Catégories

Research on research itself: replication, publication bias, peer review, incentives, and what would actually make science more reliable.

Weather: the processes that produce it on timescales of hours to weeks, and the forecasting built on them.

The study of organisms too small to see: bacteria, archaea, protists and the microbial communities they form.

Decisions by individuals and firms and what they add up to in a market: prices, competition, and the conditions under which any of it is efficient.

Imaging what is too small to see: optical, electron and scanning-probe techniques, and the physics that sets the resolution limit of each.

Warfare as a historical subject -- campaigns, armies, strategy, and what war did to the societies that fought it.

Minerals as chemical and crystalline objects: their structure, their composition, and the conditions under which each one forms.

Extracting minerals from rock: excavation, ground support, ventilation, processing, and the safety that all of it depends on.

The industrial and national age, from the late eighteenth century to the world wars.

The study of biological activity at the level of molecules, especially nucleic acids and proteins.

Simulating how a system of atoms moves over time under a force field. Used to study protein folding, solvation and materials at the atomic scale.

Genes studied through their molecular machinery: how DNA is replicated, transcribed, mutated and repaired.

Money, credit and central banking: what determines inflation and interest rates, and what a monetary authority can and cannot do about them.

How a tradition reasons about what to do: conscience, law and virtue as its own texts and authorities frame them.

The internal structure of words: the morphemes they are built from, and how a language marks case, tense, number and the rest.

How music is built: harmony, counterpoint, rhythm and form, and the analytical systems that try to account for a piece.

Music studied rather than played: its history, its repertories, the cultures that make it, and the sources it survives in.

The study of fungi: their genetics, their ecology as decomposers and symbionts, and their use in food and medicine.

How stories are structured: plot and time, voice and point of view, and the narrator who is not the author.

Getting machines to parse, generate and reason over human language: translation, question answering, summarization.