NewConcepts News

The US Supreme Court has ruled that race can no longer be considered as a factor in university admissions.

отныне католики не должны пытаться обратить евреев в христианство и заниматься миссионерством в еврейской среде. Вместо этого им предписано признать евреев носителями слова Божьего, прочувствовать их боль в связи с Катастрофой европейского еврейства и бок о бок сражаться с антисемитизмом.

Президент Обама подписал один из самых революционных биллей в новейшей мировой истории – Соединённые Штаты сняли 40-летний запрет на экспорт нефти.

Пару дней назад появилось интересное сообщение об обнаружении нового вида грибов, которые питаются исключительно бананами. Так что же, прощайте бананы? И кто в мире растений следующая жертва грибов?

Исследователи нашли огромный резервуар воды под мантией Земли, на глубине около 600 км. Его размеры настолько огромны, что этой водой можно заполнить три раза все океаны на Земле которые мы знаем.

замаранные сотрудничеством с нацистами, швейцарские банки начали активно сотрудничать с банками союзников, дав им возможность наживаться на награбленном. Это позволило «гномам» оставить себе две трети попавшего к ним нацистского золота.

Они знают точные полные имена, и у них даже есть все фотографии всего боевого расчета этого “Бука”, который сбил Боинг.

Автопроизводитель показал футуристичный электрокар Chevrolet-FNR Компания General Motors показала концептуальный автономный автомобиль будущего – Chevrolet Find New Roads (FNR) с автопилотом и электроприводом.

An experimental Ebola vaccine seems to confer total protection against infection in people who are at high risk of contracting the virus, according to the preliminary results of a trial in Guinea that were announced today and published1 in The Lancet. They are the first evidence that a vaccine protects humans from Ebola infection.

A technique for editing genes while they reside in intact chromosomes has been a real breakthrough. Literally. In 2013, Science magazine named it the runner-up for breakthrough-of-the-year, and its developers won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize. The system being honored is called CRISPR/Cas9, and it evolved as a way for bacteria to destroy viruses using RNA that matched the virus' DNA sequence. But it's turned out to be remarkably flexible, and the technique can be retargeted to any gene simply by modifying the RNA. Researchers are still figuring out new uses for the system, which means there are papers coming out nearly every week, many of them difficult to distinguish.

IF NASA PLANS to send robots to other planets, it’s going to need some new designs: ones that are easy to land, easy to move around, and easy to fix. That means they probably won’t look like a bipedal T-1000 chasing the one hope for mankind. They probably won’t even look like the four-legged galloping critters Boston Dynamics is building. Nope. Those robots will look like a hexahedral tent stripped of its fabric.

The values of two inherent properties of one photon – its spin and its orbital angular momentum – have been transferred via quantum teleportation onto another photon for the first time by physicists in China. Previous experiments have managed to teleport a single property, but scaling that up to two properties proved to be a difficult task, which has only now been achieved. The team's work is a crucial step forward in improving our understanding of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and the result could also play an important role in the development of quantum communications and quantum computers.

Ask "the invisible". They appeared in a hit list of Islamic terrorism alongside the director of Charlie Hebdo, Stephane Charbonnier, killed in his Paris'office. They are cartoonists, journalists and intellectuals involved in the publication of the cartoons. Today, most of them have become ghosts, untraceable, living in hiding, hidden in some country house, or have retired to private life to defuse the fatwa that branded them, victims of an understandable self- censorship. Yesterday, the director of the Independent, Amol Rajan, had the courage to confess that he decided not to republish the cartoons. "Too risky," wrote the journalist who heads one of the glories of the Anglo-Saxon liberal chattering classes

