Darpa Wants to Solve Science's Replication Crisis With Robots

Say this much for the "reproducibility crisis" in science: It's poorly timed. At the same instant that a significant chunk of elected and appointed policymakers seem to disbelieve the science behind global warming, and a significant chunk of parents seem to disbelieve the science behind vaccines … a bunch of actual scientists come along and point out that vast swaths of the social sciences don't stand up to scrutiny. They don't replicate--which is to say, if someone else does the same experiment, they get different (often contradictory) results. The scientific term for that is bad. What's good, though, is that the scientific method is built for self-correction.