NASA on the hunt for space poop geniuses
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Just add water: New discovery in plant-disease mechanism
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The impact of course titles on student enrollment
In October of 1955, Ford marketing executive Robert Young recruited modernist poet Marianne Moore to name the company's new car. Although the marketing department had already created a list of 300 candidates, Young confessed ...
Urgent need for innovation driving surge in funding, globalization of research
Recognizing the urgent, growing need for innovation to meet international health, environmental and economic challenges, investments in research are surging, with governments demanding the biggest possible return from every ...
Swimmers worth their salt cross shrinking Dead Sea
A group of swimmers braved the sting of extremely salty waters to cross the Dead Sea from Jordan to Israel on Tuesday, a seven-hour challenge that organisers described as a first.
Peer review is in crisis, but should be fixed, not abolished
This year three Nobel Prize-winning biologists broke with tradition and published their research directly on the internet as so-called preprints. Their motivation? Saving time.
Nobel laureate Steven Chu to be honored at UMass Lowell
Nobel laureate Steven Chu will receive an honorary degree from University of Massachusetts Lowell this week.
Research pair outlines new field of 'web science'
RIT professor images David Livingstone diaries
Multispectral imaging technology continues to recover new insights from the field diaries of 19th-century explorer David Livingstone. A team of scholars and scientists who worked on the Livingstone Spectral Imaging project ...
Criteria for funding and promotion lead to bad science
Scientists are trained to carefully assess theories by designing good experiments and building on existing knowledge. But there is growing concern that too many research findings may in fact be false. New research publishing ...
Tokyo 2020 Olympic medals to be made of recycled metals
Medals for the Tokyo Olympics will be made from old smartphones and other electronic products, organisers said Wednesday, as they look to give the Games an environmentally friendly hue.
Tougher action needed in the fight against scientific fraud
What is there to stop someone publishing scientific research that is based on no actual research or uses fake evidence to support their claims?
In food packaging, color matters: Why darker tones are a safer bet
The aesthetics of food packaging is geared to the assumptions people make about the product within. This research study makes clear that the color of packaging is an important, but tricky, element.
Success can come at any age, according to study
What does age have to do with creative breakthroughs in science? Not much, according to new research led by Northeastern network scientist Albert-László Barabási. Rather, it is productivity and the will to keep trying ...
Saudis award water prize to 8 scientists
Saudi Arabia awarded eight scientists the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water at a ceremony at United Nations headquarters in New York on Wednesday.
The best of both worlds—preprints and journals
For some time now PLOS has discussed new initiatives designed to accelerate research communication, from development of Aperta, our streamlined manuscript submission system that facilitates a faster time to first decision ...
Bill Gates urges UK to invest in science as Brexit looms
US billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates urged Britain on Wednesday to step up investment in science and research as it prepares to leave the EU.
Between science's secretive, elitist past and open, accessible future
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals ...
Gates Foundation gives University of Washington $210 million
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving the University of Washington $210 million to help build a new facility to advance efforts to improve the health and well-being of people worldwide, officials said Tuesday.
New 3-D technology raises hopes for the coldest of cold cases
The faces are haunting. They stare, straight ahead, unblinking and made of malleable clay. There are fourteen total, all busts of the missing, the unidentified, the murdered. The forgotten.
Science sheds light on 250-year-old literary controversy
The social networks behind one of the most famous literary controversies of all time have been uncovered using modern networks science.
Bloomberg donates $50 mn to Boston's Museum of Science
Billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday announced a $50 million gift for Boston's Museum of Science, fondly recalling hours spent there as a child that helped lay the foundation for his later success.
Recognizing scientific literacy and illiteracy
Scientific literacy – what it is, how to recognize it, and how to help people achieve it through educational efforts, remains a difficult topic. The latest attempt to inform the conversation is a recent National Academy ...
Who will shape the future of the data society?
The contemporary world is held together by a vast and overlapping fabric of information systems. These information systems do not only tell us things about the world around us. They also play a central role in organising ...
CO2 to fish food, other ideas advance in $20M XPRIZE contest
With dreams of turning carbon dioxide into everything from concrete to fish food, teams from six countries have advanced beyond the first phase of a $20 million XPRIZE contest to find profitable uses for CO2 emitted by power ...
Russian academics fight back against fraud, plagiarism
A dissertation council reviewing work on the mediaeval era is not normally national news, but Russia was abuzz this month when historians convened to pass judgement: was the culture minister a fraud?
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Five decisions that made the Nobel Prizes look bad
Nobel Prizes cannot be revoked, so the judges must put a lot of thought into their selections for the six awards, which will be announced in the next two weeks.
