Search

Constructing a crystalline-amorphous hybrid structure is an effective strategy to overcome the conflict between the strength and toughness of materials. However, achieving such a material structure often involves complex, energy-intensive processing. Here, we leverage the natural wood featuring coexisting crystalline and amorphous regions to achieve superstrong and ultratough wood paper (W-paper) via a dual-phase nanostructure regulation strategy. After partially removing amorphous hemicellulose and eliminating most lignin, the treated wood can self-densify through an energy-efficient air drying, resulting in a W-paper with high tensile strength, toughness, and folding endurance. Coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations reveal the underlying deformation mechanism of the crystalline and amorphous regions inside cell walls and the failure mechanism of the W-paper under tension. Life cycle assessment reveals that W-paper shows a lower environmental impact than commercial paper and common plastics. This dual-phase nanostructure regulation based on natural wood may provide valuable insights for developing high-performance and sustainable film materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article sheds light on a concerning trend in the scientific publishing industry, where fraudulent paper mills are resorting to bribing journal editors to secure publication for questionable research papers. It mentions that the investigation reveals instances of editors, including those affiliated with reputable journals, accepting cash from paper mills in exchange for publishing papers.

Mechanically transformative electronic systems (TESs) built using gallium have emerged as an innovative class of electronics due to their ability to switch between rigid and flexible states, thus expanding the versatility of electronics. However, the challenges posed by gallium's high surface tension and low viscosity have substantially hindered manufacturability, limiting high-resolution patterning of TESs. To address this challenge, we introduce a stiffness-tunable gallium-copper composite ink capable of direct ink write printing of intricate TES circuits, offering high-resolution (~50 micrometers) patterning, high conductivity, and bidirectional soft-rigid convertibility. These features enable transformative bioelectronics with design complexity akin to traditional printed circuit boards. These TESs maintain rigidity at room temperature for easy handling but soften and conform to curvilinear tissue surfaces at body temperature, adapting to dynamic tissue deformations. The proposed ink with direct ink write printing makes TES manufacturing simple and versatile, opening possibilities in wearables, implantables, consumer electronics, and robotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the correction of a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper co-authored by chemist Chad Mirkin after a legal dispute, focusing on criticisms regarding the evidence for spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) and claims of defamation.

The article discusses a study on the occupation of Earth orbits by large constellations of satellites, with a focus on the filings with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It mentions that these filings have raised concerns about the safety and long-term sustainability of low Earth orbit (LEO) and have emphasized the need for meaningful controls on satellite constellations' growth.

The article offers information on scrutiny faced by several research articles co-authored by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Thomas Südhof, regarding data duplication, image discrepancies, and other issues. Topics include corrections and retractions made by journals for flagged papers; Südhof's denial of wrongdoing; and ongoing investigations into additional articles.

The article focuses on the detection of suspicious acronyms, termed "tortured acronyms," in scientific papers, often indicative of plagiarism or misconduct, leading to the development of automated tools by researchers for identifying such anomalies, which have been integrated into existing systems like the Problematic Paper Screener (PPS) to aid publishers in screening submissions and uncovering potential instances of deception or unethical practices in academic publishing.

The article focuses on the retraction of a paper on cancer microbiome research, published in 2020 in the journal "Nature" that claims of identifying microbial signatures of different human cancers.

The article focuses on Nature retracting a highly cited 2002 paper on adult stem cells due to allegations of duplicated data, raising concerns about scientific integrity and transparency.

The article focuses on a news investigation revealing over 900 medical studies published since 1996 with authors having financial ties to tobacco companies, including 27 papers appearing in journals, most notably from MDPI, that explicitly prohibit authors with such connections.

The article discusses controlling the duration information lasts on paper so that disappears as desired has crucial for information security. Topics include the information duration on the rewritable paper coated with the title compounds has easily tuned by changing the cation of the compounds; and the fidelity of the information visualization has additionally be used as a time stamp, and a missing anti-counterfeiting label signals.

The article presents a study which explores how wearable plasmonic paper–based microfluidics for continuous sweat analysis. It mentions that wearable sweat sensors have the potential to provide clinically meaningful information associated with the health and disease states of individuals. It discusses that welld-defined flow characteristics of paper microfluidic devices enable accurate quantification of sweat loss and sweat rate.

