Tag: science

The Top 200 Cannabis-Related Studies Published in 2025

Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies on marijuana and its components have been published in the first seven months of 2025, marking a surge in new research. In this article, we break down the 200 most important of these studies.

These studies cover a wide spectrum of conditions, from autoimmune disorders and mental health issues to gastrointestinal diseases and metabolic dysfunction. In addition, researchers are increasingly turning their attention to cannabinoids beyond THC and CBD, such as CBG, THCV, and CBC. Many studies also focus on novel delivery systems—like oral dissolvable films, skin patches, and advanced emulsions—while investigating how marijuana may affect pain regulation, sleep quality, immune response, and emotional health.

What follows is a detailed roundup of more than 200 marijuana-related studies released so far this year.

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Report: “1 In 7 Scientific Papers is Fake, Suggests Study That Author Calls ‘Wildly Nonsystematic’”

In 2009, a now highly-cited study found an average of around 2% of scientists admit to have falsified, fabricated, or modified data at least once in their career. 

Fifteen years on, a new analysis tried to quantify how much science is fake – but the real number may remain elusive, some observers said. 

The analysis, published before peer review on the Open Science Framework on September 24, found one in seven scientific papers may be at least partly fake. The author, James Heathers, a long-standing scientific sleuth, arrived at that figure by averaging data from 12 existing studies — collectively containing a sample of around 75,000 studies — that estimate the volume of problematic scientific output. 

“I have been reading for years and still continue to read this 2% figure which is ubiquitous,” Heathers, an affiliated researcher in psychology at Linnaeus University in Vaxjo, Sweden, said. “The only minor problem with it is that it’s 20 years out of date,” he added, noting that the last dataset that went into the 2009 study was from 2005. 

So Heathers tried to come up with a more up-to-date estimate of scholarly literature containing signs of irregularities. “A lot has changed in 20 years,” he said. “It’s been a persistent irritant to me for a period of years now to see this figure cited over and over and over again.”

Past studies predominantly focussed on asking researchers directly if they had engaged in dishonest research practices, Heathers said, “which I think is a very bad approach to being able to do this.” But he noted that it was probably the only method available to use when the research was conducted. 

“I think it’s pretty naive to ask people who are faking research whether or not they’ll honestly answer the question that they were dishonest previously,” Heathers said. 

Heathers’ study pulls data from 12 different analyses from  the social sciences, medicine, biology, and other fields of research. All those studies have one thing in common: The authors of each used various online tools to estimate the amount of fakery taking place in a set of papers. 

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Fraud Hunters: Sniffing Out Bogus Science

Molecular biologist Mike Rossner, who has committed his life to following the science, now finds himself playing an unexpected if urgent role – exposing the fraud of his fellow scientists. 

Rossner is part of a network of experts that sniff out researchers who intentionally or recklessly fabricate, falsify, or plagiarize evidence. Rossner, a consultant specializing in identifying manipulated and duplicated images in journal papers – a telltale sign of deceit – has been dismayed by his findings at U.S. research centers. Scientists often have deleted the data underlying the images, making misconduct harder to prove and casting doubt on the validity of the research. 

“Science is about finding the truth, and an inaccurate representation of what was actually observed means that you are not representing the truth,” said Rossner, a former managing editor of The Journal of Cell Biology. “This is harmful to the progress of science and to our society that depends on it.”

In recent years, research misconduct has tainted the country’s most venerable universities, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins. To date, more than 20 Nobel Prize winners have had papers retracted by the journals that published them, a move often associated with misconduct, according to Retraction Watch. The watchdog group says that retractions worldwide increased fivefold in the last decade.

That a profession with noble intentions finds itself beset by a surprisingly high incidence of not just honest errors but fraud – estimated at about 1% to 2% of all research papers – is a complicated story. Experts say it reflects a breakdown in ethics by scientists under intense pressure to frequently publish to keep their jobs. This problem was highlighted by a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the growth of clandestine “paper mills,” which exploit the “publish or perish” culture of research. The operators of mills produce low-quality and fake papers – giving authorship to scientists at a price – that are published in “predatory journals” without peer review, fueling the growth of retractions and fraud.

The problem runs deeper. Lax oversight at some universities and research centers, which are required by federal agencies to police themselves and yet depend on the grants that published research brings in, allows wrongdoing to go unchecked. 

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“It Was Unclear to Scientists Why They Existed”: Breakthrough Study Reveals Why “Impossible” Quasicrystals Exist

Quasicrystals, an unusual atomic structural form that falls between crystal and glass, may be the most stable form of matter, despite the fact that this unusual arrangement of atoms was once considered impossible by scientists.