Macmillan have released an interesting press release, announcing that all research papers published in their 49 Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journals, including Nature, will be made free to read online, via one of Digital Science’s pet projects, ReadCube (note that Digital Science is also owned by Macmillan). These articles can be annotated in ReadCube, but not copied, printed, or downloaded. This is not open access*, and NPG have been very careful and explicit about stating this. What is the reason for this move, then, when we have a globally shifting environment towards open access? Well, academics love to break rules. We share papers freely, and often illegally, with our colleagues all the time. It’s a sort of passive rebellion against paywall-based publishers. A great example of this is #icanhazpdf on Twitter, whereby articles are requested, and then hopefully shared privately by someone else. This kind of activity is what NPG are calling ‘dark social’, like some terrible name for an evil media organisation. By this, they simply mean sharing, but out of their control. This new initiative seems to be a way of controlling, and legitimising this sort of ‘peer-to-peer’ practice.

Как заявил министр иностранных дел Канады Джон Бэрд: "Канада не будет стоять за Израилем в Организации Объединенных Наций. Мы будем стоять прямо рядом с ним. Всегда можно начать совершать правильные поступки".

Walk through the archives of any academic library and you will find dusty shelves of scientific journals dating back to the early 20th century and sometimes beyond. It’s hard to know the last time many of these volumes were opened or whether the information they contain has long been forgotten. That’s in stark contrast to the way most scientists access scientific papers today; in a matter of seconds after a straightforward web search. Never has it been so easy to look up a circuit diagram, learn about gene therapy or read the latest papers about black holes. That’s why many scientific publishers have digitised their archives to make the entire history of their publications available online and as easy to search as modern papers. That raises an interesting question—if old papers are now as easy to find as modern ones, are they having as great an impact? Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Alex Verstak and pals at Google. These guys have studied how often older articles are cited in modern papers and how this has changed since the advent of electronic publishing in the 1990s. Their conclusion is that older papers are having an increasingly important impact on modern science—that the distinction between old and new, between the historical and the modern, no longer creates a division in science.

Testing the multiverse hypothesis requires measuring whether our universe is statistically typical among the infinite variety of universes. But infinity does a number on statistics.

Alcohol is good for more than making memories—it’s also good for keeping them. (Photo by John Rowley/Digital Vision/Getty Images) Good news for cocktail lovers: Despite alcohol’s reputation as a brain-cell assassin, new research suggests that drinking daily in moderation after age 60 may actually help preserve your memory. In the study, published in the American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, the researchers tracked the alcohol intake of 664 people, assessed their cognitive functioning with a handful of tests, and performed scans of their brains. During the first phase of the study, participants’ average age was 42; by the end of the study, it was 75. What they found: Imbibing later in life — as long as it was at a light to moderate level — was associated with better episodic memory, or the ability to remember specific events, compared to abstaining. This is a significant finding, since episodic memory is the type of recall that usually disappears with dementia. “Over time, you don’t necessarily lose memory for [how to do] things, like driving or having coffee,” said study author Faika Zanjani, an associate professor of behavioral and community health at the University of Maryland. “You usually lose memory of events — memories that you have to retrieve, instead of just use. It’s not just forgetting your keys. It’s forgetting key moments in your life.”

Summary Points. Currently, many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85% of research resources are wasted. To make more published research true, practices that have improved credibility and efficiency in specific fields may be transplanted to others which would benefit from them—possibilities include the adoption of large-scale collaborative research; replication culture; registration; sharing; reproducibility practices; better statistical methods; standardization of definitions and analyses; more appropriate (usually more stringent) statistical thresholds; and improvement in study design standards, peer review, reporting and dissemination of research, and training of the scientific workforce. Selection of interventions to improve research practices requires rigorous examination and experimental testing whenever feasible. Optimal interventions need to understand and harness the motives of various stakeholders who operate in scientific research and who differ on the extent to which they are interested in promoting publishable, fundable, translatable, or profitable results. Modifications need to be made in the reward system for science, affecting the exchange rates for currencies (e.g., publications and grants) and purchased academic goods (e.g., promotion and other academic or administrative power) and introducing currencies that are better aligned with translatable and reproducible research.