Changes to the U.S. tax code will harm graduate student mobility and career prospects

Posted by Rebecca Wild | Categories: , , , , ,

Increased financial burden for students will harm science in the long run, says Aliyah Weinstein.

piggybank

A recent editorial in Nature described the harm that newly proposed changes to the United States tax code will have on graduate student finances. If passed, these regulations — ostensibly designed to simplify tax calculations — will eliminate benefits previously given to students. Of particular harm to graduate students and the scientific world would be the elimination of the tax-free status of tuition waivers.

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Want to write for Nature Geoscience? Tell us your Geostory

Posted by Mark Staniland | Categories:

With a little twisting, the continents fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Observations of matching rock units and fossils added to evidence that now distant continents were once linked. In 1912, Alfred Wegner proposed that instead of long-disappeared land bridges between Europe and America, the continents were instead joined, then pushed across the oceans to their present positions. This idea proved highly controversial, as did his speculation that seafloor volcanoes could be the driving force.

The evidence to support this theory did eventually come, as a byproduct of efforts to map seafloor hazards that could obstruct submarines. Working meticulously at Lamont, Marie Tharp processed sonar data to map the Atlantic Ocean. From this data, she documented a massive volcanic ridge running through the Atlantic Ocean. The identification of the Great Global Rift, published by Tharpe’s colleague Bruce Heezen in 1956, caused the lithospheric puzzle pieces to fall into place for Harry Hess, who was struggling to interpret maps of the North Pacific Sea floor. He is credited with publishing the definitive work on seafloor spreading, which in turn was finally confirmed with magnetic data by Walter Pitman in 1967.

While the 50 year time span to confirm continental drift may be a bit unusual, it nonetheless serves as a perfect example of scientists building on and refining each other’s work in the quest for scientific understanding. New projects are inspired by a hidden detail in one work, or an unanswered question in another.

Write for us. Enter our competition.

Nature Geoscience wants to hear the story of what discovery inspired your work. What intrigued you? Made you want to look deeper into a particular problem? If you are a student or early career scientist, you have the opportunity to tell us your Geostory as part of our ten year anniversary celebrations. Specifically, we want you to tell us about what paper, published in the past ten years, has inspired or guided your own research. Based on a careful assessment of the creativity and originality of the pitches we receive, we will select competition winners, and invite them to write a short, illustrated article to be published in Nature Geoscience.

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The story behind the story: Please consider my science-fiction story

Posted by Colin Sullivan |

This week’s Futures story is a conversational take on the influence of AI in the shape of Please consider my science-fiction story by David G. Blake. Regular reader will remember David’s earlier stories To my father, A kite for Sarah and Low-city life. Here he reveals a little more about his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Please consider my science-fiction story

If you’ve read Please consider my science-fiction story, then you know that it already kind of is the story behind the story. I was sitting there struggling with an opening scene, for what seemed like the millionth day in a row, and I realized that a certain slanted take on the thoughts running through my mind might end up being the more entertaining story to tell. It ended up being the story I needed to tell, too. A way to utilize my issues with writing to my advantage.

It’s also the first story I’ve ever written start to finish with someone reading over my shoulder. Not a method I would recommend on a regular basis, but it’s something I wanted to mention since I lost my friend less than two months after that day. The memory of Mason laughing behind me as I worked through this one adds a unique layer of happiness to its publication. I am beyond thrilled to share it with the rest of you.

Speaking of sharing, there’s a sequel in the works titled Grasping at straws, so you might get more of Mr Writer before you know it. Hell, I might even try for a trilogy. We’ll just have to see how that conversation goes.

There is one more thing I want to say. In his life, Mason Proudfoot spent a lot of time and energy raising money for HIV/AIDS organizations. You can read Please consider my science-fiction story free online. If you do, or even if you only read this post, please also consider donating to one of these organizations.

Thank you all for reading, and have a happy holiday season.

The 30-year-old snowman

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , ,

Snowman, 1987/2016 (multimedia), by Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

Snowman, 1987/2016 (multimedia), by Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss © the artists, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery; photo: Mary Ellen Hawkins, courtesy SFMOMA

 

Posted on behalf of Michael White

It stands there trapped in a frosty cage: a 30-year-old snowman in a state of bliss, its currant-shaped eyes peering out over a lopsided grin in a face dotted with frozen florets.

The glass-fronted aluminum cooler currently sits at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Above the sculpture, entitled simply Snowman, the understorey citizens of a redwood forest sway in the United States’ largest living wall. The tensions are inescapable: snow, a natural process, in a totemic form, in a machined box, surviving on electricity, juxtaposed against an artificial ecosystem. The installation is a brilliant encapsulation of our mixed-up global environment now — from polar melt to green cities.

Snowman was constructed in 1987 by Swiss artistic duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss for the Römerbrücke power plant in Saarbrücken, Germany. Toying with the idea that human enterprise could prolong an inherently transient existence, they crafted a technically fascinating sculpture. Its scaffolding is, as Fischli puts it, a “skinny snowman” constructed from copper. Under controlled humidity and temperature, the snowman grows and shrinks and alters itself – one day the eyes narrower, the next a different twist to the smile. The snow also alters the chamber’s microclimate; technicians adjust the dials to prevent a runaway snowman.

