SEE ALSO: This is confounded by the fact that weight is not necessarily an indicator of overall health. More recently, a landmark study published in the journal Science demonstrated that only a fraction of recent findings in top psychology journals could be replicated. She wanted to die safely and without pain, under a doctors supervision. By "If we reward research based on how noteworthy the results are, this will create pressure to exaggerate the results (through exploiting flexibility in data analysis, misrepresenting results, or outright fraud)," writes UC Davis's Simine Vazire. So instead, theyre incentivized to generate positive results they can publish. Proposals would be measured on their merits, but then a computer would randomly choose which get funded. We hope those who would be our leaders will do the same.Emily Laber-Warren. It "nudges us to emphasize safe, predictable (read: fundable) science.". Harry Fortuna. Mice had previously been seen attacking seabird chicks but in April researchers found eight dead adults. published 27 June 23. The bottom line is that traditional peer review has never worked as well as we imagine it to and its ripe for serious disruption. "Too many [PhD] students are graduating for a limited number of professor positions with minimal training for careers outside of academic research," noted Don Gibson, a PhD candidate studying plant genetics at UC Davis. Blame bad incentives. This is happening in other fields too, says Ivan Oransky, one of the founders of the blog Retraction Watch, which tracks scientific retractions. The fact that university faculty and research labs face immense pressure to publish but have limited funding makes it highly attractive to rely on low-paid postdocs. (As the University of Alberta's Timothy Caulfield once told us, "Its incredible how much she is wrong about."). All the while, rising costs for conducting science meant that each NIH dollar purchased less and less. Genetic engineering, also known as gene editing, has been used for years to enhance agriculture and treat disease. For example, the cities of Philadelphia and Berkeley, Calif., recently instituted a tax on sugary sodassomething that New York City tried and failed to do several years ago. NY 10036. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that the right to medically assisted death is not constitutionally protected, leaving legislation up to the states. How dangerous will the sun's chaotic peak be? "Science, I had come to learn, is as political, competitive, and fierce a career as you can find, full of the temptation to find easy paths." More transparency would also help, writes Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. But this means it's not always easy to find the best people to peer-review manuscripts in their field, that harried researchers delay doing the work (leading to publication delays of up to two years), and that when they finally do sit down to peer-review an article they might be rushed and miss errors in studies. Urgent Problems and Enduring Questions - Harvard University Example We know that as much as 30 percent of the most influential original medical research papers later turn out to be wrong or exaggerated. Severe droughts in the western states threaten water supplies for some 43 million people. They told us that, in a variety of ways, their careers are being hijacked by perverse incentives. Testing, validating, retesting it's all part of a slow and grinding process to arrive at some semblance of scientific truth. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, vowed to dig up what the government knows about UFOs. Yet many see promise for AI to help issues of bias in medical care. Science is hardly getting its due. In recent years legislators have stymied attempts to increase park funding and pushed for privatization of publicly owned lands. The constant stress drives otherwise talented and intelligent people out of science also.". Last year, Congress approved the biggest NIH spending hike in a decade. Indeed, one review in BMJ found that one-third of university press releases contained either exaggerated claims of causation (when the study itself only suggested correlation), unwarranted implications about animal studies for people, or unfounded health advice. Nosek has detailed other potential fixes that might help with replication all part of his work at the Center for Open Science. But whether the money comes from Congress or private pocketbooks, some advocates say it would be better spent readying parks for the impacts of climate change or fixing trails and roads at heavily-visited sites like Yellowstone. "We do this a couple of times a year at conferences," writes Becky Clarkson, a geriatric medicine researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. Some suggested the creation of credible referees that could rigorously distill the strengths and weaknesses of research. Reducing the perverse incentives around scientific research itself could also help reduce overhype. Top 20 Current Global Issues We Must Address - Human Rights Careers In other cases, world problems can be solved country by country such that they aren't a problem everywhere. "Since receiving my PhD in 2012, I left Chicago and moved to Boston for a post-doc, then in 2015 I left Boston for a second post-doc in Indiana. Whatever people think empathy is, it's a powerful force and human beings need it. Top Science News -- ScienceDaily Nicoletta Lanese Too much is locked away in paywalled journals, difficult and costly to access, they said. Science, technology, society and environment education A declassified U.S. intelligence report further refutes the idea that SARS-CoV-2 "leaked" from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead, the approach that towns and cities have been taking, with financial support from the federal government, has been to build walls around their shorelines or dump tons of sand on eroding beaches. Many believe it is high time for Congress to create a national standard. If Republicans remain in control, experts say, Congress might do better to focus on investing in renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, an approach that might appeal to the GOP because it could stimulate the economy by adding new jobs.Suzanna Masih. ", Perhaps there is a middle ground. Experts are divided over how the U.S. should act to minimize the threat. First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. Climate change hasn't always been so polarizing and even today relatively few Americans deny global warming is real. But everyone suffers from that: the NBER report found that novel papers also occasionally lead to big hits that inspire high-impact, follow-up studies. "For journals I could imagine that scientific associations run those themselves," suggested Johannes Breuer, a postdoctoral researcher in media psychology at the University of Cologne. Membership has grown from 59 scientists in 1899 to more than 39,000 members today, with more than one third located outside the United States. The nonprofit venture is owned and published by a team of scholars, it has no publisher middlemen, and access will be completely free for all. 