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A new way of designing computer chips could be about to shake up one of the world's most secretive industries, says Matthew Sparkes

Discovery that synthetic compounds form concentrated droplets inside cells could shake up drug development — including the hunt for coronavirus treatments. Discovery that synthetic compounds form concentrated droplets inside cells could shake up drug development — including the hunt for coronavirus treatments.

Former industry scientist Neil Jacobs takes over as acting chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in a sudden switch. Former industry scientist Neil Jacobs takes over as acting chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in a sudden switch.

An experimental procedure is exposing the links between the nervous and immune systems. Could it be the start of a revolution?

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), a half-billion-dollar facility funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), hopes to revolutionize ecology by collecting an unprecedented amount of data about long-term environmental changes across North America. But as NEON prepares to begin full operations, an abrupt leadership shake-up threatens to alienate the scientists who will be using those data and, thus, are essential to its success. On 8 January, Sharon Collinge, NEON9s chief scientist and principal investigator, resigned 4 days after Battelle Memorial Institute, which manages the network, fired two senior managers without her knowledge or consent. Within hours of Collinge9s resignation, Battelle dissolved NEON9s 20-member technical advisory committee, heading off a possible mass resignation of panel members opposed to Battelle9s actions.

In the wake of China9s expressing strong support in December 2018 for Plan S, the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access to scientific literature, researchers wonder how far the plan will spread. The program has drawn support from many scientists but concerns from others, and from publishers (including AAAS, publisher of Science ). Science looks at which countries9 funders are likely to join and which aren9t, and whether Plan S is poised to shake up scientific publishing or remain a project that applies to only a small fraction of the world9s scientific papers.

'Textbook-changing' analysis of dinosaur bones upends long-accepted relationships among major groups.

Tesla is bringing us energy-sharing, with the announcement that it is building the world's largest "virtual" power plant in Australia. Last month, the government of South Australia revealed that it had hired Elon Musk's firm to fit 50,000 homes with solar panels and lithium ion batteries. The aim is to shake up the traditional model of having all houses connect to a central power station. Instead, houses that can generate power themselves will be wired up separately. The government says that by producing their own solar energy, participating households will shave 30 percent off their energy bills

Some scientists who work directly for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) joke that NIH stands for "nerds in heaven." But the main NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, and its other intramural research sites, which together house some 1200 principal investigators and 4000 postdocs, are also known as stodgy places where the scientific management, mostly white men, tends to stay in place for decades. Now, NIH is aiming to shake up the largest collection of biomedical researchers in the world by imposing term limits on midlevel leadership positions. Starting next year, the 272 lab and branch chiefs who oversee NIH9s intramural research will be limited to 12-year terms. The changes are roiling the campus.

Government's 'global challenges' fund hoovers up extra cash for developing-world problems, cutting grants elsewhere.

Emojis, smartphone technologies and revamped guidelines would boost transparency at scientific meetings, say Shai D. Silberberg and colleagues.

The power of earthquakes and volcanoes might come from below, but climate change can unleash this power

Robert J. Geller calls on Japan to stop using flawed methods for long-term forecasts and to scrap its system for trying to predict the 'Tokai earthquake'.

Study of earthquake cycles suggests a coming period of greater seismic activity in the Bay Area.

Undergraduate textbooks are going digital. Declan Butler asks how this will shake up student reading habits and the multi-billion-dollar print textbook market.

Particle accelerators that use plasma technology promise to shake up the fields of high-energy particle physics and cancer treatment. Challenges remain, but smaller, cheaper machines are within reach. Navroz Patel reports.

Some economists had hoped that physicists might shake up the rigid theories typical of mainstream economics. But so far, they're unimpressed by physicists' handling of the markets. Philip Ball reports.

