Stories by Charles Seife

A botched obituary underlines threats from both artificial intelligence and digital plagiarism mills to pollute the news with misinformation

Oppenheimer won’t bomb in the box office, but despite its director’s best efforts, the science in the film is a bit of a fizzle

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is already billions of dollars over budget and decades behind schedule. Not even its leaders can say how much more money and time it will take to complete

He was an important physicist, but the press and the public saw him as a prophet—and he didn’t go out of his way to discourage them

Mere lying is one thing; silencing the voices of those who disagree is something far more serious and more dangerous

Federal agencies have been subtly controlling the flow of scientific information to the press, even as their media policies preach openness

The Food and Drug Administration, Sarepta and the case of the missing drug data

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been arm-twisting journalists into relinquishing their reportorial independence, our investigation reveals. Other institutions are following suit

An investigation into some scientific papers finds worrying irregularities

The genetic-testing company's real goal is to hoard your personal data

A recently exposed case of the agency's handling of drugs that reached the market in spite of fraudulent studies is no anomaly. The agency's response mirrors how it handled an earlier instance of scientific misconduct at another contract research organization

The FDA in 2011 announced years' worth of studies from a major drug research lab were potentially worthless, but it has not pulled any of the compounds from the market nor identified them

An investigative report about the influence of drug company money on scientific research, which appears in the December 2012 issue, started with a database of publicly available information. Here is how the author pieced together the report

The pharmaceutical industry funnels money to prominent scientists who are doing research that affects its products--and nobody can stop it

There's no way that anyone could pinpoint which baby became the seven billionth person living on Earth. The uncertainties in measurement are simply too huge

Why we shouldn't put our faith in opinion polls

A loophole is found in a popular encryption scheme

Experimental rabbit-killing virus runs amok in Australia