Here's an issue we don't talk about enough. Every year, peer-reviewed research journals publish hundreds of thousands of scientific papers. But every year, several hundred of those are retracted — essentially, unpublished. There's a number of reasons retraction happens. Sometimes, the researchers (or another group of scientists) will notice honest mistakes. Sometimes, other people will prove that the paper's results were totally wrong. And sometimes, scientists misbehave, plagiarizing their own work, plagiarizing others, or engaging in outright fraud. Officially, fraud only accounts for a small proportion of all retractions. But the number of annual retractions is growing, fast. And there's good reason to think that fraud plays a bigger role in science then we like to think. In fact, a study published a couple of weeks ago found that there was misconduct happening in 3/4ths of all retracted papers. Meanwhile, previous research has shown that, while only about .02% of all papers are retracted, 1-2% of scientists admit to having invented, fudged, or manipulated data at least once in their careers.

The trouble is that dealing with this isn't as simple as uncovering a shadowy conspiracy or two. That's not really the kind of misconduct we're talking about here.

Even when scientists are caught, red-handed, inventing results out of whole cloth, it's not usually a political or ideological agenda driving the fraud. Instead, this misconduct tends to be caused by biases and motivations that are a lot harder to spot and root out. It's about the personal and economic pressure to be successful and regularly publish (and, especially, pressure to publish something really important). It's about having spent years on a project and really, really, really not wanting to believe that time was wasted. It's about doing things by the book, even when you know the book is wrong. It's about laziness. Or jealousy. Or trying to please a demanding boss. It's about convincing yourself that you can cheat a little, just this one time, because your particular circumstances are just.

In other words, the problems with science are problems that exist in every human industry. Like any other job, most people are honest most of the time. Unlike other jobs, however, the culture of science has long operated on the assumption that everybody is honest all of the time — and that we always catch them when they aren't.

That's why it's actually exciting to me to see more people talking about the problems and misconduct that do happen in science.

It means more people within science are acknowledging that those problems are real and are starting to think about how to deal with them. It also means that you, the general public, are more aware of the ways in which science isn't perfect. That's important.

I talk a lot here about how hard it is to know what to think about the new studies you read about in the paper. Do they represent absolute Truth? Why are they so often contradicted by other studies? To really know why individual studies matter and what they mean for your life, you need context — context about the specific subject, and context about how science works as a whole. Knowing that scientists are human — and that the scientific process has flaws — is part of that.

And if what you're thinking right now is, "But this means that I can't totally trust any individual scientist, and it means that I can't think the newest research paper actually tells me much on its own, and it means that even honest researchers could be producing bad results, and it means I can't go around assuming that the facts I know are always going to be right," well ... congratulations. You're learning.

Some Suggested Reading/Listening:
• The New York Times on the recent research suggesting that fraud and misconduct are bigger issues in science than we like to think.
• Nature on retractions and why there are more retractions today then there used to be.
• Neuroskeptic on bad people breaking good rules, and the even bigger problem of good people following bad rules.
• Ed Yong's speech on the very human flaws in the scientific process.
• Ivan Oransky's Retraction Watch blog, where every day is "Time to Give the Scientific Process the Side-eye" Day
• The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date — a new book by Samuel Arbesman, which I am currently reading with deep interest.
• Wrong — a book by David Freedman that everybody should read.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a story for ArchitecturalSSL magazine about people installing solar-powered LED streetlights in remote villages in southern Mexico. Tying these places into the larger electrical grid would have been extremely difficult. But solar LED streetlights allowed the people who lived in those places to get the night light they wanted.

Now there's similar work happening in refugee camps in Haiti, where many people displaced by the 2010 earthquake still live. The change is undoubtedly useful: LED streetlights don't have to be powered by expensive gasoline generators, they're better on the lungs than fires, and the light level is bright enough to allow people to work and live far more easily. But what about physical safety? Surprisingly, there turns out to be a decent amount of debate over whether or not the extra light actually reduces violence and makes people safer. It's an interesting case study in how "common sense" doesn't always match up with reality and how difficult it is to attribute cause and effect in complicated social environments. From at story Txchnologist:

In recent months, the lights have come on at two camps through the efforts of aid groups, the Haitian government and the particular expertise of the Solar Electric Light Fund, or SELF, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that uses renewable energy to provide light and power in developing countries.