This document, published in Science Advances, discusses the challenges of multidisciplinary research in the field of neuroscience. The author emphasizes the importance of drawing on various disciplines to understand the mind and brain. However, the review process can be challenging due to different norms, philosophies, and standards of assessment in different fields. The author suggests tools such as cross-review and involving authors in the editorial process to address these challenges. The document also highlights the importance of collaboration across disciplines in advancing neuroscience knowledge. [Extracted from the article]

NEWS When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was "shocked" by what it found. They have "a huge conflict of interest" regarding paper mills, says Jennifer Byrne of the University of Sydney, who has studied how paper mills have doctored cancer genetics data. [Extracted from the article]

The article flags over 100 papers for concern, linked to ethical violations by French microbiologist Didier Raoult and his team, including an illegal clinical trial on hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 patients.

The article reports that paleontologist Robert DePalma has been accused of fabricating data so he could scoop her on a high-profile study by paleontologist Melanie During. It informs that During's study concluded that the asteroid that ended the dinosaur era 65 million years ago struck Earth when it was spring in the Northern Hemisphere.

The article focuses on the challenges faced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, like Elicit and Scim, designed to assist scientists in navigating the overwhelming volume of published papers, with technical and legal barriers hindering widespread adoption. Topics discussed include the limitations of generative systems, the issue of papers behind paywalls, and the necessity for sustainable business models in the evolving landscape of AI tools for literature navigation.

The article highlights a Chinese team's discovery of a bacterium within mosquitoes' guts that inhibits dengue and Zika viruses, potentially aiding disease control efforts. Topics include the bacterium's efficacy in disrupting viral transmission, the significance amidst rising mosquito resistance to insecticides, and ongoing research to assess its real-world impact alongside existing control measures.

The article discusses possible image misconduct in eight cancer papers co-authored by Italy's Health Minister, Orazio Schillaci, between 2018 and 2022, with duplications found in the images, questions raised about their intent, and concerns about the accuracy of experimental findings from his lab.

The article offers information on the retraction of papers from a genetics journal due to concerns about informed consent for study participants, particularly from ethnic minorities in China.

The article focuses on a study which found that open-access articles attract more citations from scholars in a wider range of locations, institutions, and disciplines than paywalled papers.

The article focuses on the delayed response of scientific journals to retract almost 300 papers by Japanese physicians, Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, containing signs of fabrication and ethical lapses, revealing challenges in the scientific publishing system, including slow retractions, lack of transparency, and the deferment to institutional investigations.

Advances in synthetic biology have led to an arsenal of proof-of-principle bacterial circuits that can be leveraged for applications ranging from therapeutics to bioproduction. A unifying challenge for most applications is the presence of selective pressures that lead to high mutation rates for engineered bacteria. A common strategy is to develop cloning technologies aimed at increasing the fixation time for deleterious mutations in single cells. We adopt a complementary approach that is guided by ecological interactions, whereby cyclical population control is engineered to stabilize the functionality of intracellular gene circuits. Three strains of Escherichia coli were designed such that each strain could kill or be killed by one of the other two strains. The resulting “rock-paper-scissors” dynamic demonstrates rapid cycling of strains in microfluidic devices and leads to an increase in the stability of gene circuit functionality in cell culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how combination of hierarchical structure comprising mechanical and optical function inspire technological classes of devices and interfaces based on robust, light, and spectrally responsive natural substrates. It mentions the strategies for coloration devoid of inorganic pigments.

The article offers information on role of Graduate Record Examinations (GREs) to help predict whether physics graduate students will get Ph.D. Topics include use of collider-like stratification bias, variance inflation by collinearity and range restriction, and omission of parts of a needed correlation matrix in analyses; need for randomized trials to evaluating how well students admitted by different criteria; and information on predictors that involves percentile ranks of GRE scores.

PUBLISHING | Describing uncertainty in findings and conclusions is considered a hallmark of carefully prepared scientific papers, but the frequency of such hedges has fallen over the past 2 decades - perhaps because of pressure to publish, a study asserts. In one of the largest studies of its kind, a research team looked for words conveying doubt and uncertainty - such as "might", "could", "appear to", "probably", "approximately", and "seem" - in research articles published from 1997 to 2021 in Science, which the team chose because it publishes articles from multiple disciplines. The frequency of hedges dropped by close to half, from 115.8 instances per 10,000 words in 1997 to 67.42 per 10,000 words in 2021. [Extracted from the article]