From America to Viagra: finding what you're not looking for
It's serendipity: from America to Viagra, history is full of great discoveries helped along by chance, as more than a century of Nobel prizes can attest.
Scholars who studied liars, put pants on rats win Ig Nobels
A Swede who wrote a trilogy about collecting bugs, an Egyptian doctor who put pants on rats to study their sex lives and a British researcher who lived like an animal have been named winners of the Ig Nobels, the annual spoof ...
Relative Citation Ratio: Scientists publish new metric to measure the influence of scientific research
A group from the National Institute of Health's Office of Portfolio Analysis has developed a new metric, known as the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), which will allow researchers and funders to quantify and compare the influence ...
Academic journal articles with 'clickbait-y' characteristics are shared more widely
According to a recent study, journal articles whose titles contain 'clickbait-y' characteristics are shared more widely. Analysing over 2000 titles from articles published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2013 and 2014, researcher ...
A strategy for 'convergence' research to transform biomedicine
What if lost limbs could be regrown? Cancers detected early with blood or urine tests, instead of invasive biopsies? Drugs delivered via nanoparticles to specific tissues or even cells, minimizing unwanted side effects? While ...
Screwworm sex earns departed US duo a 'Golden Goose'
The ins and outs of screwworm sex may not sound like a topic that would arouse passions.
Who's the best-equipped superhero? Student research settles 'superpower showdown'
Students at the University of Leicester have been using simple calculations to explain the feasibility of the powers behind of some of the most prominent comic book superheroes known around the world.
Experts decipher the disease behind one of the world's most famous paintings
It is one of the most famous paintings in American history: Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth. The painting, which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, depicts a young woman in a field, gazing at a farmhouse on ...
Investigative report offers statistics and opinions on Sci-Hub
(Phys.org)—A correspondent for the Science family of journals has published an investigative piece in Science on Sci-Hub, a website that illegally publishes scholarly literature, i.e. research papers. In his article, John ...
First performance in 1,000 years: 'Lost' songs from the Middle Ages are brought back to life
An ancient song repertory has been heard for the first time in 1,000 years after being 'reconstructed' by a Cambridge researcher and a world-class performer of medieval music.
Newly purchased Newton alchemy manuscript to be put online
(Phys.org)—A 17th century document written by Isaac Newton has been purchased from a private owner, by a nonprofit called the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and they have plans to put the whole thing online. What is intriguing ...
Paper on PLOS ONE creates a firestorm by referencing "the Creator"
A trio of researchers from China has caused a stir in the technical publishing arena by including some verbiage in a paper published in the open-source journal PLOS ONE that appears to mention creationism as a part of their ...
Experimental economics: Results you can trust
Reproducibility is an important measure of validity in all fields of experimental science. If researcher A publishes a particular scientific result from his laboratory, researcher B should be able to follow the same protocol ...
Fixing published research mistakes not easy; fixing the publishing system may be harder
A commentary published today in Nature suggests that the process for fixing mistakes in peer-reviewed research articles is flawed. The article, written by scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, points out ...
Did Henry VIII suffer same brain injury as some NFL players?
Henry VIII may have suffered repeated traumatic brain injuries similar to those experienced by football players and others who receive repeated blows to the head, according to research by a Yale University expert in cognitive ...
Culture-shifting new initiative to make 'open science' a reality
Renowned microbiologist Louis Pasteur famously declared that "knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch that illuminates the world". It is perhaps ironic, then, that the fruits of scientific research often remain in ...
Best of Last Week—The Zeno effect, self-driving cars and the genetic impact of stress on offspring
(Phys.org)—It was another banner week for physics as one team at Cornell verified the 'Zeno effect,' whereby atoms won't move while observed. They conducted experiments in an Ultracold Lab and found that atoms that normally ...
NASA on the hunt for space poop geniuses
When you've got to go, but you're out there in space, zipped up in a spacesuit, with no toilet in sight and a crew of other astronauts around, what do you do?
Just add water: New discovery in plant-disease mechanism
We all know that when it rains, plants grow. When it doesn't, they don't.
For wearable electronic devices, NIST shows plastic holes are golden
In science, sometimes the best discoveries come when you're exploring something else entirely. That's the case with recent findings from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where a research team has ...
Sliding on flexible graphene surfaces has been uncharted territory until now
Graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon in sheets just one atom in thick, has been the subject of widespread research, in large part because of its unique combination of strength, electrical conductivity, and chemical ...
Scientists find huge reduction in African dust plume led to more Saharan monsoons 11,000 years ago
Every year, trade winds over the Sahara Desert sweep up huge plumes of mineral dust, transporting hundreds of teragrams—enough to fill 10 million dump trucks—across North Africa and over the Atlantic Ocean. This dust ...