Last week, physicists from CERN aimounced disappointing news: a potential new particle, set to shake up modern physics, doesn't exist. The dream had lasted almost eight months, since the ATLAS and CMS collaborations found an unexpected bump in their data last year. The detectors at the Large Hadron Collider had measured more proton pairs with a shared energy of 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), than is predicted by the standard model of particle physics. If the detection had turned out to be genuine, this could have pointed to a new particle. Theorists produced more than 500 papers on how such a find would affect our understanding of particles and forces. But data gathered this year and presented at the international Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago on 5 August confirmed that the excess was a statistical fluke, the equivalent of getting a surprise run of heads when flipping an ultimately fair coin

Labour law will change how many postdocs - long a troubled segment of the US research hierarchy - are paid.

On the twentieth anniversary of the World Wide Web's public release, Oren Etzioni calls on researchers to think outside the keyword box and improve Internet trawling.

John Shea9s stone tool studies have helped archaeologists identify how stone points were used, and he has documented the sophisticated toolmaking skills of the oldest known Homo sapiens. More recently, Shea has been doing his best to shake up human origins research with a radical proposal: That the idea of "behavioral modernity"—a term long used by scientists to describe behaviors such as the use of symbolism, art, and elaborate tools—should be thrown into the scrap heap.

The most startling thing about the latest scandal to hit social psychology isn9t the alleged violation of scientific ethics itself, scientists say, or the fact that it happened in the Netherlands, the home of fallen research star and serial fraudster Diederik Stapel, whose case shook the field to its core less than a year ago. Instead, what fascinates them most is how the new case, which led to the resignation of psychologist Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University, Rotterdam and the requested retraction of two of his papers by his school, came to light: through an unpublished statistical method to detect data fraud.

Introducing new technology can shake up a sport, but over time there are diminishing returns. What will be the next big thing to improve performance?

Olga Malinkiewicz says a change of material could shake up the way we build and use solar cells – by making them bendy

Sequenom9s 2001 patent on a method of isolating fetal DNA from a mother9s bloodstream to test for Down syndrome was thrown out by a U.S. court in San Francisco. Judge Susan Illston rested her decision in part on the recent Supreme Court ruling that natural phenomena like genes cannot be patented. Illston also wrote that Sequenom9s patented idea was not sufficiently inventive.

CAMBRIDGE, U.K.-- A group of British forensics experts is hoping to build support for an overhaul of U.K. forensic science. The reformists face a tough task, however, in convincing colleagues that the evidence they have amassed proves that the system is failing.

Deaths from earthquakes are a manmade problem says Elizabeth Hausler, who wants to shake up construction in the developing world

A blue-ribbon panel has rejected a White House suggestion that U.S. astronomy programs be consolidated within NASA. Science has learned that the panel9s report, due out next week, will instead suggest greater collaboration among federal agencies and other stakeholders as the way to preserve U.S. supremacy in the field.

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTIONThe Smithsonian Institution plans to reorganize its research activities--but it's still not quite clear how. On 7 May, Secretary Lawrence Small received a go-ahead from his governing board of regents to consolidate and streamline science at the 155-year-old institution. But one of two facilities slated to close in Small's original plan--the zoo's Conservation and Research Center--will remain open, and Small and the regents will set up a commission to advise him on how best to proceed with the rest of his reforms.

A sophisticated engineering tool called finite-element analysis is providing paleontologists with insights into how fossil skulls and other bones worked in real life. By making finite-element models of fossils and loading their material properties into a computer, researchers can calculate the compression and tension as force is applied in various ways--without risk of damage to the originals.

CLINICAL RESEARCHAllegations of lax safety procedures and flawed management in a clinical cancer trial have cost four researchers and administrators their jobs at the University of Oklahoma. They have also led to a temporary shutdown of 75 clinical trials at the university's Health Science Center in Tulsa and a sweeping overhaul of the school's process for approving human experiments. University officials emphasize that none of the roughly 100 patients involved in the 3-year-old study of an experimental cancer vaccine was known to have been harmed, and that most trials will soon be restarted.

Newsmaker InterviewIn September, the government of Shenzhen, a city in southern China, appointed physical chemist Zhu Qingshi as president of the planned South University of Science and Technology. Zhu insisted on also being appointed the university's Communist Party secretary, making it clear he would be calling the shots. In an interview with Science , Zhu explained how he intends to shake up China's university system—whether the education ministry likes it or not.