As you know, the joy of real science is that “Eureka!” moment when someone, often a lonely and unhygienic individual, suddenly sees not only that the conventional theory is wrong but what’s right instead. And don’t take our word for it. A random and fairly typical email from “New Scientist” on January 8 was all excited at new discoveries about autism, new insights about time, new understanding of how our ancestors learned to butcher big animals, and that “An analysis of several experiments aimed at detecting the mysterious neutrino has identified a hint of a crack in the standard model of particle physics.” Great. Also cool that Scientific American touts new evidence of early hominid bipedalism and also of poison on arrowheads tens of millennia earlier than previously thought. So why is it that when it comes to climate science, the supposed news is always a dour pronouncement that it’s exactly right, completely settled, and things are worse than they thought?
No, really. It’s not as if they’ve gone completely over to the dark side. Other recent examples of popular science publications popularizing science include that same Scientific American burbling about “10 Discoveries That Transformed How We Thought about Health in 2025”. And even The Economist belatedly realizing the good-cholesterol-versus-bad-cholesterol story was oversimplified.
We also got a story from The Atlantic last month enthusing that “The fundamental nature of living things challenges assumptions that physicists have held for centuries.” And yes, sometimes there’s more sizzle than steak in such stories. Including the ones about the early history of human ancestors, which raises a mountain of speculation on a molehill of evidence; a single toe bone or part of a jaw allegedly changing everything. But even so, the impulse to ask what’s wrong with the settled account, what strange new thing or indeed old thing might be right instead, is commendable. All the way to that Atlantic piece suggesting that the dominant paradigm that physics is the most fundamental science, that everything else reduces to it, might be too reductionist. And who could resist “In a first-of-its-kind discovery, ancient bees nested inside bones in a cave in the Dominican Republic”?
That one’s from Scientific American too, though alas a newsletter not posted online. Speaking of which, a recent fundraising appeal from Scientific American also not posted online couldn’t resist a nudge-wink attack on Donald Trump, claiming that “Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history” and asking for “the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S”. So we have some advice for them: Make sure you’re covering science not politicizing it especially when it comes to hot topics like climate (or gender) or government health funding and you’ll do fine. But go woke, go broke because you become stale, annoying and unreliable. And unscientific.