It’s not all fun and games and engineering. The snowman’s remarkable longevity and technical underpinnings provoke reflections on our climate, and the possibility that we too may be forced to control our own environment.

What of the Paris Agreement’s ambitious goal of keeping global warming to no more than 1.5 ⁰C? Doing so, without geoengineering, looks almost impossibly optimistic. With geoengineering, we will become the snowman, our climatic stability reliant on fiddling with dials. Only this time the outcome is uncertain and fraught with ethical dilemmas, ranging from disrupted monsoons to a rain of metallic nanoparticles.

Snowman would perish without electricity, as its intentionally obvious, preposterously long power cord reminds. Yet its built-in grin fizzes with joy. There is, after all, always the next installation. What of our own shrinking cryosphere, much of which is in rapid retreat? Technically, we can probably prevent the loss of the biggest chunks of ice, such as the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets. But I doubt that we’ll be feeling blissed-out about it.

Michael White is senior editor in physical sciences at Nature. He tweets at @MWClimateSci.

Snowman by Peter Fischli and David Weiss is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through March 2018.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Joining a new college: prepare your superpowers

Posted by Rebecca Wild | Categories: , , , , ,

Empower yourself with a creative mindset and start-up skills to adapt in a new college, says Nadia Al-Banna.

running a Growth

Congratulations on your faculty position at a newly established college! You think you know what the job entails: teaching, research, and some administrative service. As you read job advice, you wonder why so many pieces include the phrase “survival tips.” “Surviving” was your most-commonly-used word during your PhD and postdoc. Surely, there‘s no more surviving to be had in a brand new college?

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TechBlog: New tools track article buzz online

Posted by Jeffrey Perkel | Categories: ,

tumblr_nnzhi8XJhW1uv17mmo1_1280“How’s my paper doing?” It’s such a simple question, and in today’s hyperconnected world it’s relatively easy to work out who’s reading and talking about your scientific publications. But are there conversations you might be overlooking?

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TechBlog: Augmented reality makes protein structures appear

Posted by Jeffrey Perkel | Categories: ,

Augment screen shot

Allister Crow/Twitter

Update (9 Dec 2017): Allister Crow has updated his instructions to produce colored AR structures; they are available here. 

Scientific publications represent years of work. It’d be nice if somebody read them.

That’s the problem Allister Crow faced as his postdoctoral work was published in early November.

Crow, a structural biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, was part of a team, led by Vassilis Koronakis, that solved the structure of a bacterial protein called MacB, a pump protein that is involved in antibiotic resistance and toxin secretion. The paper went online November 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But how to get people — and especially those outside his immediate field — to notice?

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Confused: review, Review or review?

Posted by Iulia Georgescu |

Reviews

As a scientist you’re likely using the word ‘review’ every day. “I hope my article makes it through peer-review”, “We’re thinking of submitting to Physical Review A”, “I read a really good review of this field”, and so on. You probably gave little thought to this humble word, but interestingly it has slightly different meanings in all these examples. Why is a review article called as such, and why do we call the peers who referee our papers reviewers? And above all, why was the Physical Review called a Review in the first place, when it did not publish review articles, nor was it peer reviewed in the beginning?

I confess I only recently asked myself these questions after reading a survey. Some respondents answered the question “What is your main source of reviews in physics?” with “Physical Reviews Letters”. Yes, it makes you wonder, but the confusion is not entirely ridiculous, because most physicists are not aware of the origin of these terms.

Take peer-review, although the practice itself was thought to date back to the 17th century workings of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, more recent research suggests that it emerged in the 1830s at another Royal Society publication, the Philosophical Transactions. For many publications, including Nature, peer-review was not standard practice until well into the 20th century and Einstein’s indignation and subsequent refusal to submit to the Physical Review after the editor dared send his article to an anonymous expert shows how little scientists knew and cared about the process. The term peer-review came up in the 1960s in the medical community, not in journals, but in relation to funding applications. It stood for the review committees looking into proposals and awarding grants. The term was later adopted by other scientists and editors in the 1970s and despite criticisms it is now an important and integral part of scientific publishing in all disciplines. For a brief history of peer-review check Melinda Baldwin’s “In referees we trust?” appeared in Physics Today.

What about review articles? Their origin and naming are not entirely clear. Although the genre existed in 19th century scattered throughout various publications, including a special section of Physicalische Zeitschrift, the large reviews of the Encyklopädie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften or book series (Handbuch der Physik), Nature, Science, Journal of the Franklin Institute, there were no dedicated journals until the 1920s. The Reviews of Modern Physics (1929) likely followed the model of Chemical Reviews (1924), or the earlier Physiological Reviews (1921).

