are growing, and artificial intelligence is helping to make joint working more effective.
science
artificial intelligence
Quanta Magazine
The Uselessness of Useful KnowledgeQuanta Magazine
4 min read · Oct 20th · Today’s powerful but little-understood artificial intelligence breakthroughs echo past examples of unexpected scientific progress.
science
Science

9 Best Articles in 2021

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