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Recently, in PLOS Medicine, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis suggested that pharmaceutical companies ought to pool the money they use to fund drug research, to be allocated to scientists who then have no exchange with industry during study design and execution. Quite a few respondents in our survey expressed frustration at how science gets relayed to the public. Outside grants are also in increasingly short supply. Global Issues. But nowadays, our respondents told us, the process is riddled with conflict. And its getting better in many ways. The Next Generation Science Standards, led by educators from nonprofits, philanthropies and state governments, are an attempt to codify a national baseline of math and science achievement. As if 2020 and 2021 weren't unpredictable and challenging enough, there is no doubt that 2022 will . A Great Plains state like Iowa, for example, may be well situated to harness energy from windmills whereas sunny Arizona would do better to rely on solar. Among the most famous examples is a technique called "p-hacking," in which researchers test their data against many hypotheses and only report those that have statistically significant results. DNA analysis indicates the world's most common bee originated in northern Europe around 780,000 years ago, before spreading into East Africa and Arabia around 120,000 years later. "In many cases the expectations were and often still are that faculty should cover at least 75 percent of the salary on grants," writes John Chatham, a professor of medicine studying cardiovascular disease at University of Alabama at Birmingham. But rarely does anyone say what they mean by the word. It suggests the biomedical community has been chasing statistical significance, potentially giving dubious results the appearance of validity through techniques like p-hacking or simply suppressing important results that don't look significant enough. Solving Scientific Problems by Asking Diverse Questions Only 30 states mandate renewable energy. Many scientists have had enough. "Although we recognize that some scientists will cringe at the thought of allocating funds by lottery," the authors of the mBio piecewrite, "the available evidence suggests that the system is already in essence a lottery without the benefits of being random." If we continue on this course, this generation of children could be the first in U.S. history to live shorter, less healthy lives than their parents, Donald Schwarz, vice president, Program, of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nations largest public health philanthropy, said during a telephone press conference. And even when they attempt to replicate a study, they often find they cant do so. "I would make rewards based on the rigor of the research methods, rather than the outcome of the research," writes Simine Vazire, a journal editor and a social psychology professor at UC Davis. Its easy to see how these problems in funding kick off a vicious cycle. (A 2012 paper found that female job applicants in academia are judged more harshly and are offered less money than males.) For example, he has argued, psychologists could conduct small experiments with a handful of participants to form ideas and generate hypotheses. Experts say easily disprovable narratives about the . We heard repeatedly about extremely long hours and limited family leave benefits. 58% of those ages 18 to 29 have experienced high levels of psychological distress at least once between March 2020 and September 2022. Researchers could also make use of new tools, such as open source software that tracks every version of a data set, so that they can share their data more easily and have transparency built into their workflow. As reporters covering medicine, psychology, climate change, and other areas of research, we wanted to understand this epidemic of doubt. Again and again, we also heard from researchers, particularly in social sciences, who felt that their cognitive biases in their own work, influenced by pressures to publish and advance their careers, caused science to go off the rails. Some journals are already embracing this sort of research. For better or worse, it still works. Visuals: Javier Zarracina (charts), Annette Elizabeth Allen (illustrations), Readers: Steven J. Hoffman, Konstantin Kakaes, The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270scientists. Today, we have the answers to some of these questions. Support our mission by making a gift today. Science is in big trouble. The daily incentives facing biomedical scientists to bring new drugs to market are different from the incentives facing geologists trying to map out new rock layers. Get the latest BBC Science and Environment News: breaking news, analysis and debate on science and nature in the UK and around the world. And even after an article is published, researchers think the peer review process shouldn't stop. In our survey and interviews, they offered a wide variety of ideas for improving the scientific process and bringing it closer to its ideal form. Plenty of our respondents wished that more science journalists would move away from hyping single studies. Career advancement can often depend on publishing in the most prestigious journals, like Science or Nature, which still have paywalls. Our Vice President for Policy and Strategic Initiatives unpacks five key global issues to watch in 2022, laying out both the challenges and opportunities of global cooperation in ensuring an equitable, sustainable