Blind trust in black box, or click-and-run, software is a growing problem in science, and the concern extends to big data and high performance computing. Read more »
Apple’s iPhone and other smartphones are full of rare earth minerals China is one of the biggest producers (and consumers) of these rare earth minerals, which are becoming such hot commodities that entrepreneurs and investors are thinking about mining the moon for them. Read more »
Trying to write something that people will remember? Maybe you should consider a short and sweet Facebook status update, rather than posting a photo or more formal text. A new study found that your status updates are more memorable than you might think. Read more »
Government plans to make publicly-funded research available for free online will be great for citizens but terrible news for journal publishers. One could lose up to 60 percent of its profits, an analyst warns. Read more at paidContent »
A year after opening its API, Mendeley — the document manager and social network for scientists — has seen a blossoming of apps that hook into its system… often in innovative ways. Now it’s looking to the future. Read more »
The controversial world of paywalled academic publishing has been hit by a major shift, with the British government saying it will make open access to scientific research a condition of public funding by 2014. Read more at paidContent »
Somewhere in the mountains of Chile scientists want to build a telescope capable of taking roughly 1,400 photos daily of the night sky consisting of 6 gigabytes of information each. But getting all that data off the mountain will require better broadband and smarter algorithms. Read more »
The UK government has told academic journal publishers it will make freely available online the publicly-funded research they currently charge for, labelling “paywalls” “deeply unhealthy”. Read more at paidContent »
Bina Technologies emerged from stealth mode last week and is bringing an Apple-like business model to genomics. The company relies on its Bina Box to make genome analysis faster than ever before possible without the benefit of having a supercomputer and a research network on hand. Read more »
By pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into big data research and development, the Obama administration thinks it can push the current state of the art well beyond what’s possible today, and into entirely new research areas. It’s a noble goal, but also a necessary one. Read more »
The tools that have revolutionized the way we live are only just starting to have an impact on scientific research. Now ResearchGate — the “Facebook of science” — is hoping to speed up the change, with a new round of investment from Founders Fund to make it work. Read more »
Employees who are super active on social networking sites have a very different idea of what is appropriate workplace behavior than other workers, and run into on-the-job ethical violations more often, according to a new study published this week by the Ethics Resource Center. Read more »
Google announced that it’s ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive projects. The company says access to such resources is now common. Read more »
Beyond Hadoop, there’s a lot more to think about when it comes to big data, ranging from where companies will actually find workers to how they’ll deal with an impending privacy-policy onslaught. The answers won’t be easy to come by, but they could be critical. Read more »
Award-winning quantum physicist Michael Nielsen says that the closed and disconnected nature of most research is holding back scientific progress in important ways, and that we need to help foster a new kind of networked “open science” if we want to make new discoveries faster. Read more »
Your body and your smartphone don’t speak the same language: one uses electrons, the other protons to send information. But scientists at the University of Washington are working on ways to help the two understand each other through a new type of transistor. Read more »
If you check out the webcams at the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s CMS project, you may just observe something rather unexpected. Although the picture below is from CERN, it’s much more akin to a boring office space than a scientific laboratory. However, look a little […] Read more »
Green Porno, in which Isabella Rossellini (Blue Velvet) explains how insect sex works while wearing bug costumes, was one of the hottest web series of 2008. Well of course it was — that’s one of the top 10 premises for a web series ever, even surpassing […] Read more »
Not sure how this one slipped past us, but last month Science magazine challenged its readers to translate their PhD research into an interpretive dance and post their moves on YouTube. Thirty-six videos were submitted and last week the winners were chosen. It’s not exactly “news” […] Read more »
Thin-film solar companies may not like questions about their conversion efficiency, but two new studies out this week from MIT and UCLA could eventually help solar cell manufacturers achieve numbers worth bragging about. In a study published in this week’s Journal of the American Chemical Society, […] Read more »
