Tag: science

Why So Many Social Science Claims Are False

One of the most urgent questions facing society today is the potential impact of AI on education and labor markets. So it’s no surprise that two scientists attempted to provide an answer, producing a meta-analysis suggesting that incorporating ChatGPT in schooling dramatically improved student outcomes. Social media and online sources promoted the 2025 study as a beacon of bright light.

The problem is that the researchers’ conclusions were later found to be unreliable, and the study was retracted in April – another blow to the public’s faith in science.

Scientists are increasingly chasing answers to big questions in fields from health care to climate change to AI. The academic research industry incentivizes them to produce the biggest possible findings that make for splashy headlines and career promotions. But such discoveries are rare in science, and too often, the result is widespread exaggeration, dodgy methods, and miscommunication.

“The incentive structure of modern science is such that a ‘simplify, then exaggerate’ strategy has become dominant, even if only tacitly,” according to a recent academic review. “To get published in leading journals, to be awarded grants and to be hired as a postdoc or faculty member, a system-wide bias for novelty, exaggeration and storytelling has emerged.”

As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, an alarming amount of poor-quality academic and scientific research has been discovered in recent years. Hindawi, formerly a part of major science publisher Wiley, had to retract thousands of science articles, many of them alleged to have been produced by paper mills that generate reams of reports of studies that never existed.

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Rep. Nancy Mace Moves to Ban Lab Puppy Mills After White Coat Waste Tracks 1,500 Dogs Sent into Taxpayer-Funded Experiments

The animal testing watchdog organization White Coat Waste has published a new report showing that Oak Hill Genetics, an Ewing, Illinois, breeder and the nation’s second-largest lab-dog supplier, shipped 1,518 hound-mix dogs to 44 laboratories between January 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026.

Some of the animals were only about three months old.

Recipients included universities and contract labs that hold National Institutes of Health money.

Earlier this month, White Coat Waste’s spending review found more than $225 million in NIH awards for dog and cat experiments since mid-February 2025, including more than $98 million in new dog-testing money at pharmaceutical companies and $11.7 million in new cat work.

The lab list WCW obtained is specific.

The University of Utah took dogs for heart work that WCW says includes tied-off arteries, pacemakers, and electric shock before the animals are killed; Utah has drawn nearly $12 million for those studies and received 50 Oak Hill dogs in the 18-month window. Washington University in St. Louis, with more than $1.2 million for laryngeal-nerve work, took 32. Vanderbilt has taken more than $109 million over decades for obesity, diabetes, and liver studies. The University of Washington implants tumor cells in prostates. The University of Chicago induces severe strokes. The University of Cincinnati kills dogs to harvest larynxes.

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Microsoft Claims a Quantum Breakthrough That Physicists Still Debate As DARPA Tests It

Microsoft says it has made one of quantum computing’s hardest problems dramatically easier.

Some physicists aren’t convinced.

Now DARPA gets to put its hands on the hardware.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will receive direct, on-site access to its latest quantum system at a new Maryland research center. The arrangement gives government evaluators something far more useful than another presentation about Microsoft’s roadmap. They can examine and test the technology itself.

The machine centers on Microsoft’s Majorana 2 technology. Microsoft says its newest topological qubits are more than 1,000 times more reliable than the previous generation. Their average lifetime is about 20 seconds, with some lasting more than a minute. The company says those advances have allowed it to cut its timetable in half and target a scalable quantum computer by 2029.

From Microsoft:

To create Majorana 2, the Microsoft Quantum team improved Majorana 1’s material stack to create a more stable topological phase. Majorana 2 replaces Majorana 1’s superconductor, aluminum, with lead, and also updates the semiconductor active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide. This change in materials results in significant increases in performance, which are reflected in the improved robustness of the topological phase. The topological gap, which protects the topological qubits from environmental noise and errors, is more than double that of the previous quantum processor.

The gate-defined devices in our quantum processors are composed of tetrons, a type of topological qubit consisting of two superconducting nanowires with Majorana Zero Modes (MZMs) at their ends. MZMs are the building blocks of topological qubits, storing quantum information through parity, the evenness or oddness of the number of electrons in a topoconductor wire.

