A promising field of research on social behaviour struggled after investigators couldn’t repeat key findings. Now researchers are trying to establish what’s worth saving.

Read more in Nature.

In a few decades, two warring toothbrush giants have carved out a market worth billions, with the help of a little science and some clever marketing. But where does it go next?

Read more in Wired.

The country’s only shot at a nuclear missile is inspiring a new shot at a future in space.

Read more at Smithsonian Air & Space magazine.

Dominic Cummings and I share some interests, to my slight chagrin. Both he and I are big fans of the nerdy, abstruse bit of the internet filled with people who are sometimes called “Rationalists”. Read more on Unherd.

Some star psychologists don’t disclose in research papers the large sums they earn for talking about their work. Is that a concern?

Read more here.

There’s no evidence that social media is to blame for an increase in teen deaths

There’s this trick that climate deniers used to use. They used to say “there’s been no warming since 1998”. And in a weird way they were right: looking at global atmospheric surface temperatures, none of the years that followed was as hot as 1998.

But they were cheating. They picked 1998 deliberately since it was an outlier – an El Niño year much hotter than the years around it. If you were, on the other hand, to measure from 1997 or 1999, then there were lots of much hotter years on record; and the clear trend was that later years, on average, were hotter than earlier ones. It was a wobbly, noisy line, with some outliers, but the average temperature really was going up, and the only way you could hide that trend was by cherry-picking statistics.

I was thinking about this as I read the Sunday Times splash this week, which (using as-yet unavailable data from the Office for National Statistics) claimed that the “suicide rate among teenagers has nearly doubled in eight years”. It expressed concerns that we are raising “a suicidal generation”.

Read the rest here.

The decision to legalize cannabis in Canada could be seen as a hippyish, free love move by aging potheads.

But — counterintuitively — it is better understood as a hardheaded, evidence-led attempt to protect children from the undoubted dangers of drug use.

Read the rest here.

New biomedical techniques, like next-generation genome sequencing, are creating vast amounts of data and transforming the scientific landscape. They’re leading to unimaginable breakthroughs – but leaving researchers racing to keep up.

Read more here.

Sure, the Remain-Leave argument can get pretty angry. The rows between Labour and Conservatives, too, and the respective supporters of Israel and Palestine. But the deadliest and most intractable fight of all is between people online and their completely made-up imaginary opponents.

Read the rest here.

I’m a freelance science writer. Until January 2018 I was science writer for BuzzFeed UK; before that, I was a comment and features writer for the Telegraph, having joined in 2007. My first book, The AI Does Not Hate You: The Rationalists and Their Quest to Save the World, for Weidenfeld & Nicolson, is due to be published in June 2019. Since leaving BuzzFeed, I’ve written for the Times, the i, the Telegraph, UnHerd, politics.co.uk, New Scientist, CNN, and elsewhere.

Contact me via Twitter or by email.

Below, I’ve added a few links to some of my favourite things that I’ve done over the years.

The header pic is the Cassini space probe’s final image of Saturn, because Cassini is the best space thing.