I haven’t tried it, but this simple cloaking device seems like a cool way to introduce middle school students to optics.
Author: Joceline Lega
How Cells Move in a Multicellular Organism
Answering the question of how cells move in a multicellular organism is interesting in itself but may also lead to important applications, such as a better understanding of how metastatic cancer actually spreads. Researchers at NIH, Rochester, and Penn State, have identified a new way for cells to move inside a three-dimensional matrix: by using the cell nucleus as a piston! The…
Soliton Turbulence
Understanding complex nonlinear behaviors such as turbulence or space-time disorder is a huge challenge. Being able to describe these phenomena in terms of interacting objects, such as particles, defects, or solitons, is conceptually pleasing and exciting. In an article that just appeared in Physical Review Letters, an international team of researchers reports the observation of “soliton turbulence” in sea surface height…
Robotic Swarm
Fish schools and bird swarms are amazing to look at. It is even more exciting to come up with an understanding of how thousands of entities, each of which is most likely only aware of its nearest neighbors, can self-organize into such large structures. My students and I are interested in this question from a dynamical systems and statistical physics perspective. One…
Research Funding Models
Below are three recent opinions on research funding models. Want a grant? First review someone else’s proposal, an account of an experiment at the National Science Foundation, which required that researchers submitting a proposal for funding agreed to review 7 proposals written by their competitors (July 2014). Politique de l’excellence en recherche, an opinion written by Comets (the ethics committee of…
Open Access
Below is a collection of links to sites sharing reports, opinions, and recommendations on open access.
2019
- More than 700 German research institutions strike open-access deal with Springer Nature, by Gretchen Vogel (August 2019)
- Open access takes root at National Cancer Institute, by Jocelyn Kaiser (August 2019)
- Radical open-access plan delayed a year as revised effort seeks more support, by Tania Rabesandratana (May 2019)
- To meet the ‘Plan S’ open-access mandate, journals mull setting papers free at publication, by Jeffrey Brainard (May 2019)
- Huge US university cancels subscription with Elsevier, by Nisha Gaind (February 2019)
- University of California boycotts publishing giant Elsevier over journal costs and open access, by Alex Fox, Jeffrey Brainard (February 2019)
- Deal reveals what scientists in Germany are paying for open access, by Kai Kupferschmidt (February 2019)
- Scientific societies worry about threat from Plan S, by Jeffrey Brainard (January 2019)
- Groundbreaking deal makes large number of German studies free to public, by Kai Kupferschmidt (January 2019)
- Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers? by Tania Rabesandratana (January 2019)
2018
- European funders detail their open-access plan, by Tania Rabesandratana (November 2018)
- Open-access plan draws online protest, by Tania Rabesandratana (November 2018)
- In win for open access, two major funders won’t cover publishing in hybrid journals, by Erik Stokstad (November 2018)
- European funders seek to end reign of paywalled journals, by Martin Enserink (September 2018)
- Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions, by Holly Else (September 2018)
- A toolkit for data transparency takes shape: A simple software toolset can help to ease the pain of reproducing computational analyses, by Jeffrey M. Perkel (August 2018)
2017
- Potential predatory and legitimate biomedical journals: can you tell the difference? A cross-sectional comparison, by Larissa Shamseer, David Moher, Onyi Maduekwe, Lucy Turner, Virginia Barbour, Rebecca Burch, Jocalyn Clark, James Galipeau, Jason Roberts and Beverley J. Shea, BMC Medicine (March 2017)
2016
- U.K. research charity will self-publish results from its grantees, news article in Science by J. Bohannon (July 2016)
- In dramatic statement, European leaders call for ‘immediate’ open access to all scientific papers by 2020, news article in Science by M. Enserink (May 2016)
- Council of the European Union Conclusions on the Transition Towards an Open Science System (May 2016)
- E.U. urged to free all scientific papers by 2020, news article in Science by M. Enserink (April 2016)
- Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science (April 2016)
- New York Times Op-ed: Should All Research Papers be Free? by K. Murphy (March 2016)
- Montreal institute going ‘open’ to accelerate science, news article in Science by B. Owens (January 2016)
- Dutch lead European push to flip journals to open access, news article in Nature by D. Butler (January 2016)
- Open journals that piggyback on arXiv gather momentum, news article in Nature by E. Gibney (January 2016)
2015
- Results of Nature Publishing Group’s ReadCube experiment (December 2015)
- Open access agreement between Elsevier and Dutch universities (December 2015)
- First independent review of the Research Council UK (RCUK) Open Access Policy (March 2015)
- Press release
- Report (PDF)
- The National Science Foundation publishes Today’s Data, Tomorrow’s Discoveries, a plan for public access to research funded by NSF programs (March 2015).
- Press release
- Science Insider article on the topic, which also summarizes open access policies adopted by other US federal science agencies.
- An opinion piece summarizing some of the issues related to open access (February 2015)
2014
- The Government of India publishes an open access policy for research funded by its Departments of Biotechnology and Science & Technology (December 2014)
- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation adopts an open access policy (November 2014)
- PAGES, DOE’s Public Access Gateway for Energy & Science, is available in beta-version (August 2014)
- U.S. Department of Energy Increases Access to Results of DOE-funded Scientific Research (August 2014)
- EDP survey on attitudes of learned societies towards open access (May 2014)
- Recommendations on open access (March 2014) from the European Astronomical Society
2013
- A press release (December 2013) from the Association of American Publishers on a study describing the half-life of scholarly articles by discipline
- A press release (December 2013) on SCOAP3 from the CERN press office
- Managing the Transition to Open Access Publication (November 2013), a statement from the European Physical Society
- Open access to research publications reaching ‘tipping point’ (August 2013), a press release from Europa
- Principles for the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications (April 2013), a position statement by Science Europe‘s Working Group on Open Access to Scientific Publications
- Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research (March 2013), from the Institute of Physics (IOP)
- Open access: The true cost of science publishing (March 2013), a news article published in the journal Nature
- Director Holdren’s policy on Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research (February 2013)
2008
- NIH Public Access Policy (January 2008)
2004
- Can Open Access be viable? The Institute of Physics’ experience (September 2004), an article by John Haynes, Assistant Director, Journals Business Development, IOP Publishing Ltd
- Access to the literature: the debate continues (September 2004), a collection of articles in the journal Nature
Research Integrity
Below is a collection of links to sites sharing reports, opinions, and recommendations on research integrity. USA The Office of Research Integrity Research integrity page of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Extramural Research Integrity in Scientific Research: Creating an Environment That Promotes Responsible Conduct, from The National Academies Research Integrity Office, University of Arizona Canada Honesty, Accountability and Trust:…
On Getting Enough Sleep
The research article Sleep promotes branch-specific formation of dendritic spines after learning, published in the journal Science, describes how sleep promotes the retention of dendritic spines formed during learning, which in turn strengthens memory. News coverage of this work includes Sleep’s memory role discovered, published by BBC News, A Good Night’s Rest Boosts Learning, in Science Sifter, and the perspective Memories—getting wired during sleep in Science.
Origami Robot
Check out this article on an origami-inspired robot developed by researchers at Harvard University.