There's been an interesting discussion on Twitter about senior scientists who pressure their students or postdocs into scientific misconduct or otherwise poor science: Bullying students into providing the "right" results: research misconduct by proxy? This is probably among the worst but receives little attention — Simon Eickhoff (@INM7_ISN) January 19, 2019 Today, I was made aware of a site called Bullied Into Bad Science which aims to tackle this problem. Founded by behavior ...read more

What makes humans stand out among primates? We’re naked and unusually sweaty. Yes, we’re also distinguished by upright walking, big brains and advanced culture. But here I want to focus on our sweaty bare bods. Millions of years back our ancestors were likely as hairy as chimpanzees and gorillas. Over the course of human evolution, our lineage traded its fur coat for a covering of minuscule body hairs and a few ample patches over the head, armpits and nether region. Why we became ...read more

When most of us learn about the solar system, it seems like a pretty well-ordered place. Our sun formed first, about five billion years ago, and the planets appeared a little later. As a very general trend, these planets grew larger and less dense the farther from the sun they formed.   But this story leaves out the chaotic dynamics and frenetic reshuffling that occurred when our solar system was young. Nature may like order eventually, but that order evolves out of pure cha ...read more

Since the announcement that I won the Nobel Prize in physics for chirped pulse amplification, or CPA, there has been a lot of attention on its practical applications. It is understandable that people want to know how it affects them. But as a scientist, I would hope society would be equally interested in fundamental science. After all, you can’t have the applications without the curiosity-driven research behind it. Learning more about science — science for science’s sake &mdas ...read more

In what may be a world first, a peer-reviewed journal, Frontiers in Psychology, has published a song. The musical contribution to science is called 'It's Hard Work Being No One', and it comes from psychologist J. Scott Jordan of the Illinois State University. Here's some of the lyrics, which deal with nothing less than the existential question of identity: I got a ticket on the next train to OZ Gotta see that crazy wizard because Even tin man was an I, just had no heart Scarecrow was ...read more

The Future of Martian Bots Mars has been home to robots since the 1990s. Rolling over the rocky terrain, martian robots have endured dust storms, radiation and the hardships of life on the Red Planet. New software from the UK could allow these robots to drive themselves around the rocky martian terrain and enable them to explore farther than ever before. It currently takes about eight minutes (each way) for commands and communication to travel to or from Mars, so robots guided by huma ...read more

The Ice of Mercury Mercury, the closest planet to our sun and the second hottest, also has glaciers. That may come as a surprise, but it's due to the fact that the planet has no tilt, and so the bottom of some deep craters near the poles are left permanently shadowed. With no atmosphere, the planet's night side quickly loses heat and dips far below freezing, allowing ice to form and accumulate in regions that never see the sun. Now, new models reveal incredible details about how glaciers f ...read more

What if your ability to feed yourself was dependent on a process that made a mistake 20 percent of the time? We face this situation every day. That’s because the plants that produce the food we eat evolved to solve a chemistry problem that arose billions of years ago. Plants evolved to use carbon dioxide to make our food and the oxygen we breathe – a process called photosynthesis. But they grew so well and produced so much oxygen that this gas began to dominate the atmosphere. To pl ...read more

Dear Librarian, Libraries and similar venues are public spaces where community members, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, economic level, or education level, can engage in a variety of activities.  May we suggest citizen science, which enables ordinary people to advance real scientific research?  Professional scientists need your help, and connecting through citizen science projects offers robust opportunities for patrons to address local or global concerns and to stoke ...read more

Today, when we've unlocked the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya writing and hosts of far lesser known scripts, it seems as though there's nothing left for enterprising epigraphers. Fear not, for there are actually a number of ancient writing systems still to be cracked. They include texts of the Olmec and Zapotec (Mesoamerican cultures preceding the Classic Maya), Proto-Elamite (writings of the earliest civilization of present-day Iran) and Rongorongo of Easter Island. But if it's fa ...read more