How do we solve science's 'credibility problem'?

'This finding, like this stock image, is uncredible!' Shutterstock

Science is considered a source of truth and the importance of its role in shaping modern society cannot be overstated. But in recent years science has entered a crisis of trust.

The results of many scientific experiments appear to be surprisingly hard to reproduce, while mistakes have highlighted flaws in the peer review system. This has hit scientific credibility and prompted researchers to create new measures in order to maintain the quality of academic research and its findings.

Credibility crisis

This is particularly relevant in the UK, whose government prides itself on science-driven policy making. Policies are often drawn from behavioural research, traditionally considered a “soft science”. The head of the UK’s behavioural insights team – the “nudge unit” – argues that these days research economists can “change the world for the better”. But social scientists have debated the reliability and reproducibility of some behavioural research, prompting some to wonder whether science-driven policy has its limitations – and whether over-reliance on it can even backfire.

So leading scientists have suggested a variety of proposals to change the way that science produces knowledge. These include promoting transparency concerning research designs, incentives for more experimental repetition and enforcing the submission of a full plan of the design and analysis prior to the actual study – known as pre-registration.

It is remarkable, however, that economists have so far been content to remain so silent on this credibility crisis. It is, after all, the science that specialises in the analysis of strategic behaviour and the provision of incentives to promote desirable outcomes.

Our research takes up this challenge and provides a first step in examining the theoretical effects of the proposed policies of increased transparency and monitoring on the reliability of scientific results.

Scientific steroids

Although the image of altruistic researchers working hard to discover the truth is strong in the minds of the general public, the actual process in which academic research is conducted is different. Economic theory models the various incentives of scientists, prominent among which is the desire of individuals to ascend the academic ladder.

We focus on proposals to impose transparency – which will stop researchers from committing the questionable practises which make scientific evidence difficult to interpret.

The main result of our model is that discouraging slight transgressions, such as failing to report important details of the analysis, will also reduce more severe questionable research practises such as outright data manipulation. This is because questionable research practises serve as the “steroids” of the scientific race, where the abundance of a given form of misconduct increases the incentives to engage in more extreme misconduct. Accordingly, a policy that eradicates mild forms of misconduct also discourages the use of stronger “performance enhancers”.

We examine a setting where researchers are motivated to conduct research ethically or to maintain a good reputation, but are also concerned about being published in a limited number of top journals. The latter is crucial, as it introduces an “economic externality”.

Easing the pressure

The likelihood of an individual researcher to commit a questionable research practice depends on the behaviour of other resarchers: more lighter transgressions will result in a higher frequency of outright manipulation – to guarantee a unique result and the corresponding acclaim which this brings.

Therefore a transparency policy that reduces lighter transgressions does not, as might be expected at first glance, lead to more severe misbehaviour. On the contrary, reducing the incidence of lighter misdemeanour will reduce competitiveness of the race to publication and thus ease the pressure of engaging in questionable practises.

Other possible policies could aim at reducing more severe transgressions – such as data fabrication – by using the relevant statistical techniques. But this could increase the rewards and frequency of lighter transgressions, making the overall effect on the reliability of scientific results unclear.

Mathematical models are especially useful when they address policy changes that are not amenable to direct experimentation. This is because it is the theory that bridges the gap between the current status quo and the proposed new one. Performing direct experiments on researcher misconduct is costly and difficult, but the potential effects of proposed reforms can still be evaluated by using economic theory.

Our model teaches us that we should feel confident that implementing the transparency proposals will help science fulfil its purpose of discovering the truth.

Why Brontosaurus is no longer a dirty word for dinosaur hunters

What's in a name anyway? Wikimedia

A team of palaeontologists is claiming to have “resurrected” Brontosaurus, the famous long-necked, pot-belled dinosaur. No, they haven’t conducted some mad DNA cloning experiment. They have built a big new family tree of long-necked dinosaurs and argue that Brontosaurus is distinctive enough to be classified separately from its closest relatives.

Confused? I don’t blame you. Brontosaurus is of course an iconic dinosaur. If you could only name a few dinosaurs, you would probably come up with Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Brontosaurus. Ever since 1903, however, you would have been mistaken with the last one. That was the year that palaeontologists determined that Brontosaurus was nearly identical to another dinosaur called Apatosaurus and was not the appropriate name to use.