global response and recovery. Over and over, our respondents expressed dissatisfaction with how scientific research gets disseminated. Maynards story made the cover of People magazine. But as Jennifer Walker explored recently at Quartz, many PhD students also feel isolated and unsupported, exacerbating those issues. Thank you for signing up to Live Science. "The obvious solution is to simply make [scientific funding] a stable program, with an annual rate of increase tied in some manner to inflation.". "In doing so,"Sakaluk says, "the rest of us can have more confidence that this is something we might want to [incorporate] into our own research.". #1. After all, journals can never be entirely free. But CRISPR opens the door to editing for human enhancementsuch as adding genes for bigger muscles or whiter teethpossibilities that are soon to be on the horizon, says Fyodor Urnov, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley. "The paper peer review takes forever, and this hurts the scientists who are trying to put their results quickly into the public domain.". "There is a high level of depression among PhD students," writes Gibson. Experts say Congress must take a range of actionsfrom helping cities identify toxins in their water systems to setting stricter limits for the dumping of industrial waste. Engaging students in examining a variety of real world issues and grounding scientific knowledge in such realities. In addition, they say, the federal government needs to invest more than the $5.4 billion it spent in 2014 to help states replace old water mains and pipesan investment that will pay off by preventing costly public health crises like the recent one in Flint.Nicole Lewis. Top 10 world problems and their solutions By Daniil Filipenco 02 August 2022 Share The last decade was marked by significant progress in various fields such as science, medicine and technology but at the same time, the number of problems in today's society has steadily grown. Drinking water is a basic human need, says Erin Derrington, a Pacific Northwestbased environmental consultant who specializes in wetlands. Other respondents suggested that making research free to all might help tamp down media misrepresentations. published 27 June 23. But scientific research could liberate the issue from politics. Visit our corporate site. 2023 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. Critics reject such programs as government overreach, calling them behavior taxes, but a similar program in Mexico has curbed soda consumption substantially. And sometimes, as we saw in the previous section, the study is simply poorly designed or outright wrong. Postdocs typically work long hours and are relatively low-paid for their level of education salaries are frequently pegged to stipends set by NIH National Research Service Award grants, which start at $43,692 and rise to $47,268 in year three. Career advancement can often depend on publishing in the most prestigious journals, like. Renewable energy is not evenly distributed across the country. "As a devout pirate," Elbakyan told us, "I think that copyright should be abolished.". Obesity now affects more than a third of American adults. Judge by the whole community, with no delays.". "There is very little support for female scientists and early-career scientists," noted another postdoc. To Smaldino, the selection pressures in science have favored less-than-ideal research: "As long as things like publication quantity, and publishing flashy results in fancy journals are incentivized, and people who can do that are rewarded theyll be successful, and pass on their successful methods to others.". But theres an inherent tension here. Top on the list are Maine and Idaho, which derive 100 percent of their energy from renewable sources such as biomass and hydropower. "The current peer review process embraces a concept that a paper is final," says Nosek. This is hardly an exhaustive list. They want to not only overhaul the peer review process but also change how it's conceptualized. Famine. But failed studies can mean career death. Replicating results is crucial and rare, Too much science is locked behind paywalls, Life as a young academic is incredibly stressful. The scientific process, in its ideal form, is elegant: Ask a question, set up an objective test, and get an answer. Of all the services Americans depend on, clean drinking water is the most precious. "It is very rare for a single study to conclusively resolve an important research question, but many times the results of a study are reported as if they do.". Today, such different kinds of scientific thought often come together to solve a single problem. Bioethicist Jonathan Moreno of the University of Pennsylvania says thats proper, because the technology is not yet developed, and once you legislate, its very hard to unlegislate [sic]., For now experts are wrestling with the ethical implications of gene editing and making recommendations: In December a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, comprising specialists in health, science and bioethics, will publish their recommendations on how to legislate as the technology develops.Michael R. Murphy. North Koreas dictator is conducting missile tests with great fanfare. About nine-in-ten (88%) Americans say, overall, the benefits of childhood vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella outweigh the risks, identical to the share who said this before the coronavirus outbreak. Alternatively, researchers in the journal mBio recently called for a lottery-style system. A new facial approximation offers insight into one of humankind's extinct relatives, Homo floresiensis. Here in the U.S. experts endorse a three-pronged approach: Congress should invest in drug development, ban the wanton feeding of antibiotics to cows and pigs, and attempt to reduce the number of patient infections. Scientists studied the fossilized teeth of megalodon and determined that the jumbo-size extinct species of shark was warm-blooded. Through the responses of these research professionals, it emerged that there were seven problems that science was facing: 1. The Turonic PH950 Air Purifier is efficient and user-friendly, and its $170 off at Amazon. Only over the past 100 has science become professionalized. