For Yet Better Science

Established in 1984, Vellore Institute of Technology is a non-profit private higher-education institution located in the urban setting of the medium city of Vellore (population range of 250,000-499,999 inhabitants), Tamil Nadu. This institution also has a branch campus in Chennai. Officially recognized by the University Grants Commission of India, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) is a very large (uniRank enrollment range: 30,000-34,999 students) coeducational Indian higher education institution. Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) offers courses and programs leading to officially recognized higher education degrees such as bachelor degrees, master degrees, doctorate degrees in several areas of study.

Established in 1959, Indian Institute of Technology Madras is a non-profit public higher-education institution located in the urban setting of the large metropolis of Chennai (population range of over 5,000,000 inhabitants), Tamil Nadu. Officially recognized by the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Human Resources Development of India, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) is a large (uniRank enrollment range: 10,000-14,999 students) coeducational Indian higher education institution. Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) offers courses and programs leading to officially recognized higher education degrees such as bachelor degrees, master degrees, doctorate degrees in several areas of study.

Claire Malone says that both physicists and the public benefit if researchers make science communication central to their day-to-day activities

The human mind takes shortcuts by using past experiences to fill in missing information. This special talent helped our forebears avoid unfamiliar dangers and facilitated the development of modern civilization. Today, it allows us to quickly size up new social situations and connect with complete strangers. As researchers, it helps us see patterns in nature that explain how the world works. But this inherently human characteristic has its flaws. In its most benign manifestation, our reliance on shortcuts makes us susceptible to optical illusions or a magician’s slight of hand. More troubling, our tendency to fill in missing facts by making broad generalizations can lead us to draw erroneous conclusions about our fellow researchers and the quality of their work.

Daniel Stokols , professor emeritus of planning, policy & design, and Judith Olson , professor of informatics, are co-authors of a new report from the National Research Council that concludes scientific research is increasingly dominated by teams–a promising approach that is also rife with challenges. The report is likely to have major public policy and research funding implications as academic and scientific research communities are still largely structured around an outdated concept of the independent solo investigator. Team science can be difficult, especially when teams or groups are geographically dispersed, include diverse disciplines or experience changing membership. Yet the evidence indicates that innovation and impact are enhanced by multidisciplinary science teams. The complete NRC report can be read or downloaded free here . 

PubPeer is currently very likely the most visible and coordinated post-publication peer review site for academics and scientists, even more than PubMed Commons, which has now become obsolete because it allows for anonymous comments and critiques. In order for this site to continue to gain the trust and respect of scientists, it needs to display complete transparency and open communication with the public. Little is known about the founders and the management of this organization, California-based The PubPeer Foundation, although two of its founders, Boris Barbour and Brandon Stell, work at French research institutes. It is believed that in November of 2016, The PubPeer Foundation received US$ 412,800 in funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation [funded by Enron billionaire John Arnold]. However, the public would not have been able to glean this information from looking at the “About us” page, even after PubPeer upgraded to version 2.0 on June 15, 2017. This large financial dona

The University of Cape Town is a public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university status in 1918, making it the oldest university in South Africa and the oldest university in Sub-Saharan Africa in continuous operation.

Academic culture needs to change towards more sustainability, diversity and equal opportunities. Be part of the change and support the calls to action.

Science is evolving. New tools and ideas are changing how discovery happens. Science Better is a collection of interviews with the vanguard — a repository of their best ideas and personal research habits.

"Ubiome, Theranos, FTX. What a racket... A money laundering operation fooled so many, and they went after your health. They deceived you, harmed people, and yet only CEOs were arrested. Do you mean to tell me scientists that worked under them were innocent?"

Delhi University, formally the University of Delhi, is a collegiate central university located in New Delhi, India. It was founded in 1922 by an Act of the Central Legislative Assembly and is recognized as an Institute of Eminence by the University Grants Commission.

The Indian Institute of Science is a public, deemed, research university for higher education and research in science, engineering, design, and management. It is located in Bengaluru, in the Indian state of Karnataka.

Reproducibility has long been a tenet of science but has been challenging to achieve—we learned this the hard way when our old approaches proved inadequate to efficiently reproduce our own work. Here we describe how several free software tools have fundamentally upgraded our approach to collaborative research, making our entire workflow more transparent and streamlined. By describing specific tools and how we incrementally began using them for the Ocean Health Index project, we hope to encourage others in the scientific community to do the same—so we can all produce better science in less time.  

