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Summer 2026Meta-analysis
Kleiber's law says metabolic rate scales as body mass to the three quarter power. Rubner's older surface argument says two thirds. The gap between them is ( frac{1}{12} = 0.0833), and people have been arguing about it since 1932. We took one published compilation, AnAge Build 15, retrieved 14 September 2026, pulled out every species carrying both a body mass and a metabolic rate, and fitted the exponent by two met
Summer 2026Methods
Benford's law says the leading digit of many collections of real numbers is 1 far more often than 9, following (P(d) = log_{10}(1+1/d)), and it is now a standard test for cooked books, rigged elections and fabricated data. We put eight genuinely public datasets through the test, chosen for having nothing in common: country populations, CODATA physical constants, every FDIC-insured bank's total assets and total dep
Spring 2025Original Research
Buffer capacity is introduced as a formula and usually abandoned there. We computed it instead, as the exact derivative (eta = dC_b/dmathrm{pH}) of a full charge-balance solver, across dissociation constants from pKa 2 to pKa 12 and concentrations from 0.1 mM to 1 M. No solution was mixed at any point. The club has no laboratory, so the computation is the experiment. Three independent routes to (eta) agree:
Spring 2025Methods
The carbonate system in seawater is four coupled equilibria and one conservation law, and substituting them into each other collapses the whole thing into a single quartic in the hydrogen ion concentration with exactly one positive root. We wrote a solver for it. No seawater was sampled at any point: the computation is the experiment. Using published temperature and salinity dependent constants on the total hydrogen
Fall 2025Replication
Axelrod's 1980 round robin found that tit for tat beat every program sent to it. We asked whether that survives when moves are occasionally misread. No person and no organism was involved at any point: the computation is the experiment. We implemented fifteen classical strategies, ran a full round robin of 400 repetitions at each of ten noise levels from 0 to 0.20, and then ran replicator dynamics for 4,000 generatio
Summer 2025Replication
In 1983 Andrew Watson and James Lovelock published a planet made of black and white daisies, to answer the charge that Gaia required the biosphere to plan ahead [3]. We re-implemented their model, swept the solar luminosity from 0.6 to 1.6 times present in 501 steps, integrated to steady state at each, and observed nothing whatever, since the computation is the experiment and no planet, daisy, or physical measurement
Summer 2025Original Research
Branched, feathery growth turns up in places that share almost no physics, and the club wanted to know whether the family resemblance survives being measured rather than merely admired. We implemented diffusion-limited aggregation on a square lattice and grew six independent clusters of 50,000 particles , plus 192,000 further particles in a sticking-probability sweep and an algorithmic control, for 492,000 particles
Fall 2024Original Research
A mutation that makes its carrier one percent fitter still disappears almost every time it appears. We measured how often. The instrument was a Wright-Fisher simulation the club wrote and ran on a laptop, and no organism entered the study at any point, because here the computation is the experiment. Across a grid of eight selection coefficients ((s = 0) to (0.1)) and five population sizes ((N = 50) to (10{,}00
Fall 2024Original Research
A population in which every individual leaves 1.15 offspring on average grows by 15 per cent a generation and can still go extinct by bad luck alone. We simulated a Galton-Watson branching process and a continuous-time birth-death process, 20,000 replicates per parameter cell, for starting sizes from 2 to 500 and five offspring distributions whose variance ranges from 1.15 to 33.2 with the mean held exactly fixed. Th
Fall 2024Methods
A survey that finds nothing has not proved anything. We built the detection half of a single-season occupancy model and asked the scheduling question underneath it: how long does a run of blank visits have to be before finding nothing counts as evidence of absence? With a constant per-visit detection probability (p), the probability that an occupied site produces (k) blanks is ((1-p)^k), so 95 percent confidenc
Winter 2025Original Research
Trees grow at random, lightning falls at random, and whatever connected patch the bolt lands in burns. Those two rules make the Drossel-Schwabl forest fire model, which the literature quotes everywhere as a clean case of self-organised criticality, complete with a power-law distribution of fire sizes. We tested the claim rather than repeating it. The club wrote the model and ran it on a laptop, and since no forest wa
Winter 2026Original Research
Two groups of numbers drawn from the same distribution cannot differ. We drew them 50,000 times and then analysed them the way data actually gets analysed, making one defensible choice after another with the numbers already in front of us. With no choices at all the false positive rate came out at 0.0504 0.0010 , a 95% interval of 0.0486 to 0.0524 that covers the nominal 0.05, and that single number is the check whic