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. Science Issues - Research and data from Pew Research Center The problem here is that truly groundbreaking findings simply dont occur very often, which means scientists face pressure to game their studies so they turn out to be a little more "revolutionary." 10 global health issues to track in 2021 - World Health Organization (WHO) American Society for Microbiology This research addresses complex scientific and social issues that require thoughtful policy-making and debate. Americas national parks and forests are facing many challenges. Similar efforts are being made to ban so-called microbeadstiny plastics manufactured for use in soaps and cosmetics. Because universities produce so many PhDs but have way fewer faculty jobs available, many of these postdoc researchers have limited career prospects. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. In 2021, there were 2,590 gun deaths among U.S. children and teens under the age of 18, up from 1,732 in 2019. The average American 15-year-old has difficulty solving an equation using pi. Scientists often learn more from studies that fail. Solving this wont be easy, but it is at the root of many of the issues discussed above. To have published work, they need positive (i.e.,statistically significant) results. But there is a huge variation in how students fare depending on the state they live in; some Bible belt states shirk teaching evolution science or present it as a competing theory with religious creationism whereas states like New Hampshire offer excellent math and science instruction. World problems, or global problems, are pervasive issues and risks that impact multiple nations and regions. Helium is the simplest element in the periodic table with more than one particle in its nucleus, yet state of the art theory and experiments on it don't add up. Not every student or university will have all of these unfortunate experiences, but theyre pretty common. Two species of tropical flying squirrels have worked out that if they nibble grooves around nuts to store them between tree branches, they are preserved for longer. But as right-to-die legislation gains traction, it is becoming as polarizing as the abortion debate, raising similar religious and ethical questions about an individuals rights and who should have authority in matters of life and death.Alyssa Pagano. That's not to mention the problem of peer review bullying. There's also the question of how best to finance a wholesale transition to open access. Since the default in the process is that editors and peer reviewers know who the authors are (but authors dont know who the reviews are), biases against researchers or institutions can creep in, opening the opportunity for rude, rushed, and otherwise unhelpful comments. But some respondents also noted that workplace issues for grad students and postdocs were inseparable from some of the fundamental issues facing science that we discussed earlier. Science is currently too opaque, research too difficult to share. In the United States, academic researchers in the sciences generally cannot rely on university funding alone to pay for their salaries, assistants, and lab costs. published 26 June 23. There are also philosophical problems raised by science, as in the uncertainty principle of the quantum theory, which places an absolute limit on the accuracy of certain physical measurements and thus on the predictions that may be made on the basis of such measurements; in the quantum theory itself, with its suggestion that at the atomic level . Take the National Institutes of Health, a major funding source. I'd like attitudes to change so people focus less on the race to be first to prove a particular theorem, or in science to make a particular discovery, and more on other ways of contributing to the furthering of the subject.". Unlike medicines for heart disease or diabetes, a good antibiotic is usually used by patients for just a single occurrence of an illness, which makes pharmaceutical companies reluctant to pour money into developing new ones. In a year or two, I will move again for a faculty job, and that's if I'm lucky. Graduate schools could offer more generous family leave policies and child care for graduate students. It's unclear where or how deep the . COVID-19 Scientists have maximum visibility in the COVID-19 response, while proposing solutions to other global challenges, from climate change to cybersecurity, poverty to pandemics, and food technologies to fracking. Ethan Freedman So we sent scientists a survey asking this simple question: If you could change one thing about how science works today, what would it be and why? Jon-Patrick Allem, a social scientist at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, noted that funding agencies prefer to support projects that find new information instead of confirming old results. "It seems wrong to me that taxpayers pay for research at government labs and universities but do not usually have access to the results of these studies, since they are behind paywalls of peer-reviewed journals," added Melinda Simon, a postdoc microfluidics researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. They want to break this cycle of perverse incentives and rewards. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. Discover world-changing science. 1 Share this: 2 Related Humanity has evolved throughout the ages but it will never be perfect, there are always new problems arising in the world. This has plagued science with a problem called "publication bias" not all studies that are conducted actually get published in journals, and the ones that do tend to have positive and dramatic conclusions. Funding "affects what we study, what we publish, the risks we (frequently don't) take," explains Gary Bennett a neuroscientist at Duke University. But not everyone blamed the media and publicists alone. Heres how it works. This lack of flexibility tends to disproportionately affect women especially women planning to have families which helps contribute to gender inequalities in research. Another idea would be to change how grants are awarded: Foundations and agencies could fund specific people and labs for a period of time rather than individual project proposals. The key is for this sort of transparency to become the norm rather than a laudable outlier. "Imagine," he asks, "what they could do with more time to devote to teaching and research?".