News 2019

Co-authoring a research paper with an established scientist early in an academic's career leads to significant future benefits for the junior researcher, finds a paper by UCL. This effect is much stronger for early-career researchers affiliated with less prestigious institutions, who are statistically less likely later in their careers to reach the same levels those at the most prestigious institutions will.

A study from the University of Minnesota, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that conscientiousness - a family of personality traits that combines being disciplined, focused, tenacious, organized and responsible - is the personality trait that best predicts work-related success across the board in life.

Women and men experience a 'large divergence' in their career paths in the years following childbirth, according to a study following more than 3,500 new parents. Only 27.8 per cent of women are in full-time work or self-employed three years after childbirth, compared to 90 per cent of new fathers.

Industry funders can go to great lengths to suppress the findings of academic research when it's not favourable to the company, Professor Lisa Bero writes. Over the last two decades, industry funding for medical research has increased globally, while government and non-profit funding has decreased. By 2011, industry funding, compared to public sources, accounted for two-thirds of medical research worldwide.

The terms and conditions of your employment - including your pay, hours, schedule flexibility and job security - influence your overall health as well as your risk of being injured on the job, according to new research from the University of Washington. The analysis takes a comprehensive approach to show that the overall pattern of employment conditions is important for health, beyond any single measure of employment, such as wages or contract type.

Whether you noticed or not, you are receiving and creating countless data in your everyday life, sometimes merely by sending messages and browsing items on a shopping site. Many fields, such as medicine and entertainment are data-rich, which drives researchers to find new ways to capture and analyze this rapidly increasing information.

Deaths of prominent life scientists tend to be followed by a surge in highly cited research by newcomers. Listen A study by Prof. Pierre Azoulay finds that the death of star scientists can benefit their fields of research by opening the door for an influx of new ideas and contributors, reports Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed .

A new study from the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab found that new refugees were more likely to find work within their first five years if officials assigned them to an area with a larger community of people who share their nationality, ethnicity or language. Ethnic enclaves are often viewed as a negative for the integration of immigrants with natives in their new country.

The University of Bern and the Diabetes Center Berne (DCB) are together creating four professorships in the field of diabetes technology research and development. This will boost the international profile of diabetes research in Bern and strengthen its role as a center of medicine in the long term. The four professorships are to be financed with 417,000 Swiss francs per annum each over a period of 12 years.

It seems that new scientific institutions and research projects are all about "interdisciplinarity". Is it all hype? It is not all hype, not at all. We are increasingly encountering issues that cannot be resolved using the methods of any one discipline. As a matter of fact, interdisciplinarity was already enabling major leaps forward even before it was intentionally promoted: After the Second World War, several physicists transferred to biology in the wake of the atomic bomb shock.

Being a woman has a negative association with academic rank, a study led by Cardiff University researchers has shown. A total of 2,270 academics from the 24 Russell Group universities, across all fields of knowledge, were surveyed for the research. They were asked a wide range of questions about their academic credentials, research productivity, working conditions and duties, socio-demographic characteristics and family circumstances - such as number of children and responsibility for their care.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham have received a grant worth over £275,000 from leading men's health charity, Prostate Cancer UK. Their aim is to help develop a new test to accurately show how aggressive someone's prostate cancer is, in order to help doctors identify the best treatment for each individual man.

Workplace wellness programs have been touted as a powerful tool that can make employees healthier and more productive while reducing health care spending, but the results of a new study suggest such interventions yield less-than-impressive results. The findings by University of Chicago and Harvard University scholars, published April 16 in the Journal of the American Medical Association , raise questions about the effectiveness of such programs offered by 80 percent of large U.S. employers in the $8 billion workplace wellness industry.

The Event Horizon Telescope -a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration-was designed to capture images of a black hole. On April 10, in coordinated news conferences across the globe, researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

The Event Horizon Telescope -a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration-was designed to capture images of a black hole. On April 10, in coordinated news conferences across the globe, researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

Examinations of National Institutes of Health grants in the last 15 years have shown that white scientists are more likely to be successful in securing funding from the agency than their black peers. A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that bias is unlikely to play out in the initial phase of the process NIH uses to review applications for the billions of federal grant dollars it apportions annually to biology and behavior research, even though the reviewers at that early stage in the process are aware of each grant applicant's identity.

A study has found that even young adults who do not yet have children are influenced by traditional concepts of family. At the same time, they have modern views of equality, career engagement and childcare. The result is a dilemma that affects not only young women, but also young men early in adulthood.

Carnegie Mellon University's Baruch Fischhoff says the key to communicating scientific research is simple: Collaborate. "Communicating science effectively can require an unnatural act: collaboration among experts from professional communities with different norms and practices,” wrote Fischhoff in his paper " Evaluating science communication ,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.