As editors of physics journals, we love reading the latest research papers, but we also love a bit of lunch-break science-related browsing. Here are some pieces that caught our eyes in October:
Nature and physics. In Physics Today, Melinda Baldwin recounts the highs and lows of physics research published in Nature over the past 150 years.
At APS News, Preprints make inroads outside of physics. “Recently, however, the tide has begun to shift. Since 2013, dozens of preprint servers in fields such as biology, chemistry, and sociology have popped up and garnered tens of thousands of submissions.”
Football’s concussion crisis is awash with pseduoscience, reports Christie Aschwanden in Wired. “Products that offer a “seatbelt” or “bubble wrap” for the brain claim to reduce head trauma. If only the laws of physics worked that way.”
Check out the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics 36th annual Gallery of Fluid Motion and an accompanying editorial explaining how winners were picked and giving some stats on which fluid dynamics phenomena get awarded the most.
Review with care. Writing in Science, Adriana L. Romero-Olivares gives good advice for when, and how, to comment as a referee on the level of written English of a scientific paper.
Athene Donald asks, What do we know about the research ecosystem? “There is a need for more understanding of the decisions that are taken where and by whom in the research ecosystem and what the implications of these decisions are as they ripple through higher education and far beyond. A new research institute – the Research on Research Institute, or RoRI for short – was launched this week at the Wellcome building (a key partner) in London , with a wealth of snappily short talks to illustrate the range of issues RoRI might elect to study.”