Phys.org January 21, 2022 The Biden administration announced policy changes to attract international students specializing in science, technology, engineering, and math—part of the broader effort to make the U.S. economy more competitive. The State Department will let eligible visiting students in STEM fields complete up to 36 months of academic training. There will also be an initiative to connect these students with U.S. businesses. Homeland Security will add 22 new fields of study—including cloud computing, data visualization and data science. Government data shows that international students are increasingly the lifeblood of academic research. However, U.S. Tech Workers, an advocacy group […]
Tag Archives: Science without borders
Earth BioGenome Project begins genome sequencing in earnest
Science Daily January 17, 2022 The Earth BioGenome Project, or EBP was launched in November 2018 to provide a complete DNA sequence catalog of all 1.8 million named species of plants, animals, and fungi as well as eukaryotes. The project functions as an international network of networks, coordinating numerous group-specific, regional, and national-scale efforts. The first two years of the EBP represented the startup phase. The goal for phase 1, through 2023, is to produce reference genomes representing about 9,400 taxonomic families. In addition to the International Scientific Committee, which develops standards for the project, the EBP has also formed […]
Why Discovering ‘Nothing’ in Science Can Be So Incredibly Important
Science Alert January 9, 2022 What we don’t usually hear about is the years of back-breaking, painstaking hard work that delivers inconclusive results, appearing to provide no evidence for the questions scientists ask. Yet without non-detections – what we call the null result – the progress of science would often be slowed and stymied. Null results drive us forward. They keep us from repeating the same errors and shape the direction of future studies. Often, however, null results don’t make it to scientific publications. This not only generates significant inefficiencies in the way science is done, but it’s also an indicator […]
COVID has had an impact on academics’ well-being
Phys.org December 1, 2021 Researchers in Denmark conducted research into how the situation has been for academics and have recommendations on how to mitigate potential adverse effects of the pandemic. The research into the academics’ well-being showed that as many as 40 percent of the almost 6,000 academics who took the survey reported a loss of research time. Over half of the Ph.D. candidates, postdocs and tenure-track academics reported COVID-related delays that they expect will prevent them from finishing their projects or meeting tenure track requirements in time. Their recommendations are – Prevent brain drain, invest in talent retention, especially […]
Comprehensive report on pandemic response solutions developed by 180 leading experts
MIT News March 30, 2021 When WHO declared COVID -19 outbreak a pandemic the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, and MilliporeSigma together convened more than 180 thought leaders from around the globe to collaborate asynchronously and rapidly identify solutions. The effort resulted in a comprehensive report that synthesizes data-driven insights from this expert group, known as the “Pandemic Response Supermind,” outlining the most promising solutions for pandemic response. They identified gaps and innovative solutions across five key technical areas of pandemic response, including: transmission control; diagnostics and monitoring; access to therapies and vaccines; sharing […]
Artificial intelligence and algorithmic irresponsibility: The devil in the machine?
TechXplore March 17, 2021 According to researchers in France AI tempts people to abandon judgment and moral responsibility by removing a range of decisions from our conscious minds, it crowds out judgment from a bewildering array of human activities. Without a proper understanding of how it does this we cannot circumvent its negative effects. With widespread access to granular data on human behavior harvested from social media, AI has permeated the key sectors of most developed economies. For tractable problems such as analyzing documents, it usually compares favorably with human alternatives that are slower and more error-prone, leading to enormous […]
Lightning Bolts Could Have Delivered The Spark That Started Life on Earth
Science Alert March 16, 2021 Phosphides are common accessory minerals in meteorites. Consequently, meteorites are proposed to be a main source of prebiotic reactive phosphorus on early Earth. An international team of researchers (USA – Yale University, Wheaton College, UK) proposed an alternative source for widespread phosphorus reduction, arguing that lightning strikes on early Earth potentially formed 10–1000 kg of phosphide and 100–10,000 kg of phosphite and hypophosphite annually. Therefore, lightning could have been a significant source of prebiotic, reactive phosphorus which would have been concentrated on landmasses in tropical regions. Lightning strikes could likewise provide a continual source of prebiotic […]
UC announces breakthrough open access deal with publishing giant Elsevier
UC Berkeley March 16, 2021 Two years after cutting ties with publishing industry giant Elsevier, producer of more than 2,600 scholarly journals, the University of California system announced that it has reached with Elsevier the largest open access agreement of its kind in North America. As of April 1, all research with a UC lead author published in Elsevier’s hybrid and open access journals will be open access by default, so that everyone in the world can read it for free. This fulfills the UC faculty’s goals for its so-called transformative open access agreements with publishers — universal open access […]
21 per cent of all citations go to the elite
Science Daily February 9, 2021 Researchers in Denmark used a linked dataset of more than 4 million authors and 26 million scientific papers spanning 15 years and 118 scientific disciplines to quantify trends in cumulative citation inequality and concentration at the author level. They found that a small stratum of elite scientists accrues increasing citation shares, and that citation inequality is on the rise across the natural sciences, medical sciences, and agricultural sciences. The rise in citation concentration has coincided with a general inclination toward more collaboration. While increasing collaboration and full-count publication rates go hand in hand for the […]
Audio long-read: Push, pull and squeeze – the hidden forces that shape life (podcast)
Nature Podcast January 28, 2021 Researchers are probing the subtle physical forces that sculpt cells and bodies. At every stage of life, from embryo to adulthood, physical forces tug and squeeze at bodies from within. These forces are vital, ensuring that cells are correctly positioned in a developing embryo. But they also play a role in diseases like cancer. Yet despite their importance, relatively little is known about how cells sense, respond to and generate these forces. To find out, researchers have turned to bespoke tools and methods, using them to probe lab-cultured cells and whole animals to get to […]