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New Records Show Obama Admin Purchased Aborted Babies’ Heads for $515 Each

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 198 pages of records and communications from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) involving “humanized mice” research with human fetal heads, organs and tissue, including communications and contracts with human fetal tissue provider Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR). Most of the records are communications and related attachments between Perrin Larton, a procurement manager for ABR, and research veterinary medical officer Dr. Kristina Howard of the FDA.

Judicial Watch received the records through a March 2019 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, of which the FDA is a part (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department Health and Human Services (No. 1:19-cv-00876)). The lawsuit asks for all contracts and related documentation on disbursement of funds, procedural documents and communications between FDA and ABR for the provision of human fetal tissue to be used in humanized mice research. After successfully opposing the FDA’s redaction of certain information from its records, a federal court ordered HHS to release additional information about its purchases of organs harvested from aborted human fetuses – including “line item prices,” or the price per organ the government paid to ABR. The court also found “there is reason to question” whether the transactions violate federal law barring the sale of fetal organs. Documents previously uncovered in this lawsuit show that the federal government demanded the purchased fetal organs be “fresh and never frozen.”)

The records include an FDA generated contract with ABR, based on a “requisition” it issued on July 27, 2012, for $12,000 worth of “tissue procurement for humanized mice,” indicates the requisition was for a “non-competitive award.” Although the initial award was for $12,000, the total estimated amount of funds allocated for the requisition was $60,000. Under “Justification for Other than Full and Open Competition,” the FDA writes:

Scientists within the FDA and in the larger field of humanized mouse research have searched extensively over the past several years and ABR is the only company in the U.S. capable of supplying tissues suitable for HM research. No other company or organization is capable of fulfilling the need.***

Costs are estimated [for the fetal parts] at $230 per tissue x two tissues per shipment = $460 plus $95 shipping = $555 per shipment. A total of 21 shipments = $11,655.00.

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New Biohacker Company Plans to Create Real-Life Unicorns. What’s the Catch?

Unicorns, dragons, pixies, and the like are the stuff of kids’ stories, or at least they should be. But now a new Texas startup, a bioengineering firm, The Embryo Corporation, is looking at the possibility of producing these creatures for real, and that new company is headed by a woman who doesn’t shy away from experimenting on herself.

That’s taking putting one’s money where one’s mouth is to a rather extreme extent.

Perched beneath a “Hippies use the back door” sign was Josie Zayner, sipping coffee in a crop top, jean shorts, and a patchwork of video game– and anime-themed tattoos. Zayner, a former NASA research fellow and world-famous biohacker turned gene-editing start-up CEO, relishes Bebo’s. She feels more at home here, laughing with the waitress about cheese sticks, than she ever did in the Bay Area.

“Nobody wants to be a San Franciscan except for the tech world,” said Zayner, 45, who’s called Austin, Texas, home since 2021. “These people show more warmth than you’d ever experience in San Francisco,” she continued, nodding at the dizzying decor. “This is the soul of America.”

Zayner gained infamy in the 2010s through a series of audacious gene-editing stunts and experiments conducted in California, during which she spliced jellyfish DNA into her own skin, injected herself onstage at a conference with a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) solution designed to knock out the gene that limits muscle growth, performed her own fecal transplant to cure her chronic gut problems, and even livestreamed herself on YouTube self-injecting a Covid DNA vaccine.

This is the kind of person we want messing around with genetic engineering? At least Colossal Bioscience claims to be “de-extinctioning.” They aren’t, of course; they are producing, to quote a famous movie scientist, genetically engineered theme park monsters. But Zayner has some more radical goals.

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NIH Continues Pouring More Than $225 Million Into New Dog and Cat Experiments Despite Trump Admin Efforts to Shift Toward Modern Alternatives

A bombshell White Coat Waste investigation released this week documents more than $225 million in new National Institutes of Health funding for dog and cat experiments awarded, supplemented, renewed, or extended since February 2025.

