Creating an ever-flexible center for tech innovation
Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the Cornell Tech Campus, shares what it's like building an innovation center.
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Crack down on scientific fraudsters
According to a study published last year, “most investigators who engage in wrongdoing, even serious wrongdoing, continue to conduct research at their institutions.”
With prizes like this, who needs a Nobel?
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.
NIH seeks $4.5 billion to try to crack the code of how brains function
A final version of NIH document presents an estimate of the money needed.
Re-Evaluating the College Rankings Game
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.
Labs are told to start including a neglected variable: females
Labs are told to start including a neglected variable: females
Mice or rats, pigs or dogs, they were usually male: researchers avoided using female animals for fear that their reproductive cycles and hormone fluctuations would confound the results of delicately calibrated experiments.
Science tools anyone can afford
Science tools anyone can afford
"Today people look at these extraordinary labs and forget that in the 1800s they could still do the exact same science." -- Manu Prakash
Eight (no, nine!) problems with big data
There is no doubt that big data is a valuable tool that has already had a critical impact in certain areas. But because of its popularity, we need to be levelheaded about what big data can and can’t do.
Billionaires with big ideas are privatizing American science
Billionaires with big ideas are privatizing American science
As government financing of basic science research has plunged, private donors have filled the void, raising questions about the future of research for the public good.
Professors, we need you!
Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don't matter in today's great debates.
New truths that only one can see
Maybe the researchers deeply believed that their findings were true. But that is the problem. The more passionate scientists are about their work, the more susceptible they are to bias.
How to fix peer review
Peer review, many boffins argue, channelling Churchill, is the worst way to ensure quality of research, except all the others. The system, which relies on papers being vetted by anonymous experts prior to publication, has underpinned scientific literature for decades.
Frederick Sanger, two-time nobel-winning scientist, dies at 95
Frederick Sanger, a British biochemist whose discoveries about the chemistry of life led to the decoding of the human genome and to the development of new drugs like human growth hormone and earned him two Nobel Prizes, a distinction held by only three other scientists, died on Tuesday in Cambridge, England.
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