Tag: science

The Rise and Fall of Scientific Journals and a Way Forward

Scientific journals have had enormous positive impact on the development of science, but in some ways, they are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse. After reviewing the history and current problems with journals, a new academic publishing model is proposed. It embraces open access and open rigorous peer review, it rewards reviewers for their important work with honoraria and public acknowledgement, and it allows scientists to publish their research in a timely and efficient manner without wasting valuable scientists’ time and resources.

The Birth of Scientific Journals

The printing press revolutionized scientific communication in the 16th century. After a few years of thinking and pondering, or maybe a decade or two, scientists published a book with their new thoughts, ideas, and discoveries. This gave us classics that laid the foundation for modern science, such as De Nova Stella by Tycho Brahe (1573), Astronomia Nova by Johannes Kepler (1609), Discours de la Methode by René Descartes (1637), Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton (1686), and Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus (1735). For more rapid communication, scientists relied on handwritten letters to each other.

Until they published a book, which took considerable effort and resources, scientists could only communicate with a few close friends and colleagues. That was not efficient. This gave rise to the scientific journal, an invention with profound impact on the development of science. The first one, Journal des Sçavans (Journal of the Learned), appeared in France in 1665. A decade later, this journal published the calculation of the speed of light by Ole Romer. The fastest thing in nature was communicated at a speed previously unavailable to scientists.

Over the next few hundred years, scientific journals became increasingly important, overtaking books as the primary means of scientific communication. As scientists became more specialized, so did the journals, with subject matter periodicals such as Medical Essays and Observations (1733), Chemisches Journal (1778), Annalen der Physik (1799), and Public Health Reports (1878). Printed journals were sent to scientists and university libraries around the world, and a truly international scientific community was created.

Without journals, science would not have developed as it did, and those early journal editors and printers are unsung heroes of scientific progress.

Commercial Publishers

In the mid-20th century, academic publishing took a turn for the worse. Starting with Robert Maxwell and his Pergamon Press, commercial publishers understood that the monopoly situation in scientific publishing could be very profitable. When a paper is only published in one journal, major university libraries must subscribe to that journal no matter how expensive it is, to ensure that their scientists can access the whole scientific literature.

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Scientists Discover a New Form of Ice That Shouldn’t Exist

Researchers at the European XFEL and DESY are investigating unusual forms of ice that can exist at room temperature when subjected to extreme pressure.

Ice comes in many forms, even when made of nothing but water molecules. Scientists have now identified more than 20 unique solid structures, or “phases,” of ice, each with its own molecular arrangement. These variations are labeled with Roman numerals, such as ice I, ice II, and ice III.

In a recent breakthrough, an international team of researchers led by scientists from the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) has discovered a completely new phase known as ice XXI. Using advanced X-ray facilities at the European XFEL and PETRA III, the team captured and analyzed this previously unknown structure. Their findings have been published in Nature Materials.

Ice XXI is unlike any other form of ice observed so far. It develops when liquid water is subjected to rapid compression, creating what scientists call “supercompressed water” at room temperature. This phase is metastable, meaning it can persist for a time even though another type of ice would normally be more stable under the same conditions. The discovery provides valuable new insights into how ice behaves and transforms under extreme pressure.

Water or H2O, despite being composed of just two elements, exhibits remarkable complexity in its solid state. The majority of the phases are observed at high pressures and low temperatures. The team has learned more about how the different ice phases form and change with pressure.

“Rapid compression of water allows it to remain liquid up to higher pressures, where it should have already crystallized to ice VI,” KRISS scientist Geun Woo Lee explains. Ice VI is an especially intriguing phase, thought to be present in the interior of icy moons such as Titan and Ganymede. Its highly distorted structure may allow complex transition pathways that lead to metastable ice phases.

Because most ice variants exist only under extreme conditions, the researchers created high-pressure conditions using diamond anvil cells. The sample – in this case, water – is placed between two diamonds, which can be used to build up very high pressure due to their hardness. Water was examined under pressures of up to two gigapascals, which is about 20,000 times more than normal air pressure. This causes ice to form even at room temperature, but the molecules are much more tightly packed than in normal ice.