Effective clinical practice is predicated on valid and relevant clinical science - a commodity in increasingly short supply. The pre-eminent place of clinical research has become tainted by methodological shortcomings, commercial influences and neglect of the needs of patients and clinicians. Researchers need to be more proactive in evaluating clinical interventions in terms of patient-important benefit, wide applicability and comparative effectiveness, and in adopting study designs and reporting standards that ensure accurate and transparent research outputs. Funders of research need to be more supportive of applied clinical research that rigorously evaluates effectiveness of new treatments and synthesis existing knowledge into clinically useful systematic reviews. Several strategies for improving the state of the science are possible but their implementation requires collective action of all those undertaking and reporting clinical research.

Avengers  for Better Science  is a workshop organized to support young researchers committed to building an inclusive, open and ethical academia.

The University of Lviv, presently the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, is the oldest institution of higher learning in present-day Ukraine dating from 1661 when John II Casimir, King of Poland, granted it its first royal charter.

My research is at the intersection of number theory and algebraic geometry, and deals with the basic questions and structures that underly our modern understanding of diophantine equations. This concerns on the one hand the Langlands program, which connects objects from arithmetic geometry, such as elliptic curves over number fields, with analytic or topological objects, such as modular forms or the cohomology of hyperbolic manifolds. On the other hand, this concerns the cohomological invariants attached to arithmetic varieties themselves, which forms the subject of Hodge theory, or more particularly p-adic Hodge theory.

With Hugo Duminil-Copin, thinking rarely happens without moving. His insights into the flow-related properties of complex networks have earned him the Fields Medal.

I am a mathematician at  Princeton University . Previously, I was at  Stanford University  and  Institute for Advanced Study . During summer, I can be found at  Korea Institute for Advanced Study

Publication requires complainants to disclose financial conflicts in the wake of controversy over Cassava Sciences’ experimental treatment simufilam.

Heisenberg’s name will always be associated with his theory of quantum mechanics, published in 1925, when he was only 23 years old. For this theory and the applications of it which resulted especially in the discovery of allotropic forms of hydrogen, Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1932.

E rwin Schrödinger  was born on August 12, 1887, in Vienna, the only child of Rudolf Schrödinger, who was married to a daughter of Alexander Bauer, his Professor of Chemistry at the Technical College of Vienna.

Max Planck , in full  Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck , (born April 23, 1858,  Kiel , Schleswig [Germany]—died October 4, 1947,  Göttingen , Germany), German theoretical physicist who originated  quantum theory , which won him the  Nobel Prize  for Physics in 1918.

Einstein’s researches are, of course, well chronicled and his more important works include  Special Theory of Relativity  (1905),  Relativity  (English translations, 1920 and 1950),  General Theory of Relativity  (1916),  Investigations on Theory of Brownian Movement  (1926), and  The Evolution of Physics  (1938). Among his non-scientific works,  About Zionism  (1930),  Why War?  (1933),  My Philosophy  (1934), and  Out of My Later Years  (1950) are perhaps the most important.

Eric Lander is president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard * . A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he has played a pioneering role in all aspects of the reading, understanding, and biomedical application of the human genome. He was a principal leader of the international Human Genome Project.

A federal grand jury handed down a 33-page indictment charging Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman with multiple federal crimes including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud, money laundering, and related offenses in connection with alleged schemes to defraud health insurance providers and investors raise to capital for now-bankrupt microbiome testing company uBiome.  

uBiome, Inc.  was a  biotechnology  company based in  San Francisco  that developed technology to sequence the  human microbiome . Its main product analyzed  gut microbes  in patients with long-term  intestinal disorders . [1]  Founded in 2012, the company shut down in 2019 following an investigation into possible insurance fraud.

It seems like a perfect plot for a drama fuelled movie: a young, pretty and audaciously smart woman drops out of university to “revolutionise” an existing industry with the encouragement of her old supervisor (punch line “ be the change you want to see ”). The upstart wannabe then starts to dress in black turtlenecks –in emulation of her hero – and spout rhetoric of “revolutionising blood testing” with her wondrous Edison machine. But here’s the catch: Edison is still a prototype and does not seem to work (queue ominous music with minority extra solemnly declaring that “all the tests are wrong”). The FDA then catches on,  shuts down one of the two clinics , and the older, but still pretty, woman contemplates the inevitable crash of her company. Coming soon,  starring Jennifer Lawrence as the founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes .

