Rice and Cornell statisticians merged four years of top-100 lists from five outlets into an MLB consensus ranking that reports how certain each placement is. The design carries over to any team pooling partial, disagreeing rankings, though its real-world test covered just 55 baseball players.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence45
Rice-led physicists simulated autferroic switches flipping over 400,000 times a second, up from under 100, to generate true random bits. The gain exists only in modeling, against slow magnetic switches, so the case for security chips waits on a material someone can make.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption2
- Hype gap+40
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence55
A Rice-led paper in Physical Review Research finds that magnetic lag gives even a symmetric rotating field a preferred axis, and calculates the extra fraction of a turn that cancels it in simulation.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives55
- Confidence58
In PNAS, Rice chemists report that HAT6, a disk-shaped organic semiconductor, crystallizes out of its aligned liquid-crystal phase by the coordinated, fast route that hardens steel. The window is narrow.
Reality
- Evidence64
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives55
- Confidence60
Julian West's lab reports in Nature Catalysis that a pair of carboxylic acids, plus iron, sulfur and a change of light color, adds a carbon fragment across an alkene double bond, a job usually given to palladium.
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption10
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives70
- Confidence55
A pipeline described in npj Computational Materials screened more than 27,000 concrete papers and reports an extraction F1 as high as 0.98 across several models. Rice University has a provisional patent pending on the method.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives65
- Confidence50
James Tour's lab at Rice pulses electricity through PFAS-loaded carbon and catches the freed fluorine on silver, producing the same fluorinating reagent chemists already buy. The tests were lab scale.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives68
- Confidence55
A PLOS One study surveyed 4,113 tenure-system faculty at 83 US universities and found affiliation broadening with years since the doctorate, with 16.6 percent reporting a discipline different from the one they trained in.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption15
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives50
- Confidence58
Rice's Boniuk Institute reports that aggregate support for restricting Muslim settlement more than halved between 2002 and 2019 while splitting along party lines. The published figures show which way that split runs but not how large it is.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives62
- Confidence38
A Rice University group watched a floating magnet for about a month of nights and saw no ultraheavy dark matter, and the result that matters is the mass range they showed a levitated sensor can search at all.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption18
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives62
- Confidence42
Rice, Minnesota and Paul Scherrer researchers report spin textures consistent with unconventional magnetism in ruthenium dioxide films a few atomic layers thick, and only when the lattice is strained, which makes strain a candidate control knob.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+38
- Incentives62
- Confidence44
A sintering route that keeps diamond stable without extreme pressure produced a composite that converts to graphite in microseconds on impact. The absorbed energy matters more than the hardness.
Reality
- Evidence46
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+27
- Incentives62
- Confidence42
A diamond-cubic boron nitride-cobalt composite survived a projectile at over Mach 7. The interesting part is how it survived: the diamond partly stopped being diamond.
Reality
- Evidence46
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+32
- Incentives62
- Confidence44
A Science paper from RHIC's STAR detector backs a 1996 proposal that a Y-shaped gluon junction carries baryon number. The collider stopped running in early 2026, so the dataset is closed.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives60
- Confidence48
A US-led team reads up to 80% X-ray polarization from magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 as QED vacuum birefringence. An Italian-led group says alternative explanations are not excluded.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption18
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives55
- Confidence48
Rice researchers report that uniaxial strain shrinks both the residual moment and the anomalous Hall voltage in hexagonal FeS, while the underlying magnetic order sits still.
Reality
- Evidence54
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives62
- Confidence46
A Physical Review X paper reports that stretching hexagonal manganese telluride merges its magnetic domains and reverses the sign of its anomalous Hall voltage, leaving the magnetic order intact.
Reality
- Evidence57
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+28
- Incentives34
- Confidence55
Brookhaven's STAR collaboration reports in Science that baryon number rides on a Y-shaped gluon junction. The one-third-per-quark picture in the textbooks would have to go.
Reality
- Evidence34
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+34
- Incentives66
- Confidence41