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Paper Chase: A Global Industry Fuels Scientific Fraud in the U.S.

In southern India, a new enterprise called Peer Publicon Consultancy offers a full suite of services to scientific researchers. It will not only write a scholarly paper for a fee but also guarantee publishing the fraudulent work in a respected journal.   

It is one of many “paper mills” that have emerged across Asia and Eastern Europe over the last two decades. Paper mills are having remarkable success peddling tens of thousands of bogus academic journal papers and authorships to university and medical researchers seeking to pad their resumes in highly competitive fields. 

These sophisticated outfits also engage in trickery to get papers published, infiltrating journals with their own editors and reviewers and even resorting to bribery, according to investigators and a white paper from Wiley, a New Jersey-based publisher. The scale of the fraud is eye-popping: One Wiley subsidiary, Hindawi, retracted more than 8,000 articles two years ago for suspected paper mill involvement. 

U.S. universities and regulators have been able to brush off the threat of paper mills because they have mostly sold their services in China, where research integrity standards are rarely enforced, according to experts. But these rogue operators are building on their success in Asia and expanding to the U.S. and Western Europe, where the prize is the prestige of naming an author on an article from a famous university. 

“Paper mills have become a huge business,” said Jennifer Byrne, professor of molecular oncology at the University of Sydney, who studies the enterprises. “If some journals are pushing back on papers from China, and they probably are, it makes sense that paper mills will try to diversify their clientele and start working with people in different countries.” 

 As paper mills expand from the fringe to the center of research, placing professional-looking articles in high-impact journals owned by major publishers like Springer Nature, experts worry about the potential harm to scientific discovery. Researchers willing to break the rules in a Darwinian world of ‘publish or perish’ may mislead other scientists who incorporate their false findings into their own work. “We know little about the actual impact of paper mills on research,” Byrne says. “But if scientists are building on bad information, they are wasting resources and not making progress in their fields.”

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How Trans-Activists Hatched A Plot In The 1980s To Hijack ‘Science’

The latest headlines that have thrust transgender violence and left-wing radicalism into the news cycle:

Hmm. 

Well, not the legacy media’s news cycle (if that’s MSNBC, CNN, CBS, NBC, NPR, etc.), they’re still fixated on “misinformation” and “disinformation” campaigns in their effort to bring down President Trump and crush the MAGA movement for their globalist friends. But the American people no longer believe their nonsense and have rejected the globalists. 

On Wednesday, the New York Post Editorial Board penned in a title: “How many high-profile trans killers can the media ignore?”

But let’s take a step back several decades to understand how the radical left and its woke trans-activist movement managed to hijack science within gender medicine – to grasp better how we ended up in a world experiencing both a surge of kids identifying as transgender and, as noted above, a rising trend in trans-related violence.

Plus, if you’ve noticed, the radical left’s woke army is comprised of …   

Mia Hughes, a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and director of the advocacy group Genspect Canada, spoke at a closed-door Genspect event in late September titled “The Bigger Picture Conference” in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In her speech, Hughes described how woke ideology hijacked science within gender medicine by infiltrating psychiatry, endocrinology, and surgery, reshaping modern medicine as we know it. She warned of the dangers of mistaking ideology for evidence (or “science”) and urged a return to compassion, scientific clarity, and the courage to confront uncomfortable truths.

Here’s what she told the audience: 

Back in the 1980s, a small group of trans activists hatched a plot: to take an absurd, illogical overvalued belief—that being transgender is innate, natural, healthy—and force all of society to live in a fictional world built on it.

Given the sheer audacity of that plot, there must have been people who said it couldn’t be done. But if such voices existed, they were ignored. And the activists pressed on until they succeeded in nothing less than reshaping reality itself.

And they didn’t just persuade people to politely look the other way.

They rallied good, decent people to march in the streets demanding that teenagers sacrifice their health, their fertility, and their sexual function in the name of this belief.

They convinced governments to write laws based on a non-existent, fictional concept.

They enlisted well-meaning teachers to poison the minds of a generation with absurd lies.

And they drove doctors to amputate healthy organs and call it medicine.