This paper shows that stacked sheets of paper preincubated with different biological reagents and skiving them into uniform test paper sheets allow mass manufacturing of multiplexed immunoassay devices and simultaneous detection of multiplex targets that can be read out by a barcode scanner. The thickness of one sheet of paper can form the width of a module for the barcode; when stacked, these sheets of paper can form a series of barcodes representing the targets, depending on the color contrast provided by a colored precipitate of an immunoassay. The uniform thickness of sheets of paper allows high-quality signal readout. The manufacturing method allows highly efficient fabrication of the materials and substrates for a straightforward assay of targets that range from drugs of abuse to biomarkers of blood-transmitted infections. In addition, as a novel alternative to the conventional point-of-care testing method, the paper-based barcode assay system can provide highly efficient, accurate, and objective diagnoses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the announcement by the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden that by the end of 2025, federal agencies must make papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed manuscript is published by a journal. Topics include the effort by officials to work out details of the policy, reaction from Heather Joseph of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, and the impact of the policy.

The article informs that many biologists have started to share their unreviewed papers by endorsements of preprint publishing from high-profile scientists, as well as launch of the nonprofit bioRxiv by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York in 2013. Topics discussed include increase in biology preprints, how polished a preprint need to be for publication and how preprints have catalyzed collaboration.

The article discusses that the nonprofit publisher Company of Biologists will plant a tree for each peer review and each paper it publishes to acknowledge the contributions of authors and peer reviewers and impart environmental education.

The article offers news brief on topic including Matthew Schrag confronts a mentor after their joint work is flagged on the PubPeer website.

Engineered biomaterials are materials specifically designed to interact with biological systems for biomedical applications. This paper offers the comprehensive analysis of global clinical trial trends involving such materials. We surveyed 834 studies in the ClinicalTrials.gov database and explored biomaterial types, their initiation points, and durations in clinical trials. Predominantly, synthetic and natural polymers, particularly silicone and collagen, are used. Trials, focusing on ophthalmology, dentistry, and vascular medicine, are primarily conducted in the United States, Canada, and Italy. These trials encompass a broad demographic, and trials enrolled fewer than 100 participants. The study duration varied ranging from 0.5 to 4.5 years. These biomaterials are mainly bioresorbable or bioinert, with the integration of cells in biomaterials remaining an underexplored area. Our findings shed light on current practices and future potentials of engineered biomaterials in clinical research, offering insights for advancing this dynamic field globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integral membrane proteins (IMPs) constitute a large fraction of organismal proteomes, playing fundamental roles in physiology and disease. Despite their importance, the mechanisms underlying dynamic features of IMPs, such as anomalous diffusion, protein-protein interactions, and protein clustering, remain largely unknown due to the high complexity of cell membrane environments. Available methods for in vitro studies are insufficient to study IMP dynamics systematically. This publication introduces the freestanding bilayer microscope (FBM), which combines the advantages of freestanding bilayers with single-particle tracking. The FBM, based on planar lipid bilayers, enables the study of IMP dynamics with single-molecule resolution and unconstrained diffusion. This paper benchmarks the FBM against total internal reflection fluorescence imaging on supported bilayers and is used here to estimate ion channel open probability and to examine the diffusion behavior of an ion channel in phase-separated bilayers. The FBM emerges as a powerful tool to examine membrane protein/lipid organization and dynamics to understand cell membrane processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs that a study published in October 4, 2022 issue of "JAMA Open Network" reveals that retracted papers about COVID-19 have been pulled from journals faster than those on other topics.

The article reports on the announcement by the journal "BMC Medicine" in September 2022 that it will not retract a controversial 2013 paper by botanist Steven Newmaster of the University of Guelph questioning the purity of herbal remedies.

The article reports on a study which indicates that reviewers of papers tend to recommend acceptance if the author is famous in science. It discusses the Matthew effect, which describes how high-status researchers, or those who already have many citations and grants, tend to get disproportionately more of the same. It explains the steps taken by the researchers to avoid bias in their own study.

The article offers information on the genetics papers. Topics include male genetic landscape of China, a set of almost 38,000 Y-STR sequences, Y-STR stands for Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat polymorphism, bits of repetitive DNA often used in forensic investigations, Springer Nature, launched an investigation, consent problems in China and the potential for abuse of the data, the Charité University Hospital in Berlin fired for hosting the genetic database used in several papers.

The article reports that researchers suspect paper mill in which papers contain questionable Western blot and flow cytometry images and similar keywords, titles, and layout according to microbiologist Elisabeth Bik.

