Immer wieder geht das Schlagwort vom künstlichen Organismus um, wenn von der synthetischen Biologie die Rede ist. Doch wie künstlich ist das Leben, das diese Ingenieurs- disziplin der Biologie «schafft»?

Nachwuchsforscher stehen unter hohem Druck: Gefragt sind Publikationen und Mobilität, Freiräume dagegen sind rar. Die Akademien der Wissenschaften der Schweiz machen die schwierige Situation zum Thema einer Tagung an der Universität Zürich.

Measures of research impact are improving, but universities should be wary of their limits.

If everyone likes your research, you can be certain that you have not done anything important. That is the first thing to grasp. Conflict goes with the territory. Innovation comes when universities encourage risk-taking, says Andrew Oswald.

In an era of large collaborations, multi-authored papers, and enormous datasets, is there still room for the single creative idea that proves to be a gamechanger?

Anne Glover says that better access to evidence helps policy-makers to make informed choices.

The biggest thing holding invention back is our impatience. With enough time and support, young engineers will develop the technology we need.

Five mathematicians, working in a field spurned by Stockholm and Oslo as a matter of course, will now receive $3 million awards of their own It started with a simple message from Internet billionaire Yuri Milner: let's meet up.

Free from bureaucracy, independent science labs offer a flexibility that can't be matched by universities, writes a researcher.

Why professors, librarians, and politicians are shunning liberal arts in the name of STEM.

Making early-career scientists change institutions frequently is disruptive and — with modern technology — unnecessary.

Scientists make much of the fact that their work is scrutinised anonymously by some of their peers before it is published. This "peer review" is supposed to spot mistakes and thus keep the whole process honest.

One of the loudest buzzwords in current science politics is interdisciplinarity. Government extols its virtues. Research councils clamour about its value. Academics parade their credentials.

Scientists need ways to evaluate themselves and their colleagues. These evaluations are necessary for better everyday management: hiring, promotions, awarding grants and so on. One evaluation metric has dominated these decisions, and that is doing more harm than good.

rOpenSci was awarded $300k from the Sloan Foundation to develop tools that are at least as easy to use before we can expect project reproducibility to become mainstream.

A personal account of a fellow financed by the SNSF.

Although the rating of colleges and universities around the world has been heavily criticized by educators and politicians alike, the academic rankings business is big, and booming.

A large fraction of academic scientists are obsessed with the issue of 'when will I have done enough to complete my PhD?'

Eight commandments on how to build a bad research center.

Many scientists in the UK could soon find themselves isolated from their colleagues in Europe and Scotland. That must not happen.

New NSF director jumps into the frying pan served up by Congress as it reviews agency programs.

Participants discuss the importance of finding a viable Open Access model for books, and of the funding that would be lost, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.

Ben McNeil, founder of thinkable.org, thinks our science funding mechanism is fundamentally broken. Here's why, and what he thinks we should do about it.

Little attention has been paid to the large, changing inequalities in the world of scientific research.

Don't evaluate scholarly research on public impact alone.

Europe is already a world leader in areas from car and aerospace manufacturing to chemicals, and its focus on high-tech niches – which are less subject to low-cost competition – remains a source of strength.

In the scramble to gain market share in cyberspace, something is getting lost: the public interest. Libraries and laboratories-crucial nodes of the World Wide Web-are buckling under economic pressure, and the information they diffuse is being diverted away from the public sphere, where it can do most good.

The UK Government’s new prize for substantial innovation to address pressing societal problems should be welcomed, says Martin Rees.

Peer-review of projects dominates when it comes to decision on how to allocate funding for science. But is it really the best way?

Racist government policies hurt the higher education sector, says Kevin Fong, but the harm doesn't stop there I seem to recall that "education, education, education" was Tony Blair's battle cry in the run-up to the 1996 general election. (With hindsight, the title of the Kaiser Chiefs' latest album, Education, Education, Education and War, might have been closer to the mark.)