The Split's science columnists explore discovery, exploration, and the ideas pushing humanity forward.
A coalition of climate skeptics entered a U.S. courtroom on March 20, 2026, arguing that scientific consensus is itself antithetical to science. They are half right about the wrong thing, and the distinction matters enormously.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
The UK has produced 8 babies via mitochondrial replacement therapy, and every one of them is a genuine medical achievement. But 8 data points do not close an ethics debate. The germline changes made in those children will pass to their children, and we have no multigenerational data at all.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
California SAF hit $8.85 per gallon the first week of March 2026, against $1.26 for conventional jet fuel. The chemistry works. The economics are a 7-to-1 ratio that no mandate has yet explained away.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Pig organ transplants moved from science fiction to FDA-approved trials in roughly 3 years. The infection risk that worried researchers 30 years ago still has no precise number attached to it. Those 2 facts need to be in the same sentence more often.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
Quantum funding nearly doubled in 2025. The machines themselves are still in the NISQ era, error-prone and a decade from cracking practical problems that classical computers cannot. The investment clock and the engineering clock are not running at the same speed.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
Longevity clinics in 2026 are offering peptide therapies under the banner of clinical supervision, as if a doctor's monitoring could substitute for the trials that have never been run. The science behind some of these compounds is real and worth pursuing. The safety claims are not.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Scientists have human-based testing tools that outperform animal models. A vast majority of regulatory submissions using those tools still fail review. The federal government just committed $150 million to fix that, but the money alone will not move the bottleneck.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
The citizenship question does not rewrite the federal funding formula. But it changes who answers the census, and a missed person costs their community roughly $1,500 a year in Medicaid, schools, and roads. The damage is one step removed. It still lands.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
Researchers withheld a proven hepatitis B vaccine from 7,000 newborns in one of the world's most hepatitis B-endemic countries, with funding from a CDC no-bid contract and ethics approval that used a resigned official's signature. The science did not justify the design. The geography justified the design.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 4 min read
Congress blocked NASA's proposed 24% science budget cut, and the headlines called it a victory. Then NASA quietly dissolved its independent scientific advisory groups. The budget fight was the distraction.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
New START expired February 5, 2026, and for the first time in 35 years, no legal limits constrain US and Russian deployed strategic warheads. China's ICBM silos now outnumber America's, and US officials allege a secret Chinese nuclear test in 2020 used acoustic decoupling to fool monitoring systems. The arms control architecture has already collapsed; the question is whether anyone builds something in the rubble.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Peru's 2026 dengue crisis, linked directly to extreme weather by Stanford researchers, is not a distant cautionary tale. Warming temperatures are pushing Aedes aegypti mosquitoes into 30 US states. America can afford to contain this. The question is whether it will choose to act before the outbreak rather than after.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
Scientists know only 5 mutations separate bird flu from a human pandemic. Natural evolution is already working through them in dairy herds and wild birds. The case for accelerating that process in a lab has never been weaker.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
Lake Powell is 24% full and this season's snowpack is the lowest on record in parts of the basin. This is what a water system looks like after it crosses a threshold: not dramatic collapse, but permanent structural deficit that no single infrastructure project can reverse.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Dementia patients showed 3 to 5 times more microplastics in brain tissue than healthy controls. That finding is alarming. It is also built on a detection method that may be confusing brain fat with plastic polymers. The science is worth watching closely; it is not yet worth trusting uncritically.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
The human brain runs 1 exaFLOP at 20 watts. Frontier does the same at 21 megawatts. Neuromorphic computing's efficiency advantage is real and staggering. The part nobody wants to say: no neuromorphic system has ever operated at supercomputer scale.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
Congress saved the NIH budget on paper. The administration is dismantling it through administrative mechanisms most people have never heard of. The real threat is not the funding number; it is who now decides which science gets funded.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
An anonymous FDA official called AMT-130 a failure. uniQure calls it a disease-modifying breakthrough. The disagreement is not philosophical; it is a direct clash over what Phase 1/2 biomarker data can and cannot tell us. One side is right.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
A cross-viral review of 25,000 adults found consistent immune markers predicting cognitive decline. The shingles vaccine data is striking. Neither finding proves causation, but one of them is cheap and available today.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
Rosatom says plasma propulsion could get humans to Mars in a month. The underlying physics is legitimate and NASA is already deploying the technology. The Russian claim, however, is missing almost everything that turns a concept into a spacecraft.
By Crash Davis · 4 min read
A laser pulse flipped the magnetic polarity of molybdenum ditelluride on March 4, 2026, with no heat involved. The methodology combines three pillars of modern condensed matter physics in one experiment. One study does not make knowledge, but this one makes a very good question.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Rubin issued 800,000 sky-change alerts on its first night of operations and will scale to 7 million per night. The speed is what other telescopes cannot match. So is the threat: satellite megaconstellations could already be erasing up to half the data.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
A University of Tokyo team just watched an electron flip its spin in 140 picoseconds, live. That is not a simulation or a theoretical limit. It is a demonstration that the ceiling on computing speed sits somewhere we have not reached yet.
By Crash Davis · 4 min read
A 2026 PNAS study rejects oyster farming as a carbon removal strategy, and the science is not close. Oysters are extraordinary ecological animals. They are not doing atmospheric chemistry.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