The nexus between public lighting and safety is hotly debated in Western countries.

Some studies show a decline in crime after an area is illuminated while other research has found that crime actually increases after lights are installed, though it may be because crime is more visible. These studies are of little value, however, in places with collapsed infrastructure like Haiti, which plunged into darkness after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake flattened entire neighborhoods and killed untold thousands.

The security improvements were immediate. The lights function at full power from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. and at 50 percent between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. Reported acts of violence, including sexual assault, declined from about six per week when the installations began in June to one or zero per week when streetlights came online in August, according to J/P HRO data provided by SELF. While it’s possible to attribute this drop to other factors – the population of the camp had declined to 23,000 by September and community-based “protection teams” have increased patrols – residents reported feeling an increased sense of security. Increased usage of the latrines also improved Sanitary conditions “significantly,” according to J/P HRO.

Clearly, this was going to turn out to wildly misleading. You love your iPhone like you love your mother is just not the kind of statement that passes a cursory bullshit inspection. And lots of people have handily debunked it, including a couple of actual nueroimaging specialists, Russ Poldrack and Tal Yarkoni.

So, how wrong was the NYT op-ed? Pretty damn wrong. Turns out, the part of the brain Martin Lindstrom identifies with lovey-dovey emotions is a lot more complicated than that. Here's Russ Poldrack:

Insular cortex may well be associated with feelings of love and compassion, but this hardly proves that we are in love with our iPhones. In Tal Yarkoni's recent paper in Nature Methods, we found that the anterior insula was one of the most highly activated part of the brain, showing activation in nearly 1/3 of all imaging studies! Further, the well-known studies of love by Helen Fisher and colleagues don't even show activation in the insula related to love, but instead in classic reward system areas.

And Tal Yarkoni adds a lot more to this:

... the insula (or at least the anterior part of the insula) plays a very broad role in goal-directed cognition. It really is activated when you’re doing almost anything that involves, say, following instructions an experimenter gave you, or attending to external stimuli, or mulling over something salient in the environment.

So, by definition, there can’t be all that much specificity to what the insula is doing, since it pops up so often. To put it differently, as Russ and others have repeatedly pointed out, the fact that a given region activates when people are in a particular psychological state (e.g., love) doesn’t give you license to conclude that that state is present just because you see activity in the region in question. If language, working memory, physical pain, anger, visual perception, motor sequencing, and memory retrieval all activate the insula, then knowing that the insula is active is of very little diagnostic value.

I'd recommend reading Yarkoni's full post, because it also gets into some really fascinating nuance behind the neuroscience of addiction. Shorter version: We don't have a clear biomarker that signals addiction, or addictive behavior. You couldn't even diagnose an obviously addicted individual using neuroimaging. So you should beware of anybody who tells you that an fMRI study demonstrates that people are addicted to anything.

Behavioral therapist Andrea Kuszewski has a great guest post up at The Intersection blog, looking at what we can (and can't) learn from the handful of studies that have attempted to link politics and neurobiology. None of these studies have been perfectly well-done, she writes. But, despite being flawed in different ways, they're coming to some of the same conclusions—conservatives seem to have a more active amygdala and liberals seem to have a more active anterior cingulate cortex. You can shorten that into a headline-grabbing statement about conservatives being driven more by emotions and liberals by logic. But it's really, really not as simple as that.

If you're going to talk about these studies at all, Kuszewski writes, you're going to have to understand the context behind them. In other words: This is an issue chock full of yesbuts. And, without them, you're going to come to some very wrong conclusions.

This is definitely a story worth reading all the way through. It is, however, a difficult story to excerpt ... at least, without committing the very sins the article is meant to correct. But out of all the yesbuts Kuszewski identifies, I'd like to highlight this one, in particular, because I think it's often overlooked in many popular discussions of neurobiology and culture.

