Science coverage online splits between deep specialist press (which often costs subscription money) and generalist press (which often oversimplifies). WeSearch's science hub mixes both, in chronological order, so a Nature News piece on a paper sits next to a Quanta piece explaining the same paper for a wider audience next to a New York Times Science piece on the consumer implications.
What's in this hub
Peer-reviewed and academic press. Nature News, Nature Climate, Nature Medicine, Science News (AAAS), Quanta Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Phys.org, ScienceDaily, IEEE Spectrum, Aeon, Nautilus.
Generalist science journalism. Ars Technica Science, Wired Science, the Atlantic Science, the Guardian Science, NYT Science, Washington Post Science, BBC Future, NPR Science, the New Yorker Science, the Wall Street Journal Science.
Domain specialists. Climate (see climate hub), biology, physics, astronomy, neuroscience, materials science, evolutionary biology. Domain-specific blogs from working scientists where they have RSS — Sean Carroll, Sabine Hossenfelder, Derek Lowe, Erika Ebbel.
Health and medicine. See dedicated health hub for medical coverage. Science hub picks up the basic-science end of biology and biomedical research.
Astronomy and space. Sky & Telescope, Sky News, Space.com, Astronomy Magazine, the Planetary Society, NASA News, ESA News.
What you'll find here
- Major paper announcements (with link to original where available)
- Lab and institution announcements
- Funding and policy news (NIH, NSF, ERC, ARC)
- Methods and tools coverage
- Long-form science journalism
- Replication and meta-analysis coverage
- Pre-print discussion (with appropriate skepticism)
- Science-adjacent tech (see also tech hub)
- Field-specific news (genomics, particle physics, climate science, materials)
How we balance the science hub
Science coverage online is plagued by two failure modes: oversimplifying complex findings into clickbait headlines, and uncritical amplification of preprints that haven't been replicated. The science hub is structurally biased toward the first failure (we pull from generalist publishers who write for general readers) but tries to mitigate the second by linking to the original paper whenever possible and surfacing replication coverage when it exists.
We include preprint coverage but tag it as such where the source does. We do not include "wellness" or pseudoscience content; the editorial bar is original research from credentialed institutions or rigorous explanation by working scientists.
How to use the science hub well
- Click through to the paper. The headline is always shorter and more confident than the paper. Reading the abstract — even if you skim the methods — gives you a different picture than the headline does.
- Read the discussion thread. Working scientists often comment on stories in their field. The thread under a science story sometimes contains the actual context the publisher didn't include.
- Be skeptical of preprints. A preprint is a pre-publication research draft. Many become published papers; some don't. Headlines often treat them as established findings.
- Subscribe to specific topics. Settings → Notifications → Watches → Keywords. Examples: "CRISPR", "neuralink", "JWST", "fusion".