If they could succeed in creating that false reality, then surely we can succeed in restoring truth.

Because our cause is not built on lies but on logic and reason. Not on ideology but on sound ethical principles. Not on harm but on healing.

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Scientists sound alarm on DEI’s threat to academic freedom at ‘War on Science’ event

Articles on “the importance of teaching science with a feminist framework.” Observations of whiteness in the physics classroom. A prohibition on the use of the word “intelligence” when discussing extraterrestrial intelligence at a meeting of astrobiologists.

These are just a few of the examples highlighted at an event Thursday called “The War on Science” hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and led by one of the globe’s top theoretical physicists Lawrence Krauss. 

“This is going to be a long war to fight, and it’s difficult because it’s so ingrained, and I think one of the only ways it will end is when enough academics within the academic community finally say enough,” he said.

Krauss, joined by Yale School of Medicine lecturer in psychiatry Dr. Sally Satel, classicist Solveig Lucia Gold, and evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven, focused on themes in a recent book he edited by the same name, “The War on Science,” a collection of essays from 39 scientists and scholars speaking out against attempts to impose ideological restrictions on science and scholarship in western society. 

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GOP Congressman Calls for End to Cruel NIH Dog Testing Following More Abuse Allegations Against Fauci’s Beagle Breeder

In the wake of mounting scandal, Republican Congressman Paul Gosar is demanding that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) halt all experiments on dogs, after new abuse allegations tied to the notorious Ridglan Farms puppy mill that supplies beagles to NIH-funded labs.

Gosar’s comment came in response to a White Coat Waste post that included a disturbing photo of a “9-year-old retired female breeder beagle from the notorious Ridglan Farms” being abused in an NIH-funded experiment at the Cleveland Clinic.

The pressure comes as Ridglan Farms’ lead veterinarian had his veterinary license unanimously suspended this week by the Wisconsin Veterinary Examining Board. Ridglan also faces over 300 alleged animal health violations, a proposed $55,000 state fine, and possible criminal referral, as Gateway Pundit previously reported.

The suspension is a significant escalation in the long‑running controversy over Ridglan, a commercial beagle breeding operation that WCW has documented supplies animals directly to cruel experiments funded with tax dollars by the NIH.

WCW’s investigation has found that dozens of Ridglan beagles have already been used in painful NIH‑supported experiments—ranging from tick infestation studies at the University of Missouri to forced infections, drug injections, and viral exposure protocols. WCW has also obtained documents linking NIH-funded dog testing labs at Northwestern University, University of Chicago, Washington University-St. Louis, University of Georgia, and others to Ridglan.

In a July 2025 letter, Reps. Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene and others sent to the NIH requesting the cancelation of all dog and cat testing grants awarded by Dr. Fauci and an end to future funding for dog and cat testing, he cited the ongoing NIH-funded tick bite experiment on Ridglan beagles uncovered by WCW.

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Immortal Monkeys? Not Quite, But Scientists Just Reversed Aging With ‘Super’ Stem Cells

In a discovery that may have profound impacts on aging, scientists in Beijing have taken a dramatic step toward what once seemed impossible: making old animals biologically young again. The study was published last month in the journal Cell.

By fortifying human stem cells with a gene long linked to longevity, they rejuvenated aged monkeys – improving memory, protecting bones, calming inflammation, and restoring youthful activity across dozens of organs.

The work, while still in animals, is among the most compelling demonstrations yet that aging in primates might be reversible.

The Science Behind the Breakthrough

At the heart of the study are mesenchymal progenitor cells (MPCs) – a type of stem-like cell found in bone marrow and connective tissues. These cells act as the body’s maintenance crew, capable of turning into bone, cartilage, fat, and muscle cells, while also secreting factors that help nearby tissues repair themselves.

But like all cells, MPCs age with us and eventually succumb to senescence  a state of permanent retirement. Senescent cells don’t divide anymore. Worse, they pump out inflammatory molecules, scar tissue signals, and other “toxic chatter” that accelerate aging in neighboring cells. In effect, senescent cells spread decline.