1. The brain is plastic. Meaning, every time we engage in any activity, our brain changes somewhat, even if only to a very small degree. In fact, your brain is a little bit different right now than when you started reading this article. And a little different now. Engaging in any activity excessively or intensely over a long period of time changes your brain even more—such as training for a sport or spending a long time practicing and becoming proficient at a skill. Conversely, if you stop using an area of your brain to a significant degree, it will probably shrink in size due to lack of connectivity, similar to the atrophy of muscles. When it comes to the brain areas measured in these studies, we aren’t sure how much of the difference was there to begin with, or to what degree the brain changed as a function of being in a particular political party. I suspect both things contribute somewhat. How much? We have no way of knowing at this point. To say conclusively, we need a longitudinal study, with control groups, measuring brain volume before and after joining, leaving, or participating in a political party’s activities or ideologies.

In the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami last March, I started seeing a lot of headlines like this:

"Does climate change mean more tsunamis?"

"Did climate change cause the Japanese earthquake?"

In those stories, environmentalists and climate science deniers went head-to-head, with one side pointing out yet another unintended consequence of fossil fuel consumption, and the other side pointing and laughing at what it saw as patently ridiculous fear-mongering. Missing: The nuance. And you know how much I love the nuance.

This is a story that contains a whole lot of yesbut. Yes, it really does make sense that climate change could trigger earthquakes. But it's very, very unlikely that that effect is responsible for any of the monster quakes we've experienced recently. And behind that apparent contradiction lies some really, really interesting science.

Let's start with a quick overview of why scientists think climate change and earthquakes are connected.

On the surface, this does sound pretty insane. Climate change is about the greenhouse effect increasing the global average temperature. The impacts of climate change tend to be things that are linked, somehow, to weather and climate—droughts, storms, changing habitats, melting ice caps. Earthquakes, on the other hand, are about landmasses bumping up against one another. That's plate tectonics, not El Nino. But the basic theory actually does make a lot of sense. And it's really just a logical extrapolation of some well-established natural phenomena.

It begins with the forces that cause earthquakes. The surface of this planet, what we see, is actually the crust—just the crispy coating on a ball of nougat. The crust is broken up into large pieces and those pieces move over the surface of the gooey mass beneath. At the borders, the pieces of the crust are riddled with faults. These are places where the crust has broken and different pieces are moving in different directions—away from each other, towards each other, or slipping past one another.

These faults can get stuck on one another and, over time, build up tension like a rubber band being pulled back. Earthquakes happen when the tension gets released and the pieces of the fault move suddenly with the pent-up force of many decades.

The Earth naturally forms these tense spots. That's just how the movement of the crust works. But things that happen on the surface of the crust can affect when and where the tension gets released.

The crust of the Earth seems like a big, mighty, un-moveable thing when you're walking around on it, but it's actually relatively sensitive. Over decades, scientists have amassed evidence that the application of a heavy weight to the surface of the crust (or the removal of that weight) can trigger earthquakes.

For instance, when we build major reservoirs, we look for places that don't have a lot of seismic activity. For obvious reasons. But, sometimes, after the dam has been built and the reservoir has filled, the area will start to become seismically active. The big-name example here is the earthquake at Koyna Dam in India's Maharashtra state. The reservoir was filled in 1963. People began reporting small shakes soon afterwards and, in 1967, a magnitude 6.3 quake struck the region. The epicenter was very near the new reservoir. "There's a really compelling association with a reservoir here," says Susan Hough, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey. "In this case, it was a part of India that was not all that active until the reservoir was built."

These time/place associations between earthquakes and reservoir building have happened reliably enough that scientists are confident that there is a connection. This isn't a controversial theory.

Nor is it controversial that the buildup and melting ice and snow can trigger earthquakes. The evidence for this comes from echoes of Earth's last Ice Age, when glaciers (heavy glaciers) stretched all the way down from the North Pole into places that are now quite decidedly temperate. When the Ice Age ended, the glaciers slunk back to to the Pole. And there's good evidence of a major increase in seismic activity that corresponded to the time and place where those glaciers were receding.

"The evidence includes a big increase in earthquake and volcanic activity in previously glaciated areas, such as Scandinavia and Iceland, increased volcanic activity in oceanic areas, and a greater prevalence of large submarine landslides," says Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical & climate hazards at University College London. "Some of [the landslides], the Storegga Slide off Norway 8,200 years ago, for instance, triggered major tsunamis that left their mark in the UK and elsewhere in the North Atlantic."

