Update (17:00 03 Mar): all members of the UK or international scientific community were invited to indicate their support by signing the letter. The opportunity to do so closed at 17:00 UK time on 03 March. The final tally of signatories was 3494 (please see bottom of post for the full list).  Earlier today, I sent the letter below to Professor Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society.

Since 2018, and as part of the global movement towards open science and knowledge as a public good, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) has been working to promote norms and practices of social science research data management (RDM) and sharing among social scientists, information specialists, and research institutions in the Arab region.

Hunting for top ecology programs? Discover which U.S. universities offer the best hands-on research opportunities and career-launching environmental degrees.

Ten years ago, the idea of editing human genomes to prevent disease or enhance traits might have seemed like the stuff of science fiction. Today, not only is it possible—it’s a rapidly advancing field. A recent paper in Nature , “Heritable Polygenic Editing: The Next Frontier in Genomic Medicine,” explores this possibility in detail.

Joshua Habgood-Coote reviews Philosophy, Bullshit, and Peer Review, by Neil Levy

Rare Sunfish Rescued by Florida Police Near Beach In a surprising turn of events, the Florida police were called in to assist with a unique rescue operation. A rare sunfish, usually found in the deep sea, found itself too close to the beach, prompting a rescue effort from the local authorities. The Encounter with the Sunfish A sunfish, known scientifically as Mola mola, is a rare sight near the shores.

In a few weeks, the Rogue Scholar science blog archive will reach the milestone of 25,000 archived science blog posts, each with a DOI and metadata and searchable via full-text search. With this number of blog posts, it is now time to start using a dedicated content type, and last week Rogue Scholar started the migration to the B logPost content type.

This is what I hope will be the final installment in a series of posts describing the results published in McGaugh et al. (2024). I started by discussing the timescale for galaxy formation in LCDM and MOND which leads to different and distinct predictions. I then discussed the observations that constrain the growth of stellar mass over cosmic time and the related observation of stellar populations that are mature for the age of the universe.

Last year I wrote a post describing an R package I put together that fetches recent bioRxiv preprints from a given subject and summarizes them in a couple of sentences using a local LLM running through Ollama: That tool has a limitation in that it’s using the bioRxiv RSS feed to pull recent paper titles and abstracts, and the RSS feeds currently only provide the 30 most recent preprints in each subject area.

Open science initiatives have increased the amount of (openly) available research data. Such data are often shared with the idea that they will be reused, although reuse is far from being guaranteed. Working to bridge the distance between data producers and data consumers has been suggested as one possible way to facilitate the reuse of existing data supplies.

As part of Elon Musk’s weird Department of Government Efficiency’s unconstitutional rampage through the federal government, USAID’s ForeignAssistance.gov was taken offline on January 31, 2025.