Needless to say, this never filtered down to pop culture. You have never needed to look far to see Brontosaurus name-dropped in films, books, postage stamps and wherever else. We scientists would sometimes secretly scoff at friends and family who used the name – a sure sign of those uninitiated to our fossil fraternity. But now it looks as though pop culture had it right all along. After all these years, Brontosaurus may now cease to be a dirty word among palaeontologists.

The argument that Brontosaurus is different from Apatosarus is being put forward by a team led by young palaeontologist Emanuel Tschopp from Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal, published on April 7 in the open-access journal PeerJ. Their paper is nearly 300 pages long, with vast tables of measurements and photos of fossils.

Dinosaur fever

The story dates back to the 1870s, a golden era of dinosaur discovery. As big money transformed New York and other eastern American cities, museums and wealthy individuals sent teams of explorers to the American west to bring back the trendy status symbol of the day: huge dinosaurs.

Dinosaur daddy: OC Marsh Wikimedia

Many bones found their way to a Yale palaeontologist named OC Marsh, who was locked in a bitter battle with his Philadelphia rival ED Cope. In their unquenchable desire to one-up the other, these men described some great fossils but also made a lot of mistakes by rushing new discoveries into print.

You can imagine Marsh’s excitement when he was shipped crates of giant bones from Wyoming and Colorado. They belonged to 150m year-old animals, which were some of the biggest ever found. In 1877 Marsh named the first of these long-necked behemoths Apatosaurus, then named the second Brontosaurus two years later. Both generated enormous fame in the press – especially Brontosaurus, whose name means “thunder lizard” and is a thing of linguistic beauty.

Bronto on display at Yale Ad Meskens

But in 1903 a palaeontologist named Elmer Riggs reviewed Marsh’s work. He determined that Marsh had been overzealous: Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus had nearly identical skeletons, with only a handful of tiny differences. To Riggs these two dinosaurs were the same creature – and because Apatosaurus had been named first it was the name that had to stick, following the rules scientists have respected for generations. Brontosaurus might have been a beautiful name, but it was an invalid one.

Welcome back Bronto

Over the next century, scientists forgot about the Brontosaurus name (scoffing aside). It left the palaeontological lexicon in the same way as so many archaic words are dropped from the Oxford English Dictionary every year.

In the meantime, palaeontology became a discipline in which a new species of dinosaur is being found every week. Hundreds or even thousands of dinosaurs have come to light since Riggs sunk Brontosaurus. Dr Tschopp examined hundreds of dinosaurs in museums across the world and built a huge database that records how they differ in age, size and anatomical features.

From this they built a family tree that showed Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus as closely related, but not identical. They also applied various statistical analyses to the database and family tree to demonstrate that the skeletons of Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were more different from each other than many other types of long-necked dinosaurs that have long been classified separately.

The final word?

So does this mean the case is closed and Brontosaurus thunders back to its throne? Maybe, or maybe not. I am curious to see how my fellow palaeontologists react to the paper. I suspect some will agree with Tschopp’s team, while others will continue to maintain that Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are just too similar to be considered different. To be honest, I am on the fence myself.

You say Bronto, I say Apato abrakadabra

There may be no firm resolution to this debate, which is frustrating. But this is because naming things is more art than science. There is no machine or experiment that can tell you whether two things are different enough to be called different. Even modern biologists struggle mightily to define species of modern animals – and we can observe those and study their DNA. Nomenclature will always be open to debate, value judgements and passionate arguments.

But that’s OK. It doesn’t really matter what we call Brontosaurus. Regardless of its name, it was a monstrous creature which thrived hundreds of millions of years ago and was larger than almost anything else that ever lived on land. This dinosaur by any other name, or any name indeed, would still be just as fascinating.

Deception Island – the Antarctic volcano that just doesn't make any sense

Deception wrong-footed scientists three times in ten years, and remains a mystery Wikimedia

Only two volcanoes in Antarctica are active. There is Mount Erebus, which is roughly due south of New Zealand, and Deception Island, which lies about 850km south east of Cape Horn.

Mt Erebus has been erupting continuously over the last few decades. Yet the rather smaller Deception Island, in the South Shetland archipelago, is responsible for the largest known eruption in the Antarctic area.

This horseshoe-shaped cauldron-like structure, or caldera, was produced more than 10,000 years ago by an explosive eruption that scattered more than 30km³ of molten rock. The result is an enclosed welcoming bay called Port Foster.