The effects aren't limited to things that happened thousands of years ago. Hudson Bay in Canada is basically just a divet where a patch of crust sunk under the weight of a glacier. It's slowly rebounding, in a way that we can measure today. In fact, in another 10,000 years, Hudson Bay won't exist at all, says Henry Pollack, professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, small earthquakes that happen today in Eastern Canada are thought to be associated with the Bay's slow spring-back.

All of this works because the movement of the crust can be influenced by the weight sitting on top of it. If you place a heavy weight, like a reservoir or a glacier, on top of a fault line, it might not move the way it otherwise would. Remove the weight, and it might go back to its original routine, or move in a different way. Either action, adding weight above a fault or removing it, could suppress or trigger an earthquake.

This is a simplified explanation. The reality gets a bit more complicated. For one thing, the weight of a glacier does more than just press down on what's immediately below it. "When you press your hand into the couch, [the fabric] doesn't just go down under your hand, it stretches out, too," Susan Hough says. Stretching the Earth's crust, and slowly letting it rebound back, could also trigger seismic activity. It's one theory—appealing, but still unproven—for why faults like North America's New Madrid experience seismic activity despite being hundreds of miles from a plate boundary.

By now, you should see where this is going. If naturally melting glaciers can trigger earthquakes, it stands to reason that a glacier that melts because of man-made climate change could do the same thing. Yes, it's a reasonable assumption. But ...

There are a couple of caveats that you need to keep in mind. First off, while we know that changing climate has triggered seismic activity in the past, we don't really know yet how much seismic activity is likely to be triggered by contemporary, anthropogenic climate change. The effects still need to be quantified in this particular context.

Second, this effect might be happening already, but not in a way that has a big impact on most people. Bill McGuire of University College London and Patrick Wu, professor of geophysics at the University of Calgary, are two of the researchers really paying attention to the particular problem of seismic activity triggered by modern climate change. They both say the effect, so far, has been small—limited to low-level clusters of earthquakes in Alaska and around Greenland. In other words, where the glaciers, ice pack, and snow are melting. It's possible that we could see effects in other places—remember, weight on the crust stretches, it doesn't just compress—but we don't know that yet.

Third, Patrick Wu says it's unlikely that any really large earthquake, the magnitude 8's and up, would have a link to deglaciation. The earthquakes triggered by melting water tend to be smaller, he says, between magnitudes 5 and 7. Just because climate change can trigger earthquakes doesn't mean that every (or even most) earthquakes are triggered by climate change. Simple plate tectonics is still the primary force.

Nor can deglaciation trigger earthquakes in places that weren't at least somewhat earthquake-prone to begin with. "Deglaciation can't cause a crack. Tectonics can actually cause a crack, make a fault," he says. "Whenever there is glacial melting, faults can be reactivated. But it can't create the faults."

Finally, you can't look at the research being done by people like Wu and McGuire, look at the news, and go, "A-ha!" While these researchers are finding small increases in small, localized earthquakes in the far North, there's not actually been any dramatic, mysterious uptick in earthquakes that needs to be accounted for by this, or any other, theory.

The truth is, we've had several really big earthquakes in a relatively short period of time—Sumatra in 2004, Chile in 2010, and Japan in 2011. That's more than is normal. But not so many that the difference can't be accounted for by chance. And the broader frequency of earthquakes hasn't actually changed.

What has changed is our awareness of earthquakes, and their impact. Since the 1970s, we've had the technology and interconnectedness to reliably trace and report the vast majority of quakes that happen everywhere. Quakes that you'd have never known about 50 years ago are now on the evening news. And, more importantly, those quakes can appear to be more deadly because cities have gotten larger, allowing one earthquake to kill a lot of people in a relatively small area. All of that means that, watching the news, we perceive a bigger uptick in major earthquakes than there actually has been, according to the less subjective definition of "major" used by geologists.

Basically, it boils down to this: Climate change can trigger earthquakes. There's evidence that naturally occurring climate change did that in the past. There's some evidence that anthropogenic climate change might be doing that today. And there's evidence that we could see more climate change-related earthquakes in the future. But, if you're actually concerned about evidence (and you should be) then you can't go around, pointing to earthquakes that make the news today, and calling them consequences of climate change. And we can't oversimplify research to the point of forgetting all the yesbut.