According to University of Michigan researchers in a new study, what makes these materials so unique is that the atoms are arranged in lattices similar to those found in crystals. Yet unlike crystals, these lattices do not repeat.

The new work relied on simulations that demonstrated how, despite quasicrystals featuring irregular patterns similar to those found in glass caused by rapid heating and cooling, these unique materials are fundamentally stable.

The Enigma of Quasicrystals

“We need to know how to arrange atoms into specific structures if we want to design materials with desired properties,” said co-author Wenhao Sun, the new study’s corresponding author and a University of Michigan Dow Early Career Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “Quasicrystals have forced us to rethink how and why certain materials can form. Until our study, it was unclear to scientists why they existed.”

Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman was the first to describe quasicrystals in 1984, a discovery that seemed to defy known physics. He conceived of the arrangement when he observed that the structure of certain metals, such as aluminum and manganese, resembled a cluster of many 20-sided dice joined at their faces. From these metallic arrangements, Shechtman envisioned a five-fold symmetry, where a structure would be identical from five different views.

When Shechtman proposed the idea, scientists believed that crystal lattices must repeat in all directions, making the five-fold symmetry Shechtman suggested an impossibility. However, in the years following Shechtman’s description of quasicrystals, such materials were produced both synthetically in laboratories and discovered to occur naturally in billion-year-old meteorites. With his work validated, Shechtman was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.

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Mysterious ‘orbs’ demand scientific study

President Trump interviewed Air Force pilots who were utterly baffled by the objects. They seem to chase Navy fighter jets and have been captured on radar and video. The Pentagon’s UFO analysis office is perplexed by them.

What is behind the enigmatic “orbs” reported by countless credible observers since at least World War II?

The scientific community must abandon the nearly century-long anti-scientific stigma surrounding UFOs — which the Pentagon likes to call “unidentified anomalous phenomena” — and investigate this enduring mystery. This is especially so since the Pentagon now admits openly that it is baffled by “several dozen” “true anomalies” and “really peculiar” UFO incidents, including some involving unknown “orbs.”

On July 24, the Senate confirmed former Air Force fighter pilot Matthew Lohmeier as the under secretary of the Air Force, the department’s second-highest civilian position. While in high school, Lohmeier had a remarkable UFO encounter.

According to Lohmeier, a “ball of light” descended upon him and a friend as they were in the wilderness outside of Tucson, Ariz. The object came so close that Lohmeier recalls that “it seemed to be buzzing with life, but it wasn’t man-made.”

“It was very well-organized, very spherical,” Lohmeier said, “and it seemed to be very conscious of the two of us that were sitting there in the Arizona mountains, like it was observing us … there was a level of interest from the orb to us.” Frightened, the two ran to their car. The object “zipped up and disappeared in the sky.”

Lohmeier is not the only Air Force fighter pilot left baffled by such an object. In a September appearance on Fox News, Trump stated that he interviewed several Air Force pilots who encountered spherical objects performing extraordinary maneuvers. According to Trump, the pilots told him, “All I know, sir, there was a round object that was going four times faster than my F-22.”

“Four or five guys [that] I’ve interviewed, solid people, great pilots for the U.S. Air Force,” Trump continued, have “seen things that they cannot explain, so there’s something.” Trump also told podcaster Joe Rogan that the pilots observed objects “like a round ball, but it wasn’t a comet or a meteor.”

Timothy Phillips, the former deputy director of the Department of Defense’s UFO analysis office, stated in June that the Pentagon is perplexed by “fiery orbs.”

Such phenomena have been reported since at least World War II. “Balls of Fire Stalk U.S. Fighters” read the headline of a frontpage Jan. 2, 1945, New York Times article describing the mysterious “foo fighters” that toyed with American pilots in the European and Pacific theaters.

The late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), as a wartime transport pilot in Asia, encountered such an object, which conducted extraordinary maneuvers around his plane. The experience led him to enthusiastically support then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) establishment of a secret Pentagon UFO program in 2008. A 2017 New York Times story revealing that program spurred a sweeping congressional investigation into the UFO phenomenon. This led to the introduction of extraordinary legislation and the establishment of the Pentagon’s analysis office.

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Scientists Uncover New Evidence Supporting Controversial Theory That a Comet Impacted Earth 12,800 Years Ago

Scientists have uncovered compelling new evidence from the ocean floor supporting the controversial theory that a disintegrating comet triggered a dramatic global cooling event 12,800 years ago.

