Four researchers describe how they found different ways of responding to the planet’s biggest threat — from quitting tenure to overhauling their academic programme. It was during a car journey to California in temperatures sometimes exceeding 40 °C that Sophie Gilbert decided she needed to make a major career change. Driving to visit family from […]
science
The rise of preprints
How COVID-19 has transformed the way we publish and report on scientific research. Peer review, despite its flaws, is one of the most important pillars of the scientific process. So preprint servers, which make scientific papers that have yet to be reviewed or published available online, have been slow to catch on in many fields. […]
Canada announces new innovation agency — and it’s not modelled on DARPA
The unit will instead mimic Finnish and Israeli agencies. But some researchers worry Canada might be too big and regionalized for the scheme to succeed. The Canadian government has announced that it will invest Can$1 billion (about US$780 million) over the next five years to create a funding agency focused on innovation in science and […]
Sanctions Against Russia Are Slowing Medical Progress
Many Western nations are severing ties with Russia in response to the war in Ukraine and it is hitting the scientific community hard. Economic sanctions against Russia have forced drug manufacturers to stop recruiting patients to clinical trials and launching new studies. Therapeutic areas with an ongoing or planned clinical trial with at least one […]
Ukrainian Scientists Strain to Work as War Rages
Pavlo Bazilinskyy got out just in time. In February, the scientist was visiting family in Ukraine and recovering from a nasty case of COVID-19 before starting a new job at the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. With the threat of war looming, Bazilinskyy moved his mother from Chernihiv, a city north of the capital […]
Beauty and wonder of science boosts researchers’ well-being
Appreciating the phenomena they study helps scientists to persevere in the face of setbacks. Scientists’ ability to experience wonder, awe and beauty in their work is associated with higher levels of job satisfaction and better mental health, finds an international survey of researchers. Read more in Nature.
Taking stock of the Naylor report, 5 years on
Some say there’s been too little progress toward supporting Canadian research in fundamental science. In 2016, then science minister Kirsty Duncan convened a panel of experts to conduct a comprehensive review of Canada’s academic science and research ecosystem. Led by David Naylor, former president of the University of Toronto, it was the first such exercise […]
Sci-Hub downloads show countries where pirate paper site is most used
Researchers worldwide are accessing papers using the site — but China tops the chart, with more than 25 million downloads over the past month. Download figures for Sci-Hub, the popular but controversial website that hosts pirated copies of scientific papers, reveal where people are using the site most. The statistics show that users accessing Sci-Hub […]
Replication failures cast doubt on some cancer studies
A decade-long project that attempted to replicate experiments from several high-profile papers in the field of preclinical cancer biology has found that around half of the experiments couldn’t be replicated on most criteria. ‘This suggests the credibility of published findings in cancer biology are less certain than thought,’ said Brian Nosek, executive director of the […]
First Nations communities bring expertise to Canada’s scientific research
Researchers working with Indigenous partners are benefiting from traditional knowledge of the natural world. Investigating how an extract of the traditional medicinal plant, Sooyaiaiitsi, interacts with cancer cells helped Haley Shade to “walk in both worlds”, bridging her education within Canada’s system with her Indigenous identity. Shade, a Blackfoot woman from the Kainai First Nation […]