Female animals and women have been ignored or actively excluded in clinical and laboratory-based biomedical research since such research began. This was especially true until the US Congress passed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Revitalization Act in 1993, which directed the NIH to establish guidelines on the inclusion of women and members of under-represented … Read more
Over the past decade, intense and polarizing debates about transgender rights and women’s bodies have escalated worldwide — from politicians being grilled on the definition of a woman to scientific journals being critiqued for the language they use in discussions of women’s health. Meanwhile, studies have accumulated showing that the impacts of sex and gender … Read more
Apple has poached dozens of artificial intelligence experts from Google and created a “secretive European laboratory” in Zurich to house a new team of staff tasked with building new AI models and products, according to a paywalled Financial Times report. Based on an analysis of LinkedIn profiles conducted by FT, Apple has recruited at least … Read more
RedacTek’s tool alerts users to PubPeer discussions, and indicates when a study, or the papers that it cites, has been retracted.Credit: deepblue4you/Getty A free online tool released earlier this month alerts researchers when a paper cites studies that are mentioned on the website PubPeer, a forum scientists often use to raise integrity concerns surrounding published … Read more
A NATO research vessel conducting studies of marine mammals in the Mediterranean Sea (pictured in 2009).Credit: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Kristen Allen via Mil image/Alamy Science has been essential to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the political and military alliance founded 75 years ago this month. The 32-country alliance is admitting more … Read more
Hulda Jónsdóttir wears inflatable protective suits like these to study lethal viruses.Credit: Spiez Laboratory Virologist Hulda Jónsdóttir studies some of the world’s most pathogenic viruses at the Spiez Laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland. For her, highly pathogenic viruses are more often a source of curiosity than of concern. Jónsdóttir, who runs a research group at the … Read more
Policymakers often work behind closed doors — but the documents they produce offer clues about the research that influences them.Credit: Stefan Rousseau/Getty When David Autor co-wrote a paper on how computerization affects job skill demands more than 20 years ago, a journal took 18 months to consider it — only to reject it after review. … Read more
In Unrooted, botanist Erin Zimmerman shares her struggle to balance research and family.Credit: Kenneth Wurdack Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save An Old Science Erin Zimmerman Melville House (2024) Nineteenth-century English suffragist Lydia Ernestine Becker, a lifelong advocate for women’s right to vote, was also an accomplished botanist who discovered a peculiar hermaphrodite … Read more
Podcasts and radio appearance can disseminate your science and raise your profile.Credit: Mixetto/Getty Eighteen months ago, I had zero media experience. I’m a physical-activity researcher in the school of Allied Health and Human Performance at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. In the three years since completing my PhD, I hadn’t written articles for … Read more
The way that users get information from the web has evolved over the years. People used to rely on news sites and Google to keep abreast of what was going on in the world, but then Twitter arrived and cemented itself as an alternative (and often inaccurate) source of news. Although it’s facing the threat … Read more