The total includes new grants and contracts, additional discretionary money for existing awards, and project extensions that keep taxpayer-funded laboratories running.

By June, White Coat Waste had identified more than $150 million, and by early September the figure had jumped to more than $225 million, a roughly 50 percent increase.

Nearly 44 percent of the identified spending, more than $98 million, went to pharmaceutical companies conducting dog tests. Another $11.7 million supported invasive cat experiments.

That $225 million-plus exceeds the NIH’s highly publicized $150 million investment in non-animal methods, or new approach methodologies, by more than $75 million.

The Trump administration has repeatedly moved federal research away from outdated animal models toward modern, human-relevant tools such as organoids, tissue chips, computational models, and real-world data.

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How Lockheed Martin, Raytheon & BAE Systems are propagandizing children to support war through STEM

Raytheon sponsors the Girl Scouts of America. BAE Systems is reading your toddlers their favorite fairytale stories. And Lockheed Martin funds children’s math and STEM festivals. This is done with great fanfare, supposedly to empower and inspire children to pursue their passion for science. In reality, though, these companies are attempting to launder their images and enlist the next generation to become cogs in the military-industrial complex.

All the while, these organizations’ products are being used across the world by the United States and Israel to commit war crimes – in Iran, Yemen, Palestine, and beyond – to target children.

MintPress explores the murky world of the arms companies training kids to bomb kids.

Normalizing War to Kids

When many Americans think of Raytheon (now officially rebranded as RTX Corporation), they don’t envisage rockets and cruise missiles; they think of math. For decades, the second-largest arms manufacturer on the planet has bankrolled a wide range of organizations aimed at getting children excited about STEM subjects.

Since 2009, Raytheon has been the title sponsor of MATHCOUNTS, a non-profit organization that provides engaging math programs for middle school students in every U.S. state, as well as organizing math competitions to find the brightest children in America.

In 2005, Raytheon launched its MathMovesU program, aimed, in its own words, “to inspire middle school students to get excited about math and science.” In addition to the materials provided, it has also spent millions on scholarships, grants, and study awards to thousands of students, teachers, and volunteers.

And its MathAlive! traveling exhibit promises, in rather outdated branding, to take math “2theXtreme”. MathAlive! Has also traveled to several countries in West Asia, including Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia – all of them among the biggest purchasers of Raytheon weapons technology.

The company also enjoys a longtime partnership with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA). In 2017, for example, it launched the GSUSA’s first national computer science program and cyber challenge for middle and high school girls.

“The progress to diversify the STEM workforce needs to be accelerated… At a time when technology is transforming the way we live and work, we can – and should – show young women a clear path to taking an active role in this transformation,” said Thomas A. Kennedy, then-Raytheon CEO; “Working together, Raytheon and Girl Scouts will help girls build confidence to see themselves as the robotics engineers, data scientists and cybersecurity professionals who will create a better tomorrow.”

Raytheon also spearheaded the GSUSA’s “Think Like a Programmer” project, which encourages girls to explore the world of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, and developed many of the programming badges available to the scouts.

GSUSA appears proud of this relationship. Its website profiles one former scout who now works at Raytheon as a success story and a model to follow. The article includes a step-by-step guide and a list of tips for those wishing to follow in her footsteps.

Unsurprisingly, Raytheon also works closely with the U.S. military on these matters, establishing four new STEM “centers of innovation” with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America in Michigan, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., all near military bases.

While some might be surprised by the closeness of the relationship between a children’s organization and an arms manufacturer, it is worth remembering that the scouting movement was originally established by Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell, as a stepping stone towards boys joining the military. Baden-Powell was deeply concerned that English boys would not be physically fit enough to fight for their country in any upcoming wars, and designed an organization that would train them both physically and mentally to do so.

Kirsten Bayes from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade was unimpressed by Raytheon’s attempts to improve their image and to train the next generation of weapons manufacturers. “Our view is that arms companies have no place in schools or colleges, and should certainly not be working with children’s educational charities,” she told MintPress, adding:

“Schools and other places of education should be places where children learn, grow and develop their full potential. They should not be a recruiting ground where arms companies whitewash their activities.”