The article focuses on aim to transform how scientists share research results launched a new experiment. Topics include considered eLife is a nonprofit, selective, online as only journal that focuses on the life and medical sciences which announced it will cease accepting or rejecting manuscripts for publication instead offers only peer reviews of manuscripts.

The article presents the discussion on administrators of arXiv, a preprint server used by many physicists recently refusing to post several papers from opposing sides of a debate over claims of room temperature superconductivity.

The article discuses that LGBTQ scientists who don't disclose their sexual orientation in the workplace publish fewer papers than their peers.

The article discusses the Committee on Publication Ethics, that encourages members to publish critiques. Among the majority that do run critical letters, commentaries, or online comments, many impose deadlines and limit length.

Machine learning (ML) methods are proliferating in scientific research. However, the adoption of these methods has been accompanied by failures of validity, reproducibility, and generalizability. These failures can hinder scientific progress, lead to false consensus around invalid claims, and undermine the credibility of ML-based science. ML methods are often applied and fail in similar ways across disciplines. Motivated by this observation, our goal is to provide clear recommendations for conducting and reporting ML-based science. Drawing from an extensive review of past literature, we present the REFORMS checklist (recommendations for machine-learning-based science). It consists of 32 questions and a paired set of guidelines. REFORMS was developed on the basis of a consensus of 19 researchers across computer science, data science, mathematics, social sciences, and biomedical sciences. REFORMS can serve as a resource for researchers when designing and implementing a study, for referees when reviewing papers, and for journals when enforcing standards for transparency and reproducibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fluidic logic circuits simplify system design for soft robotics by eliminating bulky components while enabling operation in a range of hostile environments that are incompatible with electronics but at the expense of limited computational capabilities and response times on the order of seconds. This paper presents a four-terminal fluidic transistor optimized for fast switching times, reduced component count, low unit cost, and high reproducibility to achieve complex fluidic control circuits while maintaining flow rates of liters per minute. A ring oscillator using three fluidic transistors achieves oscillation frequencies up to a kilohertz with full signal propagation, tolerating billions of cycles without failure. Fundamental processor circuits like a full adder and a 3-bit analog-to-digital converter require just seven transistors each. A decode circuit drives a high-resolution soft haptic display with refresh times below the human perception threshold for latency, and an electronics-free control circuit performs closed-loop position control of a pneumatic actuator with disturbance rejection, demonstrating the value across domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a high-resolution isotopic study of medieval horse mobility, revealing their origins and in-life mobility both regionally and internationally. The animals were found in an unusual horse cemetery site found within the City of Westminster, London, England. Enamel strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotope analysis of 15 individuals provides information about likely place of birth, diet, and mobility during the first approximately 5 years of life. Results show that at least seven horses originated outside of Britain in relatively cold climates, potentially in Scandinavia or the Western Alps. Ancient DNA sexing data indicate no consistent sex-specific mobility patterning, although three of the five females came from exceptionally highly radiogenic regions. Another female with low mobility is suggested to be a sedentary broodmare. Our results provide direct and unprecedented evidence for a variety of horse movement and trading practices in the Middle Ages and highlight the importance of international trade in securing high-quality horses for medieval London elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the COVID-19 pandemic affected science and tourism activities and their governance in the Antarctic and Southern Ocean. The pandemic reduced the ability of Antarctic Treaty Parties to make decisions on policy issues and placed a considerable burden on researchers. Tourism was effectively suspended during the 2020-2021 Antarctic season and heavily reduced in 2021-2022 but rebounded to record levels in 2022-2023. The pandemic stimulated reflection on practices to facilitate dialog, especially through online events. Opportunities arose to integrate innovations developed during the pandemic more permanently into Antarctic practices, in relation to open science, reducing operational greenhouse gas footprints and barriers of access to Antarctic research and facilitating data sharing. However, as well as the long-term impacts arising directly from the pandemic, an assemblage of major geopolitical drivers are also in play and, combined, these signal a considerable weakening of Antarctic exceptionalism in the early Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on the risks of keeping schools open with few precautions during Covid-19.

The article reports that the journals "Transplantation," and 'PLOS ONE," have retracted a total of 15 papers on studies involving transplanted organs in recent weeks. The author informs that the journals have taken such action because editors concluded they may have come from executed Chinese prisoners. It states that China banned the use of prisoner organs for transplantation only in 2015.