What’s really happening with trust in science

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Yesterday, the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile started a 10-year mission to image the sky with unprecedented breadth. In its first year, its nightly sweeps will generate more data than all previous optical telescopes combined. And this is just the beginning. “The first year of data is not going to be great for faint stuff, but as they build up the data over 10 years, it gets better and better,” says astrophysicist Aaron Romanowsky.

Science | 7 min read

Read more: Physicist Tony Tyson reflects on the Rubin Observatory — a project he first dreamt up more than 30 years ago (Nature | 5 min read)

Infographic of the week

In July 2024, the journal Biology Open trialled paying peer reviewers that turned around ‘good quality’ reports within four working days. The experiment was a success: paying reviewers led to faster first editorial decisions and improved review quality, as judged by handling editors on the basis of helpfulness in making a decision. (Nature | 6 min read)

Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Features & opinion

Trust in science has collapsed — right? The evidence says that it’s not necessarily so. From a global perspective, public trust in science and scientists is high. Trust has dropped in certain groups, notably among Republican-leaning people in the United States. And research in the United Kingdom shows that the proportion of people who have “a lot” of trust in science tends to be lower among politically right-leaning groups than those on the left. In many countries, people are also increasingly questioning definitive evidence on divisive issues such as vaccines, partly because scientific information is being drowned out online.

Nature | 16 min read

An influential climate study published 22 years ago has the fingerprints of oil executives all over it, reports ProPublica. In it, researchers identified a portfolio of actions they called “stabilization wedges” that used existing technology to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, the study was funded by the oil company BP and much of its content was shaped by the company, finds ProPublica’s investigation. The result: too much focus on carbon capture and storage, an unproven idea that some think could neutralize some ongoing greenhouse gas emissions. A former BP exec says the company “did not oversee” the paper and took academic freedom seriously, and the study’s authors deny BP had any control over the paper’s scientific content.

ProPublica | 35 min read

Reference: Science paper (from 2004)

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