Science Journaling Club Founded 2024

Science is worth
passing on.

We meet every week to read one piece of research properly, argue about it, and work out how to explain it to somebody who has never seen the field before. That explaining is most of what we do. The rest is our own work, published each quarter.

Members 46Issues 9Articles 50Papers in rotation 12

The club at work

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Latest field notes

Marine BiologyMeta-analysis

Not Every Shell Dissolves: Sorting the Ocean Acidification Response Literature by Who Is Actually Affected

We extracted 23 calcification and growth effect sizes from 16 published ocean acidification experiments, pooled them with a DerSimonian-Laird random-effects model, and asked whether taxonomic group explains why those experiments disagree with each other as violently as they do. The pooled response is a 13.0% reduction in calcification or growth (95% CI 31.0% to +9.6%), which is the number most readers arrive wanting

13 sectionsInteractive · LaTeX
GeochemistryPaper Analysis

The Core Is Leaking: Ruthenium-100, Hawaiian Lava, and Gold From the Center of the Earth

Earth's metallic core is supposed to be a sealed room: whatever fell into it 4.5 billion years ago stays there. In May 2025 a Göttingen-led team reported that Hawaiian basalts carry an excess of the isotope ruthenium-100, about nine parts per million , a signature that matches core metal and matches nothing else on the planet. The same rocks carry the tungsten-182 deficit you would expect from that source, an indepen

12 sectionsInteractive · LaTeX
Conservation MethodsSystematic Review

Can a Cup of Pond Water Tell You What Lives in It? Reviewing Environmental DNA Detection Rates

Filter some water, lyse what the membrane caught, run a PCR, and you are supposed to learn which animals were recently swimming there. We went looking for every study we could open that surveyed the same water bodies twice, once with a filter and once with a net or a torch or a camera, and that reported a detection probability for both. We found twelve we could pool and seven more we could not. On a random effects mo

13 sectionsInteractive · LaTeX