Fall 2024Original Research
A founding group of two individuals carries 74.973% 0.048% of the source population's heterozygosity and 20.69% of its alleles. Both numbers come out of one run of one program. They are most of what this paper has to say. We simulated founder events by drawing (2k) gametes from a source population with a fixed and printed allele frequency spectrum, then grew the new population back to a carrying capacity of 1,000 u
Spring 2025Original Research
Two products, one shared starting material, two reversible one-step reactions, and no way for the products to talk to each other directly: this is the standard textbook picture of kinetic versus thermodynamic control, and the textbook almost never tells you how long the experiment takes. We wrote the rate equations, integrated them with a from-scratch fourth-order Runge-Kutta stepper, and separately solved the same l
Spring 2026Methods
The layer model is how almost everybody first meets the greenhouse effect, and it is a good model. We asked it a question it is rarely asked: how many layers does Earth need? The instrument was a Python file the club wrote and ran on a laptop, and nothing was measured by us at any point, because here the computation is the experiment. Solving the (N)-layer grey radiative-equilibrium system as a linear system for ev
Spring 2026Original Research
The amount of sunlight falling on the top of the atmosphere at any latitude on any day is a geometry problem with four inputs and no physics in it at all. We solved it, and then ran it across the past million years. The instrument was a Python file the club wrote; the only thing we did not compute ourselves is the orbit, which comes from the published La2004 solution of Laskar and colleagues, downloaded on 14 Septemb
Fall 2025Original Research
Mutation only adds. In a population with no recombination, once the last individual carrying the fewest mutations fails to leave descendants, nothing can rebuild that class, and the minimum mutation load in the population steps up by one forever. Muller called it a ratchet. We measured how fast it turns. The instrument was a Wright-Fisher simulation the club wrote and ran on a laptop, carrying the full distribution o
Winter 2025Original Research
Give four populations the same disease and the same average number of contacts each, then change nothing but the shape of the contact network. Nobody was infected, contacted or observed. The computation is the experiment. It ran on a school laptop, and a rerun finishes in minutes. We simulated stochastic SIR epidemics on four graphs of 10,000 nodes with mean degree fixed at 6 , a triangular lattice, an Erds-Rnyi rand
Spring 2026Original Research
Heat added at the top of the atmosphere does not warm the surface immediately, because most of it goes into the ocean first. We measured how long the delay is and how much warming it hides. The instrument was a two-box energy balance model the club wrote and integrated on a laptop; no measurement of the physical world was made by us at any point, and the computation is the whole experiment. With the CMIP5 multimodel
Winter 2025Replication
Fill the cells of a square grid at random. Each cell is occupied with probability (p), independently. Below a certain density the cells form scattered islands. Above it, one cluster reaches from top edge to bottom. That density, on an infinite grid, is the site percolation threshold. The square lattice has no closed form for it, so the constant has to be measured. We measured it. Our experiment is a computation, an
Winter 2026Methods
Take a population, measure everybody, keep the worst tenth, do absolutely nothing to them, and measure them again. In our simulation they improved by 0.8760 0.0013 standard deviations. The instrument was a program the club wrote, so the computation is the experiment and no person, patient or pupil entered the study at any point. Across a grid of six selection thresholds ((p = 0.50) down to (0.01)) and seven noise
Fall 2025Original Research
We built a stochastic two-strain bacterial population model under a one-compartment pharmacokinetic drug concentration and ran 178,002 simulated treatment courses on a laptop. There are no bacteria in this study and no patients: the computation is the experiment, and none of what follows is medical advice. Before measuring anything we validated the deterministic core. Bisection on the net growth rates recovered the m
Fall 2024Methods
A species count is always short. The four estimators everybody reaches for are supposed to tell you by how much, so we tested them against a truth we knew, because we built it: five community types, each holding exactly 100 species, sampled at ten levels of effort, 6,000 replicate communities per configuration, 300,000 simulated surveys in total. No organism was involved at any stage. On a mildly uneven community (lo
Winter 2026Methods
Simpson's paradox is usually shown once, with one famous table, and then left alone as a curiosity. We treated it as a piece of engineering instead. The club wrote a generator that takes a target within-group slope and a target pooled slope of the opposite sign and returns a dataset hitting both, by solving for the required between-group slope rather than searching for one. Across eight specifications the worst devia
