Postdocs—the Ph.D.s who do much of the labor of science—are notoriously underpaid. But the problem has intensified over the past year as postdocs struggle to get by amid soaring inflation and professors report problems recruiting Ph.D. graduates to fill positions. Several institutions and states have recently implemented policies to increase their pay. But these...

Postdocs—the Ph.D.s who do much of the labor of science—are notoriously underpaid. But the problem has intensified over the past year as postdocs struggle to get by amid soaring inflation and professors report problems recruiting Ph.D. graduates to fill positions. Several institutions and states have recently implemented policies to increase their pay. But these...

Federally funded scientists who work with potentially harmful bacteria, viruses, and other agents could soon face a major expansion of U.S. government oversight. An expert group last week recommended broadening rules that require universities and funding agencies to determine whether proposed studies count as dual-use research—work that carries the risk of intentionally or accidentally...

For more than 140 years, fishers in southeastern Brazil have formed an unusual partnership with local dolphins . In the small coastal city of Laguna, men wait for the marine mammals to swim up a narrow lagoon, herding silvery mullet from the Atlantic Ocean into shallower waters. As soon as the fishers spot a dolphin slapping its tail, lifting its head, and diving deeply,...

When two male mice meet in a confined space, the rules of engagement are clear: The lower ranking mouse must yield. But when these norms go out the window—say, when researchers rig such an encounter to favor the weakling—it sends the higher ranking male into a depressionlike spiral. That’s the conclusion of a new neuroimaging study that reveals how the mouse brain responds to an...

As the fight against COVID-19 wears on and the virus continues to mutate, vaccines and several monoclonal antibody drugs are losing some of their punch. That’s added urgency to a strategy for preventing and treating the disease that, in theory, could stop all variants of SARS-CoV-2. The idea is to flood the body with proteins that mimic the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)...

Many Iranian scientists are dismayed about last week’s appointment of a hardline conservative cleric as the new secretary of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution (SCCR), a body with considerable power over science, academic life, and culture in Iran. They worry Abdolhossein Khosropanah, appointed on 17 January by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, will strengthen the...

How hard is it to give birth to an Earth? To assemble the right mix of rock, metal, and water, in a balmy spot not too far from a star? For a long time, planetary scientists have thought Earth was a lucky accident, enriched with water and lighter “volatile” elements—such as nitrogen and carbon—by asteroids that had strayed in from the outer edges of the early Solar System,...

GEOLOGY AI helps find missed meteorites Antarctica is famously good at preserving meteorites, burying the rocks in snow and ice until they resurface. They often become concentrated in regions of compacted “blue” ice that make up about 1% of the Antarctic surface. But finding the meteorites within those tracts has been an ad hoc affair. Now,...

A federal watchdog has weighed in on problems with a U.S. government grant that funded work in Wuhan, China, on bat coronaviruses that some onlookers claim led to the COVID-19 pandemic. The audit found oversight issues by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and that the grantee had misreported $90,000 in expenses. But it sheds little new light on issues already widely covered and...

FDA panel will discuss switch to an annual booster in the fall, akin to flu vaccination strategy

It’s not exactly the T-1000—yet. But researchers in China and the United States have created a liquid metal robot that can mimic the shape-shifting abilities of actor Robert Patrick’s silvery, morphing killer robot in Terminator 2: Judgment Day . Researchers demonstrated the capabilities of the new human-shaped, 10-millimeter-tall “robot” by having it...

Policies aim to accelerate science, but will require big changes for some investigators

When mink at a big farm in Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain, started to die in October 2022, veterinarians initially thought the culprit might be SARS-CoV-2, which has struck mink farms in several other countries. But lab tests soon revealed something scarier: a deadly avian influenza virus named H5N1. Authorities immediately placed workers on the farm under quarantine...

TOKYO— The Japanese government is pushing ahead with its plan to release 1.3 million tons of radioactive water from the defunct Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean. The release could begin as early as this spring or summer, according to materials distributed at a 13 January ministerial meeting. But it has stirred broad opposition—from Japan’s...

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) apologized today for the participation of some of its early leaders in the eugenics movement, as well as the group’s failure to acknowledge and oppose other past harms and injustices in the field of genetics. The apology stems from a yearlong ASHG project that resulted in a 27-page report documenting instances of...

Women constitute 26% of the scientists at the prestigious Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), but only hold 17% of the space, according to an unprecedented report released last week. SIO’s 56 women scientists have on average half as much research space and one-third the storage space of their 157 male counterparts,...

Although wolves in Alaska will eat just about anything that moves, their typical main course consists of deer, deer, and more deer. But when wolves on one island off the state’s coast finished off nearly all the deer around them, they turned to a surprising substitution: sea otters. That’s the conclusion of a new study that records a rare instance of a wolf population...

The drenching storms that hit California in recent weeks represented a long-sought opportunity for Helen Dahlke, a groundwater hydrologist at the University of California, Davis. Dahlke has been studying ways to recharge the state’s severely depleted groundwater by diverting swollen rivers into orchards and fields and letting the water seep deep into aquifers. But carrying out such...

U.S. health officials should expand oversight of federally funded research that tweaks deadly viruses to include some less risky types of pathogens, an expert panel has concluded. Its draft report , released today, also recommends funding agencies share more information about decisions to approve such work. The recommendations are welcome news for scientists,...

Universities routinely use student teaching evaluations to help make decisions about which faculty members get tenure and promotions. But factors unrelated to teaching performance, such as gender, race, and even attractiveness, can skew these evaluations, potentially exacerbating existing inequities in academia. Now, a new study suggests an additional source of bias:...

A sentencing hearing is a forum to mete out justice for someone convicted of a crime. But this week, U.S. District Court Senior Judge Julie Robinson used the sentencing of Franklin Tao , a chemical engineer formerly at the University of Kansas (KU), Lawrence, to also talk at length about what motivates academic researchers—and how the U.S. government appeared to...

Cave Johnson is almost ready to start a new study in his secret underground facility. The founder of the Michigan-based technology company Aperture Science, he’s invented a portal gun that allows people to teleport to various locations. Now, he and his colleagues want to see whether they can make portals appear on previously unfit surfaces with a new “conversion gel” containing moon...

The star pattern Western astronomers call Orion has long drawn our eyes to the night skies. Some Ki’che’ Maya people see it as a cosmic hearth. For the Khoisan people of southern Africa, it’s an archer confronting zebras and a lion. Meanwhile the Carib people of South America see a one-legged hunter named Epietembo. But future generations might wonder what all the...