ScienceGeist

Elena Álvarez-Buylla will become the director of the National Council of Science and Technology in Mexico. While many scientists are delighted that she'll be the first woman to do so, critics worry about her opposition to genetically modified maize, which could spoil the country's astonishing agricultural biodiversity.

“I shouldn't have defined myself based on my publication record.”

The Riemann hypothesis, a formula related to the distribution of prime numbers, has remained unsolved for more than a century.

Almost 90% of academic clinical trials are not reported promptly to European registry.

For first time in decades, lawmakers finish measure before new fiscal year begins.

Agency reminds researchers to report foreign ties, keep peer reviews confidential.

John "Iain" Glen, inventor of propofol, among four Lasker Award winners.

Observation confirms, yet again, a prediction of physicists' standard model.

Colleagues urge UCI to acknowledge the possibility that its sanctions against Professor Ayala were enacted in haste and to reopen the case and investigate the matter more thoroughly.

A survey suggests U.S. government scientists views are hard to pigeonhole and fall short of documenting widespread unhappiness with the Trump administration.

Tweeting can help science outreach, but may take persistence.

An ambitious project that set out nearly 5 years ago to replicate experiments from 50 high-impact cancer biology papers, but gradually shrank that number, now expects to complete just 18 studies.

Under the current slate of legislation, moderate increases would allow agency research dollars to continue their recent growth.

After her postdoc, this scientist built an editing business while traveling the world.

New IBM system shows off argumentation skills.

Steven Cowley takes over Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory on 1 July.

Response to a proposed rule announced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a 24 April 2018 press release.

Opinion pieces challenges the dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutually exclusive.

Countries that are generally more egalitarian, or that have institutions more conductive to equality, have a lower gender performance gap in math, suggesting that this gap is partly shaped by more general societal inequalities.

Customers question whether paid articles in digital magazines are worth the money.

Fake news has a long history, but there are new unanswered scientific questions raised by the proliferation of its most recent, politically oriented incarnation.

A new algorithm is trying to automate the process of identifying gang crimes. But some scientists warn that far from reducing gang violence, the program could do the opposite by eroding trust in communities, or it could brand innocent people as gang members.

By engaging in efforts to help normalize pregnancy, lactation, and child care, we can come closer to creating a culture of equity and inclusion that benefits everyone.

How many scientific papers drop into the void, never to be cited by anyone, ever again? There are all sorts of estimates floating around, many of them rather worryingly high, but this look at the situation by Nature suggests that things aren't so bad.