At any given time, there’s usually an ‘emerging’ field that’s subject to the worst hype. Typically, a few publications with easy-to-grasp results in big-name journals get picked up by the media, public interest intensifies, and scientists in the field develop a kind of recklessness, feeding the hype cycle with careless and overblown statements. Then big claims fail to replicate in later experiments, the furore dies away and normal science resumes. Ultra-hyped fields include stem cells, genetics, epigenetics, machine learning and brain imaging; for the past few years, a strong contender for the
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