Some things in science are worth waiting for. Sometime towards the end of this year, one of the rarest events in science is expected to occur. In a display case in the lobby of the physics department at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, a small drop of black tar distillate known as pitch […]
Materials Today
On the record
The open science movement is just the latest development in the long history of scholarly communication. The essence of science has always been communication. Nothing gets entered into the scientific record until it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal so that it can be explained to the scientific community at large, allowing them to […]
Brace for impact
With public finances tight, governments around the world are demanding a return on their investment in science. Researchers should get used to it. When the financial crisis hit in 2008 it became clear that the good times of the previous decade were not going to last. Researchers, who had gotten used to 10 years of […]
Open Sesame
A synchrotron under construction in the Middle East brings hope for both science and peace. “It’s like a parallel universe,” says Eliezer Rabinovici, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, of the complex of buildings in the Jordanian desert near Amman. Rabinovici is a string theorist, so he knows […]
Industry and academics square off over future of Framework
The negotiations on Framework 8, the EU’s research funding programme scheduled to begin in 2014, are now well and truly underway. With the mid-term review of Framework 7 now out of the way, attention will quickly turn to its successor. The European Commission will present its first communication on Framework 8 in early 2011, and […]
What to expect from the coalition
In May, UK voters decided not to give any one political party an absolute majority in the House of Commons. The result was the country’s first coalition government in 70 years, an unlikely pairing of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Read more in Materials Today.