Deception Island from above Wikimedia

Deception was officially discovered by the British sealing captain William Smith in 1820 and was subsequently used for purposes such as seal hunting and whaling before finding its modern calling as a site for science and tourism. Maybe because you cannot see most of the volcano above the sea, tourists rarely appreciate its hidden destructive potential.

The big blunder

Claimed in the past by the UK, Chile and Argentina, it provides a unique enclosed environment in which to monitor a “volcano under the ice”. All three of those aforementioned countries financed observatories there in the 1960s (Spain added its own in 2000).

Yet two consecutive volcanic eruptions in 1967 and 1969 went unpredicted – remarkable failures in the history of volcano monitoring. Only the Argentinian and the Spanish observatories still exist.

Google Maps

Mud from down below

The volcanic events at Deception fall into a rare category called subglacial eruptions. The island is situated in a place where there is a glacier on the ocean floor about 100m thick. Scientists would normally expect that if this were hit by lava from below, it would evaporate benignly into steam.

But the lava moving upwards at Deception has several qualities that made things happen differently: it moves slowly and it has high water content. This meant that it turned the glacier into meltwater as well as steam, creating a large overflow of mud to the surface. This was the main cause of the destruction of the UK and Chilean stations.

The reason why this melting was unexpected was because in scientific terms the glacier was “deceptively thin”. The scientists were not expecting it to produce much more than steam. Ironically, the absence of larger glaciers is what made the island the most hospitable location in Antarctica.

We understand these subglacial eruptions much better now than we did in the 1960s. Nowadays there are hazard maps to make visitors aware of the higher-risk spots on the island.

The Deception enigma

Yet from a volcanic point of view, Deception is a great puzzle. Many volcanoes are caused by subduction, which is where two of the Earth’s tectonic plates crash against one another, sending one plate down and pushing the other upwards. A classic example is the Cascade range in the north-western US, whose most famous volcano is Mt St Helens. The ones that scientists have observed happen on land.

Most volcanoes at sea are like Hawaii and the Azores, which we describe as hot spots. Instead of taking place near the points between tectonic plates, these are holes in the ocean floor where there is a direct line to the Earth’s mantle. The same goes for submerged calderas in the middle of the ocean, of which there are some examples near Japan.

For a time, scientists thought that Deception might be an unusual example of subduction happening in the ocean. But a more recent hypothesis is that the South Shetlands may be what we call a rift zone. This would mean that it is on a point where plates meet, but instead of colliding, there are gaps from them moving away from each other, creating new oceanic crust in the process. A good example of a rift zone is the Iceland, as can be seen in the video eruption below.

The hydrocarbon connection

Detailed geophysical surveys have been carried out across Deception since 2000, mainly financed by Spanish projects. UK geological research on the island has also been extensive.

You may be wondering why governments have spent so much on research there. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is some kind of place of virtue where different nations fund research just to understand how our Earth works.

Rifts fill up with the remains of volcanic explosions and other sediment eroded from the margins of the valley. This process is critical for the production of oil. Located at the western edge of the arc, Deception is the ideal place to observe rift processes because of the natural harbour, which shelters scientists from the harsh Antarctic weather.

Maybe he can shed light on the situation Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA

Rifting is the reason for all the oil in the North Sea. The oil is not deposited where the rift is located, but some distance away. In the same way, there is almost no likelihood of an oil discovery on Deception. But understanding the process of rifting there will be a strong indication that there is oil to the north of the South Shetland Islands. It would also confer an exploration advantage worldwide – so Deception without oil is as valuable as Deception with oil.

So Deception could be the key to unveiling how rifts form and where oil is, in places where resources are unexploited. In an era where the political claims to the Antarctic have long since receded, that should ensure that this frozen corner of the world remains important for some time to come.

Lemurs may hold secrets to living longer, but they won't increase our lifespan

Jonas the lemur defied his small size by living to the age of 29. David Haring, Duke Lemur Center, Author provided

When Jonas the fat-tailed dwarf lemur died recently in captivity at the ripe age of 29 years, he was the oldest known of his species. But Jonas not only outlasted members of closely related lemur species held in captivity; he also lived much longer than science would predict based on his small size.

A new study in the Journal of Zoology attributed this exceptional longevity to the fact that this lemur species are able to readily enter a low energy state. They can do this for both for long periods of days to months (hibernation), as well as shorter periods of a few hours (known as torpor), which can be used in response to harsh conditions. The researchers suggest that increased longevity in hibernators could be the result of cellular machinery that makes them resilient to metabolic stress, which is associated with ageing.

