The findings confirm research that I conducted more than 20 years ago. Under the guise of the Comedy Research Project, Timandra Harkness and I performed a randomised clinical trial to assess whether or not science can be funny.
Modern scientific societies are increasingly vulnerable due to their dependence on membership fees and journal subscriptions, which are being challenged by the rise of virtual networking and open-access publishing.
Computer programs that check mathematical arguments have existed for decades, but translating a human-written proof into the strict programming language of a computer is extremely time-consuming, often taking months or even years.
A NIST employee tells WIRED that some plans to bring on foreign workers through the agency's Professional Research and Experience Program have recently been canceled because of uncertainty about whether they would make it through the new security protocols. The staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, says the agency has yet to widely communicate what the new hurdles will be or why it believes they are justified.
Known as ExStra, this is a permanent national funding programme designed to strengthen research at the nation's top universities and make them more competitive internationally. While the ExStra programme allows for up to 15 "Excellent Universities" (Exzellenzuniversitaten), only ten institutions have made the grade for the next round of funding.
His message is clear: our world is built on abundant energy, around 80% of which has come from fossil fuels over the past 50 years. Because supplies are limited, energy consumption will peak in decades - sooner if humans attempt to limit climate change. To keep global warming below 1.5 °C by 2100, the use of fossil fuels must fall by 5-8% each year - a pace that is too fast for low-carbon energy to keep up with.
This is a striking decision at a moment when public confidence in higher education is eroding. It is also puzzling because rigorous research and evaluation have demonstrated, over and over, the value of the work of centers for teaching and learning, including positive impacts on student learning outcomes, institutional effectiveness and faculty development.
"We didn't do any LLMs. There is significant interest in that. There are lots of people trying those ideas out, but I think they're still in the exploratory phase," Desai told El Reg. As it turned out, the researchers didn't need them. "We used a simpler model called a variational auto encoder (VAE). This model was established in 2013. It's one of the early generative models," Desai said.
The fewer solicitations you have, the less time grant applicants have to figure out which of our pigeonholes they fit into. In the past, a solicitation might have been for an individual program, which means it's attached to an individual program officer and a specific dollar amount. Now, instead of going to one program officer's area, the NSF will use technology to better route applications to wherever within the agency they can best be reviewed.
Last November, the UK government announced a bold plan to phase out animal testing in some areas of research. Animal tests for skin irritation are scheduled for elimination this year, and some studies on dogs should be slashed by 2030. The long-term vision is 'a world where the use of animals in science is eliminated in all but exceptional circumstances'.
The exponential growth of scientific literature presents an increasingly acute challenge across disciplines. Hundreds of thousands of new chemical reactions are reported annually, yet translating them into actionable experiments becomes an obstacle1,2. Recent applications of large language models (LLMs) have shown promise3,4,5,6, but systems that reliably work for diverse transformations across de novo compounds have remained elusive. Here we introduce MOSAIC (Multiple Optimized Specialists for AI-assisted Chemical Prediction), a computational framework that enables chemists to harness the collective knowledge of millions of reaction protocols.
In her book Hope in the Dark, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit observes that transformation starts in the margins. The book explores social movements throughout history, but the notion that mainstream beliefs grow from fringe ideas once thought to be outrageous is familiar to anyone who has watched change happen. Hope, she says, lives in the dark around the edges.
Calling nanoscientists: your field needs you to try to replicate a landmark finding that quantum dots can act as biosensors inside living cells. As part of the first large-scale effort in the physical sciences to tackle the reproducibility crisis, researchers in France and the Netherlands are offering funds and resources in exchange for a few months of work. "We are trying to use
Iranian researchers are in a difficult situation. Those in Iran face low wages, high inflation, sociopolitical instability, resource mismanagement, oppression by the authorities and long-standing international sanctions. High prices hinder conference attendance, as do difficulties obtaining visas. Unstable Internet connections, frequent power outages and lack of access to scholarly sources jeopardize collaborations. Scholars also have to contend with isolation, and sometimes biases, from the international community. And for those who work abroad, travelling to and from Iran is risky, even with visas and double citizenship.
For nearly 100 years, the United States has been the world's leader in a wide variety of scientific fields. No other country has: invested as much in fundamental scientific research, has made more scientific breakthroughs and scientific advances, has attracted more scientific researchers to move there to conduct their research, or has conducted more projects and been home to more scientists that have won Nobel Prizes.
Postdoctoral researchers are an essential part of academic science and the knowledge Cornell brings into the world. They often mentor students and lead projects, helping advance discoveries in areas like quantum materials, genomics and biomedicine - work that will fundamentally transform technologies, medicine and public health," said Gary Koretzky '78, vice provost for research, who will administer the grant to researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Veterinary Medicine and Cornell Engineering.
In fact, Stawicki was on a mission to save the lives of around 1,000 zebrafish ( Danio rerio) in her laboratory. Similarities between lines of hair cells on the fish's flanks and those in the mammalian inner ear enable her to use them as a model to study hearing problems in humans caused by some antibiotics and chemotherapy drugs. A sensor had picked up that the lab's heating system had been knocked out by a power fault.