Spring 2025Methods
Every general chemistry course states the common ion effect as a rule with no stated exceptions: add an ion the precipitate already contains, and its solubility falls. We built an exact solver for precipitation equilibria, one that carries the solubility product, stepwise complex formation, the anion's own acid-base speciation, and the water equilibrium as a single coupled system with nothing approximated away, and s
Winter 2025Original Research
An outbreak's average reproduction number, (R), does not say how that transmission is shared out. We fixed (R = 2.5) and swept the negative binomial dispersion parameter (k) across seventeen values from 0.01 (extreme superspreading) to 10,000 (indistinguishable from Poisson, no superspreading at all), running 40,000 independent branching-process replicates per value and checking every simulated extinction proba
Winter 2025Original Research
A system approaching a fold bifurcation recovers from disturbance more and more slowly, and that slowing is supposed to be readable in ordinary noisy measurements before anything visible happens. The club has no laboratory, so we tested the claim by simulation, which is in any case the only place where the control can be run. In 38,600 simulated trajectories of a cusp normal form driven slowly toward its fold under p
Spring 2025Methods
Chemistry courses hand out four or five closed-form shortcuts for titration curves and then guard each one with a shrug. We wrote an exact solver instead, built from charge balance and mass balance with nothing thrown away, and used it to audit the shortcuts across a grid of 57 acid strengths and 41 concentrations. The solver was checked first: charge balance holds to a worst relative residual of 4.3510 15 , speciati
Summer 2025Original Research
In 1952 Alan Turing proposed that two substances reacting and diffusing at different rates could turn a uniform sheet into a patterned one with no template anywhere. We tested the mechanism by integrating the Gray-Scott system on a periodic 256 256 grid, and nothing here was observed in an organism or a beaker, because the club has no laboratory and the computation is the experiment. We derived the Turing conditions
Summer 2026Original Research
Zipf's law says that if you rank the words of a text by frequency, the count at rank (r) falls off like (r^{-a}) with (a) near 1. We tokenised fifty public-domain books from Project Gutenberg spanning fourteen languages and about 2,350 years, from a Greek tragedy to a 1925 American novel, and fit both a pure Zipf law and a shifted ZipfMandelbrot form by exact maximum likelihood, never by regression on a log-log
Marine BiologyMeta-analysis
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
GeochemistryPaper Analysis
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
Conservation MethodsSystematic Review
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
SeismologyPaper Analysis
On 28 March 2025 a security camera twenty metres from Myanmar's Sagaing Fault filmed the ground tearing open. One side slid past the other. Frame-by-frame pixel tracking gives 2.5 ± 0.5 m of slip in 1.3 ± 0.2 s , peaking at 3.2 ± 1.0 m/s . It throws in something nobody ordered. The slip path curves [1]. Nobody had ever filmed a fault rupturing. We rebuild the pulse from the three published numbers. They will not all
General ScienceExplainer
Almost every date you have ever read about the past came out of one of seven or eight methods, and not one of those methods deserves to be trusted on its own. Tree rings and lake muds and ice layers count years directly, one at a time, while radiocarbon, potassium-argon and uranium-lead measure atoms instead, each covering a different slice of time. The whole structure becomes believable because the slices overlap ,
BiogeographyPaper Analysis
Fiji has iguanas. Nothing else in the Pacific does, and the family is otherwise an American one, so for a century the four Fijian species were explained away as leftovers from a vanished southern supercontinent or as the end of a long chain of island hops from South America. In March 2025 a team led by Simon Scarpetta sequenced more than four thousand genetic loci and found the closest living relative of the Fijian i
EcologyMeta-analysis
One German study reported a 76.7 percent fall in flying-insect biomass over 27 years [1]. A synthesis of 166 long-term surveys put terrestrial declines near 9 percent per decade while freshwater insects rose about 11 percent per decade, and an erratum later steepened the terrestrial figure [2, 3]. More than 5,300 American time series gave net trends indistinguishable from zero [6], which is a statement about time ser
Tropical EcologyPaper Analysis
For a century, lightning has been filed under damage . In March 2025 a team working in central Panama filed it under strategy . A custom lightning-location array pinned down 93 struck trees , and the crews then went and looked at every one of them, which is how ten strikes on Dipteryx oleifera , the tonka bean, came to be recorded as doing negligible damage while 64% of struck trees of other species were dead within
Planetary AstronomyExplainer
Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus have all been watched for decades in the infrared light of a small molecular ion called H 3 + , which glows wherever a giant planet's magnetic field funnels charged particles into its upper atmosphere. Neptune refused to show it. In March 2025 a team led by Henrik Melin reported that JWST had finally caught the ion, and caught with it the first clear infrared aurora at Neptune, sitting betw
OceanographyData Story
Two researchers at Plymouth took twenty years of satellite measurements of how fast light dies in seawater, one number per pixel per year on a 9 km grid, and asked a question nobody had asked globally: is the ocean getting dimmer? Over 2003 to 2022 the attenuation coefficient rose across 75,341,181 km , which is 21 percent of the ocean, while it fell across only 10 percent. The lit layer shoaled by more than 50 metre
Spring 2025Original Research
Trees grow at random, lightning falls at random, and whatever connected patch the bolt lands in burns. Those two rules are the whole of the Drossel-Schwabl forest fire model, an object so economical that it is usually handed over as a finished fact to be memorised: self-organised criticality, power-law fire sizes, one exponent near 1.15. We preferred to test it, so the club wrote and ran the model on a laptop; no for
Scientific PracticeExplainer
Reading primary research is the one skill this club exists to teach. Almost nobody gets taught it. Here is the handout we wish somebody had pushed across the table on day one: what each part of a paper does, why experienced readers go to the figures before the prose, how to check whether the statistics carry the conclusion, and what peer review promises in writing. Honesty demanded that we measure the thing we were d
Environmental ArchaeologyData Story
Three Arctic ice cores hold a dated record of the smoke that European silver smelters put into the air two thousand years ago. In January 2025 a team led by Joseph McConnell at the Desert Research Institute ran that record backwards through an atmospheric transport model to recover annual emissions, then forwards again to map lead concentrations across Europe, then through two published epidemiological regressions to
Disease EcologyPaper Analysis
Sea star wasting disease began in 2013. It emptied the Pacific coast of North America of sunflower sea stars. Roughly 3,000 km of coast. The prime suspect for ten years was a virus. Wrong suspect. In August 2025 a team led by Melanie Prentice named the killer: Vibrio pectenicida strain FHCF-3, cultured from the coelomic fluid of a diseased star, able to reproduce the disease in healthy animals and recoverable from th
Marine PhysiologyPaper Analysis
A bony vertebrate is supposed to get longer, or hold still. Reversing is not on the menu. During the marine heatwave that hit Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea in 2023, Melissa Versteeg and colleagues measured 134 wild clown anemonefish six times over five lunar months. A hundred of them got shorter. Shrinking raised an individual's survival probability by as much as 78 percent . Pairs where both partners shrank did better
PaleoclimateExplainer
The Sturtian glaciation opened around 717 million years ago and closed around 661 million years ago, and the 56 million years of ice lying between those two dates have embarrassed every account of the Cryogenian written since anyone first learned to measure the interval at all [5, 6]. A Harvard group published a different reading of it on 27 April 2026 [1]. In their coupled model of Neoproterozoic climate and carbon,
Soil ScienceMeta-analysis
Farmers are being offered money to store carbon in their soil, the practices on the menu being no-till, cover cropping and residue retention, and the rates written into contracts usually sit somewhere near half a tonne of carbon per hectare per year. We went looking for where that number comes from. Screening 22 published syntheses and long-term trial reports, we could extract 12 effect sizes carrying usable uncertai
GeologyExplainer
A 2025 study of basin-scale 3D seismic data from the northern North Sea reports hundreds of kilometre-wide sand bodies that appear to have liquefied, sunk through a 200–500 m interval of older microfossil ooze, and come to rest beneath it. Rafts of that older ooze went up instead. They built mounds. The authors call the sunken sand sinkites , the risen ooze floatites . Grant the interpretation and the law of superpos
StatisticsExplainer
A p value measures your data against a pretend world, the one where the effect you are hunting does not exist. The number describes data, given a hypothesis. Swap those two around and every misreading in this article follows. We define the thing properly, then take apart four beliefs the club has had to argue with at its own table: that p is the probability the hypothesis is wrong, that a smaller p means a bigger eff
VolcanologyPaper Analysis
Uturuncu is a 6,008-metre dacite volcano in southwest Bolivia whose last eruption was 250,000 years ago, give or take five thousand. For three decades it has impersonated a mountain about to go off. The ground above it has been rising at roughly a centimetre a year over a broad dome, that dome sits inside a ring of slow subsidence reaching past 70 kilometres, and small earthquakes fire underneath it most days. In Apr