If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want …
Last August I wrote an article about a controversy involving MIT’s prestigious Clean Energy Prize. The winning team for 2011, CoolChip, had publicly implied that they had developed the technology featured in their entry, when in fact it was developed by a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories (who, by the way, had no idea CoolChip was submitting his invention in the contest). After the article was published, the chancellor of MIT, Eric L. Grimson, began an investigation, the results of which have now been released.
The short version: CoolChip did not break the rules of the contest.
The long version is a little less positive. The investigation found that CoolChip was “misleading in some of its public presentations of its business plan and associated technology.” It also found that the Clean Energy Prize’s rules needed to be clarified and that the university should make sure…
The swallows will still come back to Capistrano, albatrosses will wing their way across vast oceans, and homing pigeons will still arrive at home. But scientists are no longer sure how they do it.
Until last week, some thought they had a pretty good idea. Birds had both a magnetic compass and a map that they followed over impossibly long distances. But research published in the latest issue of Natureshows that map-sensing cells that were supposedly built into a bird’s beak don’t really exist. The cells that researchers thought were there are actually of a completely different kind.
“They are immune cells called macrophages, and not neurons that communicate with the brain,” says David Keays, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Molecular Pathology, in Vienna, and lead author of the new paper. “They can’t detect magnetic fields.”
There’s a whole lot of cheating going on. More than 60 percent of college undergraduates, and more than 40 percent of graduate students, admit to cheating in some way on their written work, according to a national survey by Clemson University’s International Center for Academic Integrity. Now one graduate student has come up with a reason for all this: income inequality.
Lukas Neville, a doctoral student at Queen’s University in Ontario, reports in the latest issue of Psychological Science that there’s more evidence of academic dishonesty in U.S. states with bigger gaps between the rich and the poor. Those gaps, he speculates, erode trust among people—something that’s been found by other researchers—and less trust means more cheating.
The evidence in the paper has limits. For starters, it’s circumstantial, based on the frequency of Google searches for things that seem…
Rafe Sagarin trained as a marine ecologist but was working as a science adviser for a member of Congress when Washington began to take on strange traits.
It was 2002, and as Sagarin walked the sidewalks and Congressional corridors in the post-9/11 city, he saw it sprout uniformed police officers, Jersey barriers, and metal detectors. Mail arrived late after being screened for bombs and anthrax, and chemical masks were stored under desks. He saw Washington as an ecosystem, not that different from the tidal pools he had studied near Monterey, Calif.
“Frankly, I was becoming quite alarmed at what I was seeing,” says Sagarin, now an assistant research scientist at the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment. What bothered him was not the heightened security, but the…
Though not from a gorilla, the new fossils fit into an outline of a gorilla foot
Standing and striding on two feet has long been viewed as a hallmark of humanity. One of the strongest claims for Lucy, the famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton, as a direct human ancestor was that her feet and hips looked decidedly bipedal. But today scientists announced evidence for another forerunner, living at the same time as Lucy’s species, that spent most of its time in trees but also could walk.
The new fossil, a fragment of a right foot, bolsters the notion that before our genus, Homo, stepped from the mists of antiquity, there was a flourishing period of experimentation, as several creatures tried different ways of getting out of the trees and onto the ground. “Our evolution was not characterized by a single…
It’s not a real jellyfish, but an incredible simulation made of advanced flexible material. And it’s powered not by gas or electricity, but by the simple combination of hydrogen and oxygen. Robojelly is just a prototype now, but its developers at the University of Texas at Dallas and at Virginia Tech say in a new paper that the six-inch robot could harvest its fuel directly from the ocean and be used to monitor ecosystems. It could also be used for surveillance work; the machine was developed with U.S. Navy money.
Right now Robojelly is powered by tanks of hydrogen and oxygen. The atoms combine with a platinum catalyst to produce heat, which in turn causes the robot’s artificial muscles to contract, squeezing like a real jellyfish and propelling the mechanism through the water. Eventually the scientists think they can jettison the tanks and use hydrogen and oxygen from the water…
You might think that, for scholars who study bias and bullying, the conviction of Dharun Ravi would be a victory of sorts. After all, the jury took seriously the suffering of Tyler Clementi, Ravi’s roommate at Rutgers University who killed himself soon after he discovered that Ravi had been using a Webcam to spy on his intimate encounters with another man. In interviews after the verdict was announced, jurors seemed disturbed by Ravi’s behavior, calling it “wrong.” As one prosecutor put it: “They felt the pain of Tyler.”
But the reaction from these scholars is much more ambivalent. danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School, said in an interview that she remains “troubled by the decision to prosecute Ravi.” It’s not that she doubts that Ravi is guilty of the crimes in question, but she worries about drawing a line between his …
Why bar flies are drawn to booze. / Photo courtesy Bernt Rostad, Creative Commons license
It’s the ultimate seedy bar scene: Late in the evening, a guy makes a move on a woman sitting on the next bar stool, who turns him down. Rebuffed, he turns to the bartender and drowns his sorrows in another beer. That scene has now been played out, not in a bar, but in a modern lab at the University of California at San Francisco, and not with people but with flies.
Male fruit flies, rejected in their attempts to mate, turn to alcohol-soaked food, researchers reported today in the journal Science. Scientists think the discovery, along with evidence that the behavior seems to be driven by a small molecule in the brain, may open a window onto the self-destructive actions of alcoholics and drug addicts.
A paper by two bioethicists arguing for “after-birth abortion” has stirred up a debate, to say the least (here’s an earlier post about it). I asked Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and one of the world’s best-known philosophers, for his take. Here’s what Singer, whose own views on infanticide are controversial, wrote:
In contemporary applied ethics, the issue of the moral status of newborns and the possibility that in some circumstances infanticide can be justifiable, dates back to Michael Tooley’s article “Abortion and Infanticide” published in Philosophy and Public Affairs—perhaps the most respected journal in the field—in 1972. (The authors quite properly note this article, as well as later contributions to the discussion.) Their article doesn’t say anything remarkably new, although it does add some thoughts about the justifiability of infanticide…
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