What are scientists researching about?

Plant research in space (NASA)

In previous posts I have mentioned some dangers faced by the future of science in the face of the growing obstacles suffered by basic research and the tendency of politicians to prioritize practical applications. The arguments I offered in those posts were qualitative. It is possible, however, to obtain real quantitative data, extracted from the journal Science News, which publishes a fairly complete summary of the results of research in all fields of science and technology. By analyzing 23,946 articles published during 30 years, I have obtained the following table, which shows the number of scientific news related to fourteen of the most researched topics in the fields of biology and medicine during that period of time. (More than half the research results belong to those two fields).

Daring to say “I don’t know”

I don’t know. It seems quite simple. Why so few people dare to say it?

Several years ago, when it became fashionable in popular newspapers to publish mini-surveys, answered by four or five people, about a current issue, I wondered at seeing that, whatever the question, not one of them ever answered I don’t know. Everyone was perfectly clear about what they should answer in every case.

Some of the questions had substance:

• How would you end the civil war in Yugoslavia?
• How would you solve the unemployment problem?
• How would you stop terrorism?

Five years in PopulScience

Albert Einstein

This week we celebrate a small anniversary: five years since this blog was created. In this time, 245 posts have been published. The Spanish version of the blog is a little older: it was created 30 weeks before, in January 2014, and has published 257 posts.

To mark the date by some kind of celebration, I have decided to compute the list of people most mentioned in the blog in these five years. The following table shows the names of the ten people most quoted and the number of times their name has been quoted:

Name	Times quoted in PopulScience
Albert Einstein	42
Isaac Newton	33
Stephen Hawking	20
C.S. Lewis	20
Aristotle	17
Charles Darwin	14
Isaac Asimov	14
Richard Dawkins	12
Plato	10
Ptolemy	9