Eric Kandel studied how memories are stored by these nerve cells. His breakthrough came in 1970 while he was at New York University studying a marine snail with a simple nervous system. Kandel found that as the snail learned, chemical signals changed the structure of the connections between cells, known as synapses, where the signals are sent and received. He went on to show that short-term and long-term memories are formed by different signals. This is true in all animals that learn, from molluscs to man.

Originated as the Imperial University of Peking in 1898, Peking University was China’s first national comprehensive university and the supreme education authority at the time. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, it has developed into a comprehensive university with fundamental education and research in both humanities and science. The reform and opening-up of China in 1978 has ushered in a new era for the University unseen in history. And its merger with Beijing Medical University in 2000 has geared itself up for all-round and vibrant growth in such fields as science, engineering, medicine, agriculture, humanities and social sciences.

The University of Tokyo, abbreviated as Todai or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by the Japanese government.

  Tsinghua University is a national public research university in Beijing, China.  

In 1944, Oswald Avery proved that DNA is the bearer of organisms' genetic code. Further explanation was provided when James Watson and Francis Crick determined the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. This structure–a long double helix–contains a long row of pairs of four different nitrogen bases, which allow the molecule to function like a code. The molecule's structure also explains how it is able to copy itself. The nitrogen bases always pair in the same constellations, so that if a molecule is split, its halves can be supplemented so that they form copies of the original molecule.

A critical influence in Crick’s career was his friendship, beginning in 1951, with   J. D. Watson , then a young man of 23, leading in 1953 to the proposal of the double-helical structure for DNA and the replication scheme. Crick and Watson subsequently suggested a general theory for the structure of small viruses. Crick in collaboration with A. Rich has proposed structures for polyglycine II and collagen and (with A. Rich, D. R. Davies, and J. D.Watson) a structure for polyadenylic acid. In recent years Crick, in collaboration with S. Brenner, has concentrated more on biochemistry and genetics leading to ideas about protein synthesis (the «adaptor hypothesis»), and the genetic code, and in particular to work on acridine-type mutants.

“I would say read all of Dawkins – that would be my recommendation. But if I had to pick just one self-contained book that lays out Dawkins’s philosophy and methodology, and shows his literary skills, I would have to pick this one. His most famous book is  The Selfish Gene  because it lays out the gene-centred view of evolution, but it’s a bit of a tough slog. All the stuff you find in it you can also find in  The Blind Watchmaker. “

On the Origin of Species  is Charles Darwin’s book on evolution that changed our understanding of the world, and our place in it, irrevocably. It is one of Five Books’ most recommended books.

The best science books, as recommended by some of the most eminent academics and public figures in the field. Reading lists on subjects including  popular science ,  physics ,  applied mathematics ,  computer science ,  biology ,  chemistry  and  astronomy .

World Top 100 Scientists 2023 ; University / Institution, Country, Region

The 1st edition of Research.com ranking of top scientists in the world is based on data collected from Microsoft Academic Graph on 06-12-2021. Position in the ranking is based on a scientist's general H-index.  

Best science  books of 2022. Preventing future pandemics, the secrets of the Higgs boson and the surprising roots of plastic surgery.  

An almighty eruption, the cosmos remastered, swirling cells and more.  

From a detective story on the origins of Covid-19 to a narrative that imagines a fateful day for dinosaurs, these works affected us the most this year  

Article about the disgruntled troll Leonid Schneider.

Article about a disgruntled troll called Leonid Schneider

China has the world’s largest older population (≥60 years old), and China’s ageing burdens will increase further as the second baby boomers (those born between 1962 and 1975) start to enter retirement in 2022. In addition, China’s rapid demographic transition over the past 4 decades will lead to a striking decline in the number of living children for each older person in China and will bring substantial challenges for both family-based care and social care. Achieving healthy ageing is necessary for China to reap positive benefits from increased longevity and to reduce potential economic and social burdens that could accompany rapid population ageing.

The  best science for  better lives. Explore the latest high-quality research from The Lancet Group.  

The Better Science initiative calls for a rethinking of the university towards more sustainability, diversity and equal opportunities.  Academic work should be characterised by sustainability, diversity, and equal opportunities: it should provide quality in a holistic sense, whereby quantity and speed are not the primary considerations.

The Free University of Berlin is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and the humanities.

Young research  university  with over 10.000 students in medicine and STEM subjects in the heart of Ulm's Science City.  

Our objectives are four fold. (1) to develop projects to improve the research enterprise; (2) to connect isolated ongoing efforts; (3) to engage social scientists, given the role that socio-political forces have played in molding today’s research structure. (4) to empower students – the future scientists – who are not yet entrenched in the current system to explore fresh ideas.