The biggest challenge to voting accuracy in the U.S. isn’t hanging chads or hacked voting machines—it’s the mail. A new report by the Voting Technology Project (VTP)—a joint venture between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—finds that even though absentee ballots account for about only a quarter of all ballots [...]

Since the turn of the 21st century, the number scientific papers published predominantly by Chinese researchers in any of the Nature journals has risen from six to nearly 150 according to a new index published by Nature on May 12. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Campuses such as Tsinghua University and Peking [...]

A few weeks back I blogged about a paper by Arturo Casadevall, Ferric Fang and others from the University of Washington and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine that investigated retractions in scientific publications and concluded that the majority of retractions could be traced to misconduct, with the majority of misconduct in turn arising from fraud. [...]

There’s a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that should make the scientific community sit up and do a little pondering. Researchers from the University of Washington, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the firm MediCC! analyze retracted papers from 1977 onwards and investigate the reasons for their retractions. The [...]