Tag: science

Leaked Emails Show EPA Sought To Discredit Scientist After Ohio Train Derailment Disaster

Leaked emails from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) show that the agency sought to discredit an independent scientist who questioned official data on contamination following the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment and fire in February 2023.

Following the official EPA announcement that were no dangerous levels of toxins in the area and that it was safe for residents to return home, independent testing expert Scott Smith reported finding high levels of dioxins in the soil in East Palestine.

According to News Nation, when Smith’s findings were reported in spring of 2023, former EPA administrator Judith Enck said the agency should pay attention to Smith’s test results.

Instead of taking new samples and doing similar testing, leaked emails show that the EPA began collecting Smith’s personal information and monitoring his actions in an effort to discredit the environmental scientist.

Smith’s personal information and whereabouts were distributed to more than 50 EPA employees, his dog’s picture was circulated and drones were documented hovering near the scientist on multiple occasions.

Lesley Pacey, with the Government Accountability Project, told NewsNation that the EPA’s response was “troubling” since it was a matter of public health.

Pacey said, “What the EPA seems to have done here in East Palestine is that they were more interested in controlling the narrative and controlling what was going out to the community, from the community and back to the community,” adding, “They were definitely controlling the narrative of nothing to see here, no long-term health impacts.”

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California invested millions in STEM for women. The results are disappointing

Ten years ago, it seemed everyone was talking about women in science.

As the economy improved in the years after the Great Recession, women were slower to return to the workforce, causing alarm, especially in vital fields like computing. State and federal leaders turned their attention to women in science, technology, engineering and math, known by the acronym STEM.

Over the next few years, they poured millions of dollars into increasing the number of women pursuing STEM degrees. But the rate of women who attain those degrees has hardly improved, according to an analysis of colleges’ data by the Public Policy Institute of California on behalf of CalMatters.

“The unfortunate news is that the numbers haven’t changed much at all,” said Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the institute who conducted the analysis of California’s four-year colleges using data from the 2009-10 school year and comparing it to the most recent numbers, from 2022-23. The share of women who received a bachelor’s degree increased from roughly 19% to about 25% in engineering and from nearly 16% to about 23% in computer science. In math and statistics, the percentage of women who graduate with a degree has gone down in the last five years.

“It’s not nothing, but at this pace it would take a very long time to reach parity,” Johnson said.

Girls are also underrepresented in certain high school classes, such as AP computer science, and while women make up about 42% of California’s workforce, they comprise just a quarter of those working in STEM careers, according to a study by Mount Saint Mary’s University. Fewer women were working in math careers in 2023 than in the five or 10 years before that, the study found.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon,” said Mayya Tokman, a professor of applied mathematics at UC Merced. She said underrepresentation is a result of perceptions about women, the quality of their education, and a lack of role models in a given field.

Science and technology spurs innovation and economic growth while promoting national security, and these jobs are often lucrative and stable. Gender parity is critical, especially as U.S. science and technology industries struggle to find qualified workers, said Sue Rosser, provost emerita at San Francisco State and a longtime advocate for women in science. “We need more people in STEM. More people means immigrants, women, people of color as well as white men. There’s no point in excluding anyone.”

She said that recent cuts by the Trump administration to California’s research and education programs will stymie progress in science, technology and engineering — and hurt countless careers, including the women who aspire to join these fields.

Over the last eight months, the federal government has made extensive cuts to scientific research at California’s universities, affecting work on dementia, vaccines, women’s issues and on health problems affecting the LGBTQ+ community. The administration also ended programs that support undergraduate students in science. In June a federal judge ruled that the administration needs to restore some of those grants, but a Supreme Court decision could reverse that ruling.

More recently, the administration halted hundreds of grants to UCLA — representing hundreds of millions in research funding — in response to a U.S. Justice Department investigation into allegations of antisemitism. Now the Trump administration is asking for a $1 billion settlement in return for the grants. A California district judge ruled on Tuesday that at least some of those grants need to be restored.

‘The cultural conversation has changed’

In the past five years, attention has shifted away from women in science. Nonprofit leaders and researchers across the state say that many lawmakers and philanthropists turned away from women in STEM during the COVID-19 pandemic and focused more on racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.

Since 1995, women have been outpacing men in college, and women are now much more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree. The unemployment rate for men is higher, too, and men without college degrees are opting out of the labor force at unprecedented rates.

On July 30 Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order saying the state needs to do more to address the “growing crisis of connection and opportunity for men and boys.” It’s not a “zero-sum” game, he wrote: the state can, and should, support everyone.

But some state investments for women’s education are lagging.

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Scientists Say This “Strange Physics Mechanism” Could Enable Objects to Levitate on Sunlight

Designed for flight forty-five miles above the Earth’s surface, Harvard SEAS researchers have devised a nanofabricated lightweight structure capable of sunlight-driven propulsion through a process called photophoresis, capable of monitoring one of Earth’s most challenging locations to navigate.

Stretching between 30 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mesosphere has proven extremely difficult to study, as the altitude is too high for planes and balloons, yet too low for satellites. Achieving regular direct access to this long-out-of-reach portion of the atmosphere could be a major boon to improving weather forecasts and climate model accuracy.

Now, a new breakthrough technology could make it possible, by allowing lightweight structures to reach largely unexplored heights powered by sunlight alone.

Photophoresis

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the University of Chicago, and other institutions worked on the project, which was revealed in a new paper published in Nature.

“We are studying this strange physics mechanism called photophoresis and its ability to levitate very lightweight objects when you shine light on them,” said lead author Ben Schafer, a former Harvard graduate student at SEAS, now a professor at the University of Chicago.

Photophoresis is a physical process where gas molecules bounce off of an object’s warmer side more forcefully than its cooler side in extremely low-pressure environments. One such environment is the difficult-to-reach mesosphere.

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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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