“I think that the history of the review article as a genre still needs to be written. In doing so, one should ask when and how review articles became a different genre with respect to handbooks and textbooks as well as whether and to what extent the creation of journals completely dedicated to review articles were important to establish the genre itself.” Says Roberto Lalli, historian of science at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

The use of the plural in journal titles signals that the publications are dedicated to review-type articles. The plural meaning is quite clear, but the singular stands for something else. Back to why the Physical Review got its name, the journal was established in 1893 by Cornell University and was originally called The Physical Review: a Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics. J. Gould Schurman was then the president of Cornell University, and coincidentally, or not, he was the editor of two other journals: the Philosophical Review and School Review. The word review almost certainly comes from the French revue, with its Latin-language equivalents rivista (Italian) or revista (Spanish). It was a popular name for periodicals towards the end of the 19th century.

“The word ‘review’ often indicated a periodical with long, intellectually weighty articles.” Says Melinda Baldwin, historian of science and Books Editor at Physics Today.

Physicists are perhaps more prone to confusion around the word review because of the numerous journal titles containing the word: the Physical Review … titles, Annual Reviews of …, Living Reviews in …, Review of Scientific Instruments and so on. But Surface Review and Letters (yes Review not Reviews) probably wins a prize for the most misleading journal title, as it seems to be an exception to everything mentioned before. It leaves the reader wondering what Review could mean in this context. As for Letters, that is another abused term whose story I wrote about a while back.

 

Powerlifting to a PhD

Posted by Rebecca Wild | Categories: , ,

One in three graduate students are at risk of developing a common psychiatric disorder, and half of graduate students will experience psychological distress. Here’s how Rachel Frisbie helps manage the stress of graduate school.

rachel_deadlift

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Rocket woman

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , ,

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The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle of the Indian Space Research Organisation, which carried the Mars Orbiter Mission satellite Mangalyaan. The payload included instruments developed by Dutta and her team.

ISRO

3Q: Moumita Dutta

A physicist at the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Space Applications Centre, Moumita Dutta was part of the team that put a probe into Mars orbit in 2014. The instruments they designed for the Mangalyaan are still beaming back data. Now India is gearing up for its third planetary mission in 2018 — Chandrayaan-2, a return to the Moon. As Dutta prepares to take part in the London Science Museum’s Illuminating India events, she talks about the lure of optics, the challenge of crafting super-light sensors, and the rise in Indian women entering space science.  

Tell me about your work with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Moumitta Dutta.

Moumitta Dutta.

In my childhood I had dreamed about space, aliens, the Universe, the stars – particularly the aliens! But I didn’t think I would be involved in space science. I became interested in physics when I saw the magnificent colours coming out of a prism in an experiment at school. I ended up doing a master’s in applied physics, specialising in optics. Then one morning in 2004 I read in the local newspaper that India was preparing for its first lunar mission, and I thought ‘What a phenomenal thing’. From that moment on I wanted to join the ISRO. A year and a half later, I did, ending up working on two sensors that would fly on the Chandrayaan-1 project [India’s first lunar mission, which launched in 2008 and found evidence of water before losing contact with Earth.] My base is the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, mainly working on optical sensors for studying Earth and for planetary missions. For India’s 2018 lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, we will use advanced versions of the sensors flown in the last mission, carrying out a very detailed study of the lunar surface and mineralogical mapping. There will be an orbiter, a lander and a rover, with mounted instruments to carry out experiments on the surface.

Mangalyaan launched just 18 months from its conception, costing a relatively low US$75 million.  What challenges did you face in building its sensors? 

All the sensors were designed in India: a colour camera, an infrared spectrometer generating a thermal map of the Martian surface and a methane sensor. We had 15 months or so to develop them. The main challenge was to make them very compact, lightweight and low-power, because the mission was to be launched with minimum fuel. We fought for every gram. The sensors were all first of a kind, and to develop them quickly we had to use off-the-shelf — rather than space-qualified — components, then test each under extreme conditions. The team of almost 500 engineers working  across the centres on the mission worked day and night. I feel like people worked from their heart and no one cared about the clock. The mindset was that they were working for our country, and the mission had to be successful. When we received the first signal after the spacecraft was captured into Mars orbit, a wave of joy spread across the country. The project team members became the superstars of India, with people even holding their pictures on placards, like film stars. Eagerness about Indian space research has rocketed. Three years on, the orbiter still transmits data from all the sensors, which we are analysing today.

Methane sensor for Mars.

Methane sensor for Mangalyaan.

Space Application Centre, ISRO

Mars colour camera.

Colour camera for Mangalyaan.

Space Application Centre, ISRO

Is space science in India welcoming women?

In the past few years we have seen a significant increase in the number of women joining Indian space science: right now, they constitute 20% or 25% of ISRO. The organisation is always ready to welcome women. As a government body, we get a minimum of six months’ maternity leave, for example, and women are given equal responsibilities. I feel like it’s not about whether someone is a man or woman, it is all about how they can handle the challenges. Now, whenever I give a talk and a small girl comes up to me and says, “I want to work for ISRO, I want to be an astronaut,” I feel wonderful. Women scientists of ISRO have also featured in the media, including Vogue India; and when our work is recognised, we represent the contributions of all the women involved.  That is the best part of it.

Interview by Elizabeth Gibney, a senior reporter for Nature based in London. This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

Dutta will be appear in conversation with space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock at the London Science Museum’s Lates: Illuminating India on 29 November.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.