Related papers: Agencies and Science-Experiment Risk
While firms and factories often adopt technologies like robotics and advanced manufacturing techniques at a fast rate, government agencies are often seen as lagging in their adoption of such tools. We offer evidence about the adoption of…
Space-based experiments today can uniquely address important questions related to the fundamental laws of Nature. In particular, high-accuracy physics experiments in space can test relativistic gravity and probe the physics beyond the…
One of the virtues of peer review is that it provides a self-regulating selection mechanism for scientific work, papers and projects. Peer review as a selection mechanism is hard to evaluate in terms of its efficiency. Serious efforts to…
This essay analyzes emerging AI & quantum technology (incl. quantum-AI hybrids) regulation, export controls, and standards in the US, EU, & China, comparing legislative efforts anno 2025 to balance benefits/risks via their distinct…
In recent years, a series of high-profile retractions and fraud cases have arisen in physics, sparking a conversation about research integrity and replicability. Here, we discuss how the practice of science is shaped by the social and…
Ultra-high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos probe energies far above the weak scale. Their usefulness might appear to be limited by astrophysical uncertainties; however, by simultaneously considering up- and down-going events, one may…
Laboratory experiments provide a valuable complement to explore the fundamental physics of space plasmas without the limitations inherent to spacecraft measurements. Specifically, experiments overcome the restriction that spacecraft…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
The increasing deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other autonomous algorithmic systems presents the world with new systemic risks. While focus often lies on the function of individual algorithms, a critical and underestimated…
Any scientific attempt to explain consciousness is tasked with reconciling the third person objective perspective of science with our first person subjective experience of the world. A good point of departure is to consider situations in…
Agentic AIs $-$ AIs that are capable and permitted to undertake complex actions with little supervision $-$ mark a new frontier in AI capabilities and raise new questions about how to safely create and align such systems with users,…
The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety Institutes and governments worldwide are deciding whether they evaluate advanced AI themselves, support a private evaluation ecosystem or do both. Evaluation regimes have been established in a wide range…
Automation significantly alters human behavior, particularly risk-taking. Previous researches have paid limited attention to the underlying characteristics of automation and their mechanisms of influence on risk-taking. This study…
While artificial intelligence (AI) holds enormous promise, many experts in the field are warning that there is a non-trivial chance that the development of AI poses an existential threat to humanity. Existing regulatory initiative do not…
Pharmaceutical companies may have incentives to exaggerate the therapeutic effects of their developed products during the clinical stage, which endangers the health of patients. To increase transparency in clinical practice, the NIH…
Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…
The recent discovery of "dark energy" has challenged Einstein's general theory of relativity as a complete model for our macroscopic universe. From a theoretical view, the challenge is even stronger: general relativity clearly does not…
Since the 1930s, and with very few exceptions, it has been assumed that the process of radioactive decay is a random process, unaffected by the environment in which the decaying nucleus resides. There have been instances within the past few…
The proper choice of a measurement technique that minimizes systematic and random uncertainty is an essential part of experimental physics. These issues are difficult to teach in the introductory laboratory, though: because most experiments…