The findings, reported by University of South Carolina scientists, involve the discovery of several examples of direct evidence that Earth experienced a series of impacts from a disintegrating comet 12,800 years ago, which caused a period of cooler global temperatures lasting more than a millennium.

Although no direct evidence of the proposed ancient comet was found during the study effort, the researchers believe their findings offer strong geochemical support for a theoretical series of impacts, or more likely, an airburst event, as the cause of a brief and unexplained reversal in warming at the end of the last ice age.

The results offer strong support for the hypothesis “that the Earth collided with a large comet about 12,800 years ago,” study co-author, Dr. Vladimir Tselmovic, said. “The amount of comet dust in the atmosphere was enough to cause a short-term ‘impact winter,’ followed by a 1,400-year cooling period.”

Previous attempts to explain the 1,200-plus years of cooling that began unexpectedly in the middle of an overall global warming trend, known as the Younger Dryas, have resisted the inclusion of a cometary impact. Instead, most models account for the 10-degree Celsius drop through an increase in cold glacial meltwater that flooded the northern Atlantic Ocean. According to those theories, this meltwater runoff significantly weakened currents responsible for transporting warmer tropical water north.

To locate more concrete evidence for the comet impact hypothesis, study leader Dr. Christopher Moore and colleagues reexamined deep ocean floor core samples that include sediments confirmed by radiocarbon dating as being from this time period. Based on the best theoretical impact sites, the team used cores taken from Baffin Bay near Greenland.

To search for clues of comet impacts in the samples, the team employed multiple tools and techniques. According to the team’s statement, they employed scanning electron microscopy, single-particle inductively coupled plasma time-of-flight mass spectrometry, energy-dispersive spectroscopy, and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.

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Federal Complaint Filed After NIH Bureaucrat Attacks Anti-Animal Testing Watchdog Group White Coat Waste, Goes After Board Members

In a brazen display of deep state arrogance straight out of the Fauci era, a high-ranking National Institutes of Health (NIH) official has been exposed abusing his position to defame the White Coat Waste Project (WCW), America’s leading watchdog against wasteful and cruel government-funded animal experiments.

Warren Casey, Director of Strategic Partnerships at the NIH’s Division of Translational Toxicology and Executive Director of the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM), sent emails from his personal Gmail account to members of WCW’s advisory board, abusing his federal credentials to trash the organization and urge supporters to cut ties.

Casey’s email, which appears to be a clear retaliation against WCW’s relentless exposure of NIH’s shady animal testing practices, opens by touting his 15-year tenure at NIH and his ICCVAM role to lend an air of official authority. He accuses WCW of launching a “reckless smear campaign” against fellow NIH scientist Dr. Nicole Kleinstreuer, claiming it incited death threats and harassment that required FBI involvement and police protection.

“I write with serious concern about your association with the White Coat Waste Project (WCW). While WCW claims to support ending animal testing, its recent actions undermine that mission and endanger public servants,” Casey wrote in the email to board members.

Casey claimed the organization’s “demonizing Dr. Kleinstreuer in public forums, distorting her statements, and falsely portraying her as an enemy of reform. WCW’s attacks have incited hundreds of death threats, nonstop harassment (phone calls, emails, social media posts), FBI involvement, and round-the-clock police protection for Dr. Kleinstreuer and her family.”

The email concluded, “Your name and reputation lend legitimacy to WCW’s platform and your continued affiliation with WCW legitimizes their harmful tactics and implies your de facto support as a member of their advisory board. In today’s climate, where violence against public servants is on the rise and political assassination is no longer unthinkable, this is not just immoral—it’s dangerous—and endangers the lives of the civil servants WCW chooses to demonize. I urge you to stand with the scientists and public servants working every day toward ethical, evidence-based reform—without threats, misinformation, or violence.”

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Devastating US Report Lays Bare The Abuses Of ‘Settled’ Climate Science And Its Role In Net Zero

Net Zero is dead in the United States and the last rites have been administered in the devastating official report from the Department of Energy. Released earlier this week, the report cancels the decades-long censorship imposed by so-called ‘settled’ climate science. It is compiled by five eminent scientists and is a systematic take-down of the claims, methodologies and motivations driving activist scientists, politicians and opinion formers promoting the hard-Left Net Zero fantasy. Despite its ground-breaking importance, to date it has been largely ignored by mainstream media including the BBC and Guardian.

