The Split's science columnists explore discovery, exploration, and the ideas pushing humanity forward.
CRISPR was announced in 2012. The first Hepatitis B therapy built on it is only now entering serious trials. That 14-year gap is not a scandal. It is the cost of not killing people with untested medicine, and the real question is which parts of the pipeline we can actually compress.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
A single EV battery requires hundreds of kilograms of lithium extracted from ecosystems that are often fragile and poorly regulated. The ecological harm is real and documented. And yet the lifecycle numbers, replicated across multiple independent analyses, tell a story that does not change: EVs still win by a wide margin.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
The British Educational Research Journal published 19 manipulated articles before anyone caught them. Peer review caught zero. The question is not whether this can happen again. It is how many times it already has.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
EPA says repealing the Endangerment Finding saves $1.3 trillion. Its own analysis shows $180 billion in net costs and $87 billion in annual climate damages it chose not to count. The emissions don't stop because the accounting did.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
The FDA banned Red No. 3 from cosmetics in 1990 over animal tumor data, then spent 35 years allowing Americans to eat it. The human cancer evidence is genuinely weak. The case for the ban does not depend on it.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
A 90%-complete skeleton from South Africa has been sitting in the data for years, and the field keeps treating it like a regional footnote. Little Foot's mosaic of ape and human traits isn't an anomaly. It's the whole argument against linear evolution models.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
A rock hit the North Sea 50 to 60 million years ago and left a 1.9-mile scar that geologists spent 24 years arguing about. The debate ended in April 2026, not because science finally caught up, but because the right instrument was finally applied to the right data.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Pollen found under 500 meters of Greenland ice confirmed that Prudhoe Dome melted completely around 7,000 years ago. Some coverage treated this as reassuring. The study's own numbers say otherwise: we are on pace to recreate those conditions by 2100, this time in decades instead of millennia.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
Fossil records show 10 of 18 extinct Hawaiian waterbird species disappeared before Polynesians arrived. A 2026 study found no evidence of Indigenous overhunting. The real drivers were climate, rats, and European land use, and conservation strategy has been aimed at the wrong target for 50 years.
By Crash Davis · 4 min read
A ship sprays sea salt into clouds to reflect sunlight back into space. The physics is elegant, the climate rationale is urgent, and nobody downwind was asked. That sequence is the problem.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Boeing's Starliner left 2 astronauts stranded for nine months and generated a 311-page failure report blaming systemic cultural problems. SpaceX already does the job. The case for continuing to fund Starliner is thinner than the report.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
Bacteria have been blowing themselves up to share antibiotic resistance genes with their neighbors, and a 2026 study finally identified the 3-gene switch that triggers it. This isn't a curiosity. It's a drug target that changes the entire logic of how we fight superbugs.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
Researchers just finished the most careful accounting of Earth's artificial light ever assembled, and the result is 16% brighter nights since 2014. But buried in the same dataset is France's 33% drop, and that number changes the entire argument.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
A study published yesterday shows the Montreal Protocol's ozone recovery is running 7 years behind schedule, and the cause is a loophole that has been in the agreement since 1987. The measurement tools exist. The fix is known. What is missing is a binding limit.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
A South Korean preprint in 2023 sent labs worldwide scrambling to synthesize LK-99. The hovering pellets looked like magic. The resistance measurements told a different story entirely.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Community leaders told ING's shareholders last December to stop treating their valley as a sacrifice zone. European banks invest €8 billion a year in critical minerals extraction. Nobody has committed to changing anything.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
Anthropic refused Pentagon demands to strip its AI of autonomous weapons restrictions. The government called it a national security risk. A federal judge disagreed. Every AI researcher should be paying close attention to what comes next.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
Zealandia's 2017 case for continental status was methodologically careful, peer-reviewed, and largely ignored. That gap between evidence and consensus is not a failure of geology. It reveals that 'continent' was never really a scientific category.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Bill Gates has committed $2 billion to next-generation clean technology since 2016. The cheapest solar on the planet costs $0.03 per kWh and is sitting in a 5-year grid interconnection queue. Those two facts are related.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
Four astronauts flew around the moon last week for the first time since 1972. The engineers who built Orion earned every bit of that milestone. The $4 billion price tag for a rocket that then sinks into the ocean is a different story entirely.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
A new international collaboration has locked down the universe's expansion rate to 1% precision, and the gap with early-universe predictions is still there, unmoved. The methodology survived every stress test. The standard cosmological model did not.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
The EPA erased its 2009 endangerment finding in February 2026, and Administrator Lee Zeldin told climate skeptics to celebrate vindication. The atmospheric physics did not get the memo. Repealing a legal determination and overturning scientific evidence are not the same action, and the difference is not subtle.
By Dr. Nadia Osei · 3 min read
Subglacial meltwater channels drove catastrophic floods 12,000 years ago, scouring bedrock at Niagara Falls velocity. The mechanism is physically real and active. The problem is we are not measuring it well enough to know how much it is changing our sea level future.
By Vera Santos · 3 min read
A 500-kilometer canyon system sat under the Atlantic for millions of years, known but unreadable. The 2026 GEOMAR study did not find something new. It finally built instruments good enough to see what was always there.
By Crash Davis · 3 min read
