Science Talk

Ahead of a project to spray carbon dioxide into jungle plots, researchers contemplate what its results might signal about the forest’s future.

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After years of delay, researchers are ready to inject carbon dioxide into jungle plots.

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Science is an iterative process. Progress comes from people coming up with ideas that are sort of right and then new evidence and ideas coming in to update them to become even more correct.

Underlying this process is a willingness by scientists to accept that they might be wrong and be open to updating their ideas.

It turns out that social scientists have a term for this mindset. To find out more, I talked with two researchers who are studying this thing they call “intellectual humility.”

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Years in the making, a project in the Amazon rain forest is finally set to determine whether a rise in carbon dioxide could save one of the world’s largest carbon sinks.

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Cows and at least one person in the U.S. have been sickened by avian influenza. We asked experts about the risk to humans.

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Volcano detectives use artificial intelligence to sleuth out ancient secrets in Alaska.

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Today’s episode of Uncertain is about the ways that studies can leave us overconfident and how “just-so stories” can make us feel overly certain about results that are still a work in progress. And sometimes studies get misleading results because of random error or weird samples or study design. But sometimes science gets things wrong because it’s done by humans, and humans are fallible and imperfect.

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These marine mammals are very hard to observe, but in the past two decades the roughly 20 or so people in the world who study sperm whales have found some compelling evidence of culture among them.

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Today we’re going to look at how measles—a disease that was practically eliminated in the U.S.—has resurged in recent months, because people basically forgot how bad it was and got complacent about vaccines. 

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Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a professional astronomer—with a passion for amateur astrophotography—and she's here to offer tips and tricks for want to get into capturing the night sky.

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