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Agriculture Canada admits researchers breached scientific integrity rules

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has acknowledged cases of potential scientific misconduct involving improper publication practices and unauthorized animal research, but the department is refusing to identify the employees or studies involved.

The admission was uncovered by Blacklock’s Reporter in the department’s annual report, Addressing Misconduct and Wrongdoing at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

“Concerns were raised regarding non-compliance with the department’s policy on science and technology publications related to the publication of scientific articles and book chapters,” the report said.

Officials also received complaints involving the unauthorized use of animals for research. The department said the allegations were reviewed under its science-integrity policy but provided no details about the findings, consequences or affected research.

The policy applies to federal employees and affiliated researchers involved in conducting, managing, reviewing or communicating scientific work.

Possible breaches include fabricating or misrepresenting data, improper authorship, failing to acknowledge scientific contributions, interfering with the release of findings and violating ethical or legal research requirements.

Despite the admission, no federal agency has attempted to document the full extent of plagiarism across the federal government.

A 2015 case involving an open-book Transport Canada employment examination found that six of 114 applicants had plagiarized material. The Public Service Commission concluded the applicants knowingly presented someone else’s work as their own to improve their chances of being hired.

Records released in 2017 revealed the commission had received 67 allegations involving plagiarism and résumé fraud over two years. At least seven cases were referred to the RCMP.

Agriculture Canada did not disclose whether the latest cases resulted in disciplinary action or whether any compromised publications were withdrawn or corrected.

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25 State AGs Urge Defunding Of National Academies Of Sciences, Allege Bias On Climate Lawsuits

A coalition of 25 state attorneys general called on federal agencies and Congress to defund the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), charging that the organization had used taxpayer dollars to produce reports that supported plaintiffs in climate lawsuits against energy companies.

In an Aug. 27 letter, the state attorneys general urged the federal government to “end grants to an organization [NASEM] that uses taxpayer money to prop up litigation theories that have been rejected by courts from Maryland to Mississippi to California.”

Much of the conflict stems from a chapter on climate science in the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for federal judges that was written by NASEM, together with the Federal Judicial Center (FJC).

This manual provides essential background and technical information for judges who are presiding over thousands of lawsuits in which states and cities across the United States are seeking billions of dollars in damages from energy companies as compensation for alleged harm from global warming.

Allegations of Bias

Critics allege that information NASEM produced for the manual supports the plaintiffs’ claims while ignoring contrary views that favor the defense.

President Donald Trump stated in a July 19 Truth Social post that NASEM had “published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change” and that “taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it.”

In January, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, told the FJC in a letter that the manual appeared to include “biased programming” with the “underlying goal of predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs who allege injuries from the manufacturing, marketing, use, or sale of fossil-fuel products.”

In response, the FJC removed the chapter from its manual. Initially, NASEM kept the chapter on its website but removed it on Aug. 7, pending an internal review.

“That chapter has received considerable scrutiny,” NASEM stated. “[NASEM] has determined that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway.”

However, attorneys general from the group of 25 states, led by Montana, Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia, say they have concerns regarding that review process.

“Now, over five months later, after presidential criticism and increasing public scrutiny, NASEM has temporarily removed the chapter from its website for an ‘independent review’ of the ‘processes used to develop the chapter,'” the attorneys general wrote in their letter. “This review appears to be a sham, as demonstrated by NASEM’s secrecy around all aspects of the review process.”

The attorneys general charged that the chapter in the reference manual that NASEM helped write “materially misquotes the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], directly contradicts the manual’s statistics chapter, was apparently substantially ghost-written by climate plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Burger, and had funders, authors, and reviewers that included climate funders, activists, and litigation participants.”

One of the co-authors of the Reference Manual’s climate chapter, Columbia Law School professor Jessica Wentz, defended the work in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, stating that it had undergone a rigorous review process, that Michael Burger had not contributed to it, and that it was “objective and rooted in settled science.”

