What do we really want to know about research? A study of academic research promotion in the 21st century: The importance of interlocking circles of the Venn diagram
“No mathematician in the history of mathematics has been better known for less”, said mathematician William DUNN of John Venn. Jack Murtagh argues that the interlocking circles of the Venn diagrams are useful when simple and provocative. As the number of circles in the diagram rises, the number of regions delineated by their intersections skyrockets, leading us into a pleasant thicket of questions about geometry and symmetry.
Researchers have identified trends in the academic-promotion criteria of nearly 250 universities and government agencies by using hundreds of policy documents. Research output was included as a criterion for promotion in almost all of the documents. However, high-income countries increasingly rely on detailed assessments of researcher quality — more so than upper-middle-income countries, in which quantitative metrics remain the gold standard. Study co-author Yensi Flores Bueso hopes this work “provides a foundation to rethink policies that foster equity, inclusivity and research integrity as fundamental pillars of our research culture”.
The technologies Nature considers to keep an eye on in the year ahead include self-driving labs, which use robotics and artificial intelligence to help ramp up speed and capacity, and CAR-T-cell therapies that attack solid tumours.
Source: Daily briefing: Cancer ‘poisons’ the immune system by giving it faulty machinery
Tracing Microplasticity in the Brain with Two-Photon Microscopy and a Mouse Study of Cancer-Infiltrating Lymphocytes
Cancer cells can sabotage immune cells that try to attack them by filling them with defective mitochondria, the organelles that cells rely on to make energy. In samples from three people with cancer, researchers noticed that mitochondria in both the tumour cells and immune cells called tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) shared the same mutations. When they grew cancer cells with fluorescent-tagged mitochondria alongside TILs, the TILs had taken on some faulty mitochondria after only 24 hours. By 15 days, their native mitochondria had been replaced almost entirely. The TILs were less likely to commit suicide because they wereinted.
The current volatility in the quantum-computing share market isn’t justified by the breakthroughs and setbacks in the field, says Global Quantum Intelligence (GQI), a company that tracks the quantum market. Share prices in several quantum-computing companies crashed this month in response to unenthusiastic comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The record highs were set by the announcements made by Google. The stock market has been overreacting to all of this, according to Doug Finke, who is the chief content officer. It is difficult to properly price quantum stock because no firm sells mature products, and no one company has really made a stab at making a useful quantum computer.
The latest study, published in Science Advances today, was done by a researcher in Beijing who wanted to understand how microplastics affect the brain. They used miniature two-photon microscopy to look at mouse brains through a transparent window after they had been implanted in the animal.
The glowing cells were observed by the researchers when they injected the plastic spheres into the mice. Smaller particles resulted in fewer obstructions.
The imaging technique can trace microplastics as they move through the bloodstream, says Eliane El Hayek, an environmental-health researcher at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. It is very interesting and helpful.
Microplastics are specks of plastic, less than 5 millimetres long, that can be found everywhere, from the deep ocean to Antarctic ice. We breathe, drink, and eat in the air and water. They can enter through plastic medical devices.