Programmieren: Der Code-Editor Zed erobert Linux

Der bisher nur auf MacOS verfügbare Open-Source-Code-Editor Zed erscheint für Linux. Beliebt ist er bei Entwicklern vor allem als VS-Code-Ersatz. (Entwicklungsumgebung, Mac)

Der bisher nur auf MacOS verfügbare Open-Source-Code-Editor Zed erscheint für Linux. Beliebt ist er bei Entwicklern vor allem als VS-Code-Ersatz. (Entwicklungsumgebung, Mac)

Aktion für Playstation-Besitzer: Streamingabos Apple TV+ und Apple Music einige Monate gratis

Für die sechs Monate Gratisnutzung von Apple Music wird eine Playstation 5 benötigt. Die drei Monate Apple TV+ gibt es auch für Besitzer der Playstation 4. (Sony, Playstation 4)

Für die sechs Monate Gratisnutzung von Apple Music wird eine Playstation 5 benötigt. Die drei Monate Apple TV+ gibt es auch für Besitzer der Playstation 4. (Sony, Playstation 4)

Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately, it’s broken.

There’s no incentive to fix the system, which was never designed to catch fraud anyway.

Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately, it’s broken.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt was the most difficult book I've ever written. I'm a cosmologist—I study the origins, structure, and evolution of the Universe. I love science. I live and breathe science. If science were a breakfast cereal, I'd eat it every morning. And at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched in alarm as public trust in science disintegrated.

But I don't know how to change people's minds. I don't know how to convince someone to trust science again. So as I started writing my book, I flipped the question around: is there anything we can do to make the institution of science more worthy of trust?

The short answer is yes. The long answer takes an entire book. In the book, I explore several different sources of mistrust—the disincentives scientists face when they try to communicate with the public, the lack of long-term careers, the complicitness of scientists when their work is politicized, and much more—and offer proactive steps we can take to address these issues to rebuild trust.

The section below is taken from a chapter discussing the relentless pressure to publish that scientists face, and the corresponding explosion in fraud that this pressure creates. Fraud can take many forms, from the "hard fraud" of outright fabrication of data, to many kinds of "soft fraud" that include plagiarism, manipulation of data, and careful selection of methods to achieve a desired result. The more that fraud thrives, the more that the public loses trust in science. Addressing this requires a fundamental shift in the incentive and reward structures that scientists work in. A difficult task to be sure, but not an impossible one—and one that I firmly believe will be worth the effort.

Modern science is hard, complex, and built from many layers and many years of hard work. And modern science, almost everywhere, is based on computation. Save for a few (and I mean very few) die-hard theorists who insist on writing things down with pen and paper, there is almost an absolute guarantee that with any paper in any field of science that you could possibly read, a computer was involved in some step of the process.

Whether it’s studying bird droppings or the collisions of galaxies, modern-day science owes its very existence—and continued persistence—to the computer. From the laptop sitting on an unkempt desk to a giant machine that fills up a room, “S. Transistor” should be the coauthor on basically all three million journal articles published every year.

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Rocket Report: Chinese firm suffers another failure; Ariane 6 soars in debut

“This powers Europe back into space.”

The Ariane 6 rocket takes flight for the first time on July 9, 2024.

Enlarge / The Ariane 6 rocket takes flight for the first time on July 9, 2024. (credit: ESA - S. Corvaja)

Welcome to Edition 7.02 of the Rocket Report! The highlight of this week was the hugely successful debut of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket. They will address the upper stage issue, I am sure. Given Europe's commitment to zero debris, stranding the second stage is not great. But for a debut launch of a large new vehicle, this was really promising.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Chinese launch company suffers another setback. Chinese commercial rocket firm iSpace suffered a launch failure late Wednesday in a fresh setback for the company, Space News reports. The four-stage Hyperbola-1 solid rocket lifted off from Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert at 7:40 pm ET (23:40 UTC) on Wednesday. Beijing-based iSpace later issued a release stating that the rocket’s fourth stage suffered an anomaly. The statement did not reveal the name nor nature of the payloads lost on the flight.

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