Among mammals, body size correlates with lifespan: larger species live longer than smaller species. This relationship is not perfect and there are sometimes major exceptions. Jonas and other fat-tailed dwarf lemurs are one of these, meaning they might carry clues to what determines lifespan.

The flame that burns twice as bright

In 1908, Max Rubner proposed the first evidence-based theory of ageing. He noticed that the bigger a species of mammal was, the lower its metabolic rate, meaning that bigger mammals use less energy per kilogramme of body mass than small ones.

But species with bigger body size are also longer-lived. Putting these together, it becomes clear that shorter-lived mammals have a faster metabolic rate. To quote Lao Tzu (and the movie Blade Runner): “The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”

Rubner showed that horses, cows, dogs, cats and guinea pigs each use about 200 kilo-calories for each kilogramme of body weight over the course of their lifetime. So over their lives, each animal, per kg body weight, does the same amount of metabolic work; short-living animals do it faster, longer living do it slower.

This became the Rate of Living Theory. It says that energy metabolism is unavoidably associated with damage which accumulates over time, eventually causing decline in cell function and ultimately death. The faster the metabolism, the more the damage, the shorter the life. In 1956, the Free Radical Theory of Aging proposed that reactive forms of oxygen formed during energy production in cells are what lead to the damage which causes ageing. It’s not proven, but there is much supporting evidence and it’s the best explanation so far.

Evolution shapes the genetics which controls and deals with all this. Natural selection maximises the species productivity in their particular ecologies. In high mortality environments, fast growth and reproduction is required, and ageing is fast. If there is a chance for longer survival, fast growth and reproduction are sacrificed in favour of maintenance of the body, leading to slower ageing and an extended reproductive life. In some species, hibernation has evolved to allow an organism more flexibility in a changeable environment, allowing survival through lean times so that reproduction can re-start when conditions improve.

In hibernating fat-tailed dwarf lemurs, the heart rate drops from 200 to eight beats per minute. Both body temperature and metabolic rate can also drop for up to three months at a time, though they can also enter torpor; a milder state of lower activity. As the Rate of Living Theory predicts, this reduction in metabolic rate is associated with a longer life.

Could humans achieve a similar state?

So if lemurs can do it, why can’t we? There’s one little hiccup in this idea which you may have already noticed: humans can’t hibernate.

Though some yogic practices do allow substantial slowing of breathing and heart rate, this is for short periods. There is no posture or practice in yoga so far known as “the torpid lemur.”

Extreme depth free-divers can slow heart rate as an enhanced form of the diving reflex. Some sort of trance-like focus is often used. Holding your breath results in substantial brain cooling by as much as one degree per minute. But this form of control is associated with significant incidences of abnormal heart rhythms, and deaths among free-divers are not uncommon.

Or holding your breath? Ben Baker Photography, CC BY-SA

Medicine: the real beneficiary

In 1999, 29-year-old Norwegian Anna Bågenholm survived 80 minutes in freezing water following a skiing accident. She was in extreme hypothermia; her core temperature, even after an hour’s journey to hospital, was just 13.7°C. Although there was significant cold damage to her body, there was no apparent brain damage at all. This was probably because, when her heart eventually stopped, her brain was so cold its metabolic rate was sufficiently slow it required almost no oxygen. Her heart stopped for at least three and a half hours and her metabolism is thought to have slowed down to just 10% of its normal rate.

The use of therapeutic hypothermia for treatment of cardiac arrest has become more common in Norway since this case. This can reduce core temperature to 32°C, five degrees lower than usual body temperature. But slowing the heart substantially requires even lower temperatures, and surviving this slowing of the heart would require substantial cooling of the brain and other energy-hungry organs. All which would need a lot of fine tuning to get right.

At this point, at least, I’m not holding my hand up to volunteer.

Saturday’s lunar eclipse will be total, but brief

The moon will enter the outer part of Earth’s shadow (the penumbra) at 4:01 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on April 4. Totality won’t occur until the moon passes through the umbra, or deepest part of the shadow.

Moon: G.H. Revera (CC BY-SA 3.0); C. Crockett/

Primordial stars left their imprint on dwarf galaxy

Explosions of very massive stars in the early universe (illustrated) seeded a handful of stars in a nearby galaxy with unusual amounts of various elements.