Coconut crab claws pinch with the strongest force of any crustacean
The claws of coconut crabs have the strongest pinching force of any crustacean, according to a study published November 23, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Shin-ichiro Oka from Okinawa Churashima Foundation, Japan, ...
Your dog remembers what you did
People have a remarkable ability to remember and recall events from the past, even when those events didn't hold any particular importance at the time they occurred. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology ...
Mood ring materials—a new way to detect damage in failing infrastructure
"Mood ring materials" could play an important role in minimizing and mitigating damage to the nation's failing infrastructure.
Pioneering study of invertebrates discovers 1,445 viruses including several new families
A groundbreaking study of the virosphere of the most populous animals - those without backbones such as insects, spiders and worms and that live around our houses - has uncovered 1445 viruses, revealing people have only scratched ...
New study reveals when West Antarctica's largest glacier started retreating
Reporting this week (Wednesday Nov. 23) in the journal Nature an international team led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explains that present-day thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier, one of the largest and fastest ...
Harnessing the power of predatory bacteria as a 'living antibiotic'
A naturally occurring predatory bacterium is able to work with the immune system to clear multi-drug resistant Shigella infections in zebrafish, according to a study published today in Current Biology.
Aviation enhancements, better biosensors could result from new sensor technology
Piezoelectric sensors measure changes in pressure, acceleration, temperature, strain or force and are used in a vast array of devices important to everyday life. However, these sensors often can be limited by the "white noise" ...
Gov't wants phone makers to lock out most apps for drivers
The government wants smartphone makers to lock out most apps when the phone is being used by someone driving a car.
Scientists develop vaccine against fatal prescription opioid overdose
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a vaccine that blocks the pain-numbing effects of the opioid drugs oxycodone (oxy) and hydrocodone (hydro) in animal models. The vaccine also appears to decrease ...
How to protect your laptop—even when it's asleep
In the age of WikiLeaks, Russian hacks and increased government surveillance, many computer users are feeling increasingly worried about how best to protect their personal information—even if they aren't guarding state ...
Scientists trace 'poisoning' in chemical reactions to the atomic scale
Researchers have revealed new atomic-scale details about pesky deposits that can stop or slow chemical reactions vital to fuel production and other processes. This disruption to reactions is known as deactivation or poisoning.
DNA influences selection of partners for educational achievement
A study co-led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has found that people with genes for high educational achievement tend to marry, and have children with, people with similar DNA.
Genomics reveals hen harrier is two distinct species
The study, published as the cover article in BioMed Central's Avian Research, led by the Earlham Institute and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, explores the phylogenetic relationship between ...
Scientists create first intermetallic double salt with platinum
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory are being credited with creating the first intermetallic double salt with platinum.
Gravity sensors might offer earlier warning of earthquakes
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from France, the U.S. and Italy has found evidence from the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that sensors that measure changes in gravity might offer a way to warn people of impending disaster faster ...
Research finds sharing, cooperation key to Arctic villages
A new analysis of subsistence data collected in three Arctic communities underscores the importance of social ties and sharing among households.
Study finds some female fish evolve bigger brains when males have bigger genitals
Despite what you might think, evolution rarely happens because something is good for a species. Instead, natural selection favours genetic variants that are good for the individuals that possess them. This leads to a much ...
Researchers use parkour athletes to test energy demands of tree dwelling apes
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the Universities of Roehampton and Birmingham in the U.K. has found a unique way to measure the energy spent by tree-dwelling apes when faced with gaps in a jungle canopy. In their ...
Positive language is on the decline in the United States, study finds
Although recent election coverage may suggest otherwise, research shows that people are more likely to use positive words than negative words on the whole in their communications. Behavioral scientists have extensively documented ...
New quantum states for better quantum memories
How can quantum information be stored as long as possible? An important step forward in the development of quantum memories has been achieved by a research team of TU Wien.
Prototype smart cane could transform lives of the blind and visually impaired
An enterprising researcher from The University of Manchester has developed a prototype tool that could help transform the lives of the blind and visually impaired.
Israeli firm can steal phone data in seconds
It only takes a few seconds for an employee of one of the world's leading hacking companies to take a locked smartphone and pull the data from it.
Actually, men and women don't communicate differently, at least in writing
Men and women don't communicate much differently from each other, at least when they get the same training and are working on the same type of written assignment. The findings come amid frequent studies that have discovered ...
New tool uses UV light to control inflammation
Black light does more than make posters glow. Cornell researchers have developed a chemical tool to control inflammation that is activated by ultraviolet (UV) light.
Single enzyme controls two plant hormones
Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis isolated an enzyme that controls the levels of two plant hormones simultaneously, linking the molecular pathways for growth and defense.
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