Upgrading the Repair System with FoxO3

To overcome this exhaustion, researchers turned to FoxO3, a protein known as a longevity gene regulator. In healthy young cells, FoxO3 acts like a switchboard operator, turning on DNA repair pathways, antioxidant defenses, and stress-resistance programs. In older cells, FoxO3 activity wanes – leaving them vulnerable to damage.

Hydra, a freshwater organism capable of regenerating indefinitely, rely heavily on FoxO to keep their stem cells active. Humans share this same protein, and genetic studies link variants of FOXO3 to exceptional longevity in people.

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Scientists make embryos from human skin DNA for first time

US scientists have, for the first time, made early-stage human embryos by manipulating DNA taken from people’s skin cells and then fertilising it with sperm.

The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease, by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life.

It could even allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child.

The method requires significant refinement – which could take a decade – before a fertility clinic could even consider using it.

Experts said it was an impressive breakthrough, but there needed to be an open discussion with the public about what science was making possible.

Reproduction used to be a simple story of man’s sperm meets woman’s egg. They fuse to make an embryo, and nine months later a baby is born.

Now scientists are changing the rules. This latest experiment starts with human skin.

The Oregon Health and Science University research team’s technique takes the nucleus – which houses a copy of the entire genetic code needed to build the body – out of a skin cell.

This is then placed inside a donor egg that has been stripped of its genetic instructions.

So far, the technique is like the one used to create Dolly the Sheep – the world’s first cloned mammal – born back in 1996.

However, this egg is not ready to be fertilised by sperm as it already contains a full suite of chromosomes.

You inherit 23 of these bundles of DNA from each of your parents for a total of 46, which the egg already has.

So the next stage is to persuade the egg to discard half of its chromosomes in a process the researchers have termed “mitomeiosis” (the word is a fusion of mitosis and meiosis, the two ways cells divide).

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You Can Trigger ‘Time Expansion’—Meaning You Can Stretch Seconds and Warp Reality, Scientists Say

Time isn’t nearly as immutable as it first seems. Ask any astrophysicist, and they’ll likely regale you with mind-bending descriptions of gravity’s effect on space-time (i.e. the more massive the object, the slower time appears to travel around it). Some cosmologists even wonder if entire pockets of the universe—whether filled with galaxies or endless nothing—experience time at different rates.

However, the perception of the speed at which time passes can also vary within our minds. And it’s this mental realm that Steve Taylor—a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University—is exploring in a new paper and a new book called Time Expansion Experiences.

Taylor’s interest in these altered temporal moments—which he calls “time expansion experiences,” or TEEs—began when he and his wife were involved in a car crash back in 2014. “Everything went into slow motion,” Taylor describes in a post on the Leeds Beckett University website. “I looked behind, and the other cars seemed to be moving incredibly slowly, almost as if they were frozen. I felt as though I had a lot of time to observe the whole scene and to try to regain control of the car. I was surprised by how much detail I could perceive.”

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‘Massive’ comet hurtling toward us is larger than previously thought, could be alien tech, scientist says: ‘It could change everything for us’

Scientists have discovered that the 3I/ATLAS — a Manhattan-sized interstellar object that potentially has alien tech — is much larger than previously thought, according to a new report.

First discovered by NASA on July 1, the cosmic anomaly has been under watch by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and his team as it shoots across the solar system. The object, which is believed to be a comet, reportedly has interstellar origins, making it the third ever object from beyond the solar system ever detected after ‘Oumuamua, which was discovered in 2017, and 2I/Borisov in 2019.

Now the team has gleaned some “sizable” new intel on the interstellar visitor, namely that the “mass of 3I/ATLAS must be bigger than 33 billion tons,” per a blog post by Loeb.

They arrived at this number by calculating the object’s trajectory to find that ATLAS’s “gravitational acceleration” is “smaller than 49 feet per day, squared,” Futurism reported.

This was then compared to how much mass it was shedding via gases and dust particles to determine the size.

Loeb and co. also found that the diameter of its solid-density nucleus must be larger than 3.1 miles — the upper limit of current projections that are based on observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This makes it larger than “three to five orders of magnitude” more massive than its predecessors, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.

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