NASA, CXC, M.Weiss

A handful of ancient stars outside the Milky Way witnessed the explosive deaths of the first generation of stars, researchers report in the April 1 Astrophysical Journal. The eyewitnesses harbor unusual amounts of heavy elements, such as magnesium and silicon, which means they were probably bystanders to a few supernovas from primordial stars up to about 20 times as massive as the sun.

The stars live about 290,000 light-years away in the puny Sculptor galaxy. Astronomers think that dwarf galaxies like Sculptor are relics from the early universe, which makes these galaxies useful laboratories for studying conditions from not too long after the Big Bang.

Five years ago the iPad changed clicks to touches – but another tablet revolution is coming

This sort of 3D display you can't buy in the shops. Jason Alexander/Lancaster University , Author provided

Apple’s iPad arrived five years ago. It is a device that changed the way we think about computing, marking a seismic shift from keyboard and mouse to direct manipulation with our fingers. The iPad wasn’t the first tablet computer – it wasn’t even Apple’s first tablet computer – but it was the first to capture the world’s imagination and sell tens of millions of devices.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the hands of children, who these days will walk up to any screen and expect to be able to interact with and shift content with the prod of a finger. This style of interaction has even followed us to our workstations where, despite their questionable use, touchscreens now frequently come as standard or are common options when buying a personal computer.

Touchscreens bring the user’s fingers into direct contact with the virtual objects onscreen, but still fundamentally present data representing a 3D visual environment through the medium of a flat 2D screen. Fully comprehending the interface relies almost entirely on our own visual sense, rather than exploiting our other, well-trained sense of touch.

From the pixel to the physical

Touchscreen tablets free us from the constraints of working at a desk and are more liberating due to their smaller size and weight. But, to make better use of all our highly-tuned senses, the next generation of displays will not be 2D and flat, but will have self-actuated, physically re-configurable surfaces. Flat screens will be able to deform themselves into other shapes. These interfaces will change the shape of their display surface to better represent on-screen content and provide additional means to pass on information by touch rather than vision alone.

Screen interaction gets physical. Jason Alexander/Lancaster University, Author provided

Dynamic physical geometry – tablets with interfaces that morph in three, real dimensions, rather than simply displaying 2D representations of them – will fundamentally change the way we approach computer interaction. Displays with pixels that can physically protrude from the surface will allow developers to enhance familiar applications such as architecture, design, terrain modelling and photography by rendering computer-generated 3D scenes in three dimensions in the real world. This will opens all sorts of opportunities for novel applications in team collaboration, tangible entertainment and ways to make computing more accessible to those with disabilities.

Devices will be able to change their form and function: a mobile phone that mutates into a TV remote control, and then into a videogame controller, re-configuring itself to provide appropriate interfaces. Apps will not only be able to modify a visual display, but also dynamically change the physical properties of the device.

This display revolution is closer than we think: commercial ventures such as Tactus Technology’s Phorm already provide a way to generate fixed-position buttons that protrude from the screen by filling small pockets with liquid on command.

Building a physical screen

In our lab, we’ve begun to explore the implications of users interacting with shape-changing displays. We’ve created a 10×10 interactive bar chart with which to represent common data visualisation tasks such as displaying data, filtering data, organising it into different rows and columns, navigating between large datasets, and making annotations. We’ve found that the physical nature of dynamic bars encouraged users to directly manipulate data points for annotation and comparison-style tasks and that traditional touch-based controls work well for navigation and organisation tasks.

Certainly, constructing these shape-changing displays requires expert electronic and mechanical knowledge. There’s a need to involve people with a wide range of interaction design skills to drive forward early prototype design, so we developed a tool that allows non-technical researchers to experiment with shape-changing displays.

ShapeClip is a tool to transform any computer screen from a flat viewing surface to a 3D one, transforming light from the screen into movement through coordinates in physical space above it. By adding a z-axis to the screen’s x- and y-axes, designers can produce dynamic physical content by adding ShapeClip tools to screens. ShapeClip displays are portable, scaleable and can be re-arranged to suit need. They are also fault-tolerant. Users need no knowledge of electronics or programming and can develop motion designs with presentation software, image editors, or web sites.

The iPad shifted our approach from pressing buttons to pressing with our fingers. Future displays will not be flat glass screens we prod, but physically dynamic surfaces capable of reconfiguring themselves in order to better present information to the user through a rich tactile experience that offers more to our senses.