In addition to the chapter in the reference manual for judges, NASEM produced a report in July titled “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts 2026,” which critics say bolstered plaintiffs’ arguments that harm from extreme weather events could be attributed to energy companies’ production of fossil fuels.

That NASEM report supported “extreme event attribution” (EEA), the legal theory underpinning climate lawsuits, which claims that damage from extreme weather can be attributed to fossil fuel emissions, as plaintiffs assert. NASEM stated in a summary of the report that “the scientific tools, observational datasets, and methods developed and used for EEA have advanced considerably over the past decade and increased the confidence in EEA results for some types of weather events.”

“[NASEM says] that these attribution studies have more prominence in the press and in legal proceeding and they say attribution methodology is getting better, but saying something is getting better is nowhere near the same as saying it’s any good,” Steven Koonin, physicist at Stanford University and former undersecretary for science under President Barack Obama, told The Epoch Times. “You would expect to see graphs throughout the report comparing the results of attribution with what the actual data is, and there is virtually none of that in the report.”

The NASEM report also provides a methodology and causal link between greenhouse gas emissions, changes in climate, extreme weather, physical impacts on communities, and societal and economic harm.

Among the climate lawsuit cases currently moving through the courts is a pending Supreme Court case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which could set a precedent for many other similar cases.

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RFK Jr.’s “Gold-standard Science” Runs Into Another AI Citation Scandal

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent years denouncing the federal health establishment. And as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, he promised to replace its failures with “gold-standard science.”

Now his department appears to have replaced some of the science with AI hallucinations.

Earlier in August, a federal judge rebuked the Department of Health and Human Services for using scientific citations that either do not exist or do not support the claims attached to them. The citations appeared in official funding notices used to reshape the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP).

The episode is especially damaging because it is not the first. In 2025, the Kennedy-chaired Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released a major report on children’s health that contained invented studies, garbled references, and visible fingerprints of artificial intelligence.

Phantom Studies Behind a Real Policy

The latest controversy comes from Hennepin County, Minnesota v. HHS, a lawsuit challenging Kennedy’s overhaul of the TPP.

Congress created the program to fund local initiatives shown to reduce teen pregnancy, along with “promising” approaches that could be tested. HHS took a much narrower approach in 2026.

The department issued new grant notices that pushed recipients toward abstinence, “body literacy,” reproductive-goals counseling and sexual-risk-avoidance education. A separate HHS policy notice barred programs from “encouraging, normalizing, or promoting sexual activity for minors” and required compliance with administration policies against “gender ideology” and DEI.

HHS also terminated virtually all existing TPP awards, according to the court.

That prompted Hennepin County, King County in Washington, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States to sue.

On August 19, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper granted a preliminary injunction against implementation of the new policy and funding notices. He found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that HHS acted arbitrarily and capriciously.

Then came the largely overlooked part that made national news this week.

A “Hallmark of AI-generated Citations”

HHS tried to support its new emphasis on “body literacy,” which it defines as understanding how a healthy body functions, including reproductive anatomy, physiology and hormonal patterns, and interpreting biological signals to make informed health decisions.

The problem was that much of the cited “science” could not be found.

 Cooper wrote:

On the topic of body literacy, the notices (remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited — a hallmark of AI-generated citations.

He continued:

Two out of the seven appear to be completely made up. Three of the seven did not publish in the cited journals but appear to have similar titles to articles published in completely different journals.… And according to the early-stage factual record, there seem to be no pregnancy prevention curricula and programs that “center [on] body literacy” and other newly-imposed TPP requirements.

HHS did not bury the questionable references in a stray litigation brief. They appeared in government notices telling applicants what “science” federal money would follow.

The court found a deeper problem. HHS itself acknowledged a “near absence of body literacy education standards nationwide.” Yet the agency made “body literacy” a central requirement for grantees.

Cooper said HHS offered no adequate explanation for imposing that approach across the program.

HHS funding materials nevertheless tell applicants that eligible programs must reflect “high-quality evidence of effectiveness” and align with its “commitment to gold-standard science.”

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