Science Alert May 26, 2018 It was a particularly special moment when NASA announced open access to PubSpace in 2016. The public can access NASA-funded research articles in it by searching for whatever they’re interested in, or by just browsing all the NASA-funded papers. Patents and material governed by personal privacy, proprietary, or security laws are exempt from having to be included in PubSpace… read more.
Tag Archives: Science without borders
Artificial intelligence needs to be socially responsible, says new policy report
Eurekalert May 10, 2018 In a policy report “On AI and Robotics: Developing policy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution“, researchers in the UK contend that the development of new Artificial Intelligence technology is often subject to bias, and the resulting systems can be discriminatory, meaning more should be done by policymakers to ensure its development is democratic and socially responsible. In these ‘data-driven’ decision-making processes some social groups may be excluded, either because they lack access to devices necessary to participate or because the selected datasets do not consider the needs, preferences and interests of marginalised and disadvantaged people…read more.
The Big Bell Test: Global physics experiment challenges Einstein
Science Daily May 9, 2018 A Bell test requires spatially distributed entanglement, fast and high-efficiency detection and unpredictable measurement settings. Twelve laboratories on five continents, 13 experiments tested local realism using photons, single atoms, atomic ensembles and superconducting devices. More than 100,000 people around the world playing an online video game generated 97,347,490 binary choices. The observed correlations strongly contradict local realism and other realistic positions in bipartite and tripartite scenarios…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
For how long will the USA remain the Nobel Prize leader?
Phys.org May 10, 2018 According to a researcher in Germany since first being awarded in 1901, most Nobel Prizes for science have gone to the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany and France. According to his analysis the Nobel Prize productivity in these countries is primarily determined by two factors: a long-term success rate, and periods during which each country has been able to win an especially large number of Nobel Prizes. The U.S. era is approaching its end, states the report. Since its zenith in the 1970s, U.S. Nobel Prize productivity has already declined by a factor of 2.4. A […]
Nationwide program launches to train new generation of quantum engineers
Eurekalert May 9, 2018 Funded by a $1.6 million award from the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and Harvard University will head a new nationwide graduate student training program for quantum science and engineering. The program, Quantum Information Science and Engineering Network, will group select graduate students with both an academic adviser and one from a leading technology company or national laboratory. Over the course of four years, the “triplets” will each address a pressing research question for both academia and industry. Approximately 20 students will receive four years of funding under […]
Topic-adjusted visibility metric for scientific articles
Phys.org May 10, 2018 As different academic disciplines have different research behaviours and citation practices, a comparison of research quality across different disciplines based on raw citation counts would not reflect accurately the research merit. An international team of researchers (USA – Columbia University, Singapore) has developed an article-level metric, called “topic-adjusted visibility metric”, which is able to automatically account for the variation in citation activities among different research fields by using a complex network containing attributes belonging to the selected article. Each article need not belong to a single field but can belong to multiple fields with varying degrees. […]
Workshop explores intertwined future of food production, water, and climate
MIT News May 11, 2018 Choices by consumers and farmers can help limit global warming, but climate change may also curtail those choices in the future. While all global climate models show an overall increase in surface temperatures over the coming decades when it comes down to regional effects on temperature and rainfall there are areas of significant uncertainty. To clarify some of what is known about these complex interactions, and what areas have a pressing need for further research, a two-day MIT workshop this week brought together a group of specialists from around the world to explore the interactions […]
R&D Special Focus: Looking Back at Past R&D 100 Award Recipients
R&D Magazine May 3, 2018 Over the past few weeks, R&D Magazine has taken an in-depth look at some of the 2017 R&D 100 Awardees on rdmag.com. The full list of 2017 R&D 100 awardees can be viewed here … read more.
Japan Just Found a Huge Rare-Earth Mineral Deposit That Can Supply The World For Centuries
Science Alert April 16, 2018 Rare-earth minerals used in electronic devices are plentiful in layers of the Earth’s crust. There are only a few economically viable areas where they can be mined and they’re generally expensive to extract. Researchers in Japan have found a deposit of rare-earth minerals about 1,150 miles (1,850 km) southeast of Tokyo. It’s within Japan’s exclusive economic zone, so the island nation has the sole rights to the resources there. There’s enough yttrium to meet the global demand for 780 years, dysprosium for 730 years, europium for 620 years, and terbium for 420 years. China has tightly […]
Melding of concepts from different scientific fields
Science Daily March 9, 2018 Researchers in Japan developed a new methodology to analyze citations in papers that used two specified terms and tracked the changes over time. They mapped individual papers and connected these with papers they had cited, resulting in publications citing the same paper being close to each other. They found that only a few publications were required for the fusion between agent based modeling and individual based modeling and these weren’t necessarily the most cited papers. According to them three things are needed for fusion to occur: researchers being aware of issues in different fields; common […]