Computer models are said to offer “little guidance” on how much of the climate responds to higher levels of carbon dioxide, most extreme weather events are not increasing, sea levels in North America show no increasing trend while weather attribution claims are challenged by natural climate variation along with an admission that they were originally designed with ‘lawfare’ in mind. For Anthony Watts, who has spent decades challenging the ‘settled’ politicised science, the most important consideration is that the report, “directly confronts the exaggerated and politicised rhetoric that has dominated headlines for decades”.

Watts, who runs the Watts Up With That? (WUWT?) site that was responsible for publicising the infamous Climategate scandal, argues that the new report is unique in that it has both official status and author independence. It is not a think tank paper or an article in a ‘dissenting’ journal.

“It’s rare to see scientists of this calibre (with backgrounds at NASA, IPCC and major universities) allowed to directly challenge prevailing policy narratives with government resources behind them”, he notes.

The work is a “comprehensive critique” quoting extensively from peer-reviewed literature with clear explanations of scientific uncertainties and climate model error. 

For regular readers of WUWT? and other inquiring publications such as the Daily Sceptic, many of the issues discussed in the report will be familiar. In the last four years, your correspondent has written nearly 500 articles on climate science and Net Zero in an attempt to fill in the significant reporting gaps left by the narrative-driven mainstream media. Many of the papers quoted are familiar, not least in the section that deals with the sensational ‘greening’ of the planet caused by higher levels of CO2. 

The report quotes from recent work that shows extensive plant and crop growth due to the atmospheric fertilisation that has enhanced photosynthesis and improved water use efficiency. Over the past 60+ years, the authors observe that there have been thousands of studies on the response of plants to rising CO2 levels, and the overwhelming theme is that they benefit from the extra gas. In 2016, Zhu et al detected greening over 25%–50% of the planet. But there is a near official news blackout on the subject. A few mentions can be found in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports but overall, observe the authors, “the Policymakers Summaries, Technical Summaries and [IPCC] Synthesis reports of AR5 and ASR6 do not discuss the topic”.

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Something Massive Could Still Be Hiding in The Shadows of Our Solar System

Is there a massive undiscovered planet on the outer reaches of the Solar System? The idea has been around since before the discovery of Pluto in the 1930s.

Labelled as planet X, prominent astronomers had put it forward as an explanation for Uranus‘s orbit, which drifts from the path of orbital motion that physics would expect it to follow. The gravitational pull of an undiscovered planet, several times larger than Earth, was seen as a possible reason for the discrepancy.

That mystery was ultimately explained by a recalculation of Neptune’s mass in the 1990s, but then a new theory of a potential planet nine was put forward in 2016 by astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology).

Their theory relates to the Kuiper Belt, a giant belt of dwarf planets, asteroids and other matter that lies beyond Neptune (and includes Pluto). Many Kuiper Belt objects – also referred to as trans-Neptunian objects – have been discovered orbiting the Sun, but like Uranus they don’t do so in a continuous expected direction.

Batygin and Brown argued that something with a large gravitational pull must be affecting their orbit, and proposed planet nine as a potential explanation.

This would be comparable to what happens with our own Moon. It orbits the Sun every 365.25 days, in line with what you would expect in view of their distance apart.

However, the Earth’s gravitational pull is such that the Moon also orbits the planet every 27 days. From the point of view of an outside observer, the Moon moves in a spiralling motion as a result. Similarly, many objects in the Kuiper Belt show signs of their orbits being affected by more than just the Sun’s gravity.

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Three new studies challenge decades-old climate dogmas on sea level rise

For years, climate reports have relentlessly painted a bleak picture: the ice caps are melting, the oceans are rising, and humanity is on the brink of catastrophic flooding.

The motivation for the recently published opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was justified, among other things, by the dangers to islands and coastal areas. ” Rising temperatures are leading to the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, resulting in a rise in sea levels and threatening coastal communities with unprecedented flooding.” These unprecedented floods, by the way, have been predicted for 40 or more years, each five years in a row. But let’s look at the scientific evidence on this. Personally, I’m going to Venice to see if the islands there have finally sunk under water since their founding in 421.

We have heard it again and again from politicians, activists and the media who want to dramatize every rise in global temperatures as an unprecedented catastrophe.

We know that the Holocene Temperature Maximum, during the ongoing interglacial period, was warmer in Greenland than today, at about 4–8.5°C. Amazingly, despite this warmth, global sea level was lower than today. How is this possible if models predicting catastrophic sea level rise are correct? If the Greenland ice cap survived such warming without flooding the coasts, how does this fit with claims that the current moderate warming will do so?

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