News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Papers are a key currency for academic careers—which is why publication disparities among various groups, such as men versus women, are often a focal point for efforts to increase equity and diversity. Now, a new study quantifies another of these gaps: LGBTQ academic scientists who don’t disclose their sexual orientation in the workplace publish fewer … Read more
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 375, Issue 6584. This story is part of a special package being published this week about the barriers Black physicists face and potential models for change. Read more C. Smith/Science Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States have had outsize success in launching … Read more
Older adults make up a hefty proportion of cancer patients but a much smaller slice of clinical trial participants—a long-standing and vexing problem the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants drug companies to tackle. The agency yesterday released recommendations urging companies to boost representation of people over 65 years old, and especially over 75. … Read more
Physicists in Australia have programmed a quantum computer half a world away to make, or at least simulate, a record-size time crystal—a system of quantum particles that locks into a perpetual cycle in time, somewhat akin to the repeating spatial pattern of atoms in an actual crystal. The new time crystal comprises 57 quantum particles, … Read more
Baricitinib, an oral drug that dampens an overactive immune system and is commonly used by people with rheumatoid arthritis, reduced hospitalized COVID-19 patients’ risk of dying by 13%, investigators of the world’s largest trial of coronavirus treatments announced today. Patients in the study also took other drugs, such as the steroid dexamethasone, that act on … Read more
Ukrainian employees of the U.K.-headquartered rocket company Skyrora are helping to defend the space city of Dnipro as it braces for air strikes, while the company’s Ukraine-born CEO admits that “there is nothing we can realistically do for them right now.” Volodymyr Levykyn, a Ukraine-born tech entrepreneur, spoke to Space.com on Wednesday (March 2), the … Read more
This story is part of a special package being published this week about the barriers Black physicists face and potential models for change. Read more For years, Maritza Tavarez-Brown couldn’t talk about the end of her astronomy career without tears. She’d wanted to be an astronomer since high school. But she struggled in her introductory … Read more
Gravitational waves will be mapped to unprecedented high detail when a new gravitational wave detector mission launches in 2037. This will observe black holes, neutron stars and other objects, a new study notes. The paper looks ahead to when the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) from the European Space Agency will fly into space to … Read more
The first major attempt to replicate striking evidence of the ‘cosmic dawn’—the appearance of the Universe’s first stars 180 million years after the Big Bang—has muddled the picture. Four years after radio astronomers reported finding a signature of the cosmic dawn, radio astronomer Ravi Subrahmanyan and his collaborators describe how they floated an antenna on … Read more
A troubled €300 million nuclear physics research facility in Romania may now have to do without one of its main components, a gamma ray beam designed to probe the heart of atoms. That’s because the U.S. company contracted to supply the gamma ray source may be on the verge of bankruptcy, according to sources familiar … Read more