I wish the academy would incentivise scholars to improve society, not chase citations. I want us to reimagine a PhD that is designed not to win kudos within the academic community, but rather aimed at discovering something new that will be useful for practitioners and have real social impact.
Too much research is aimed at insular academic circles rather than the real world. Let’s fix this broken system.
Julian Kirchherr
Researchers discover new type of lung cell.
A new rumor has suggested that NVIDIA will be using the new GeForce RTX branding on their upcoming GeForce 20 series graphics card lineup.
Thirteen companies, including Boeing and Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, will be doing studies for NASA on the future of commercial human spaceflight in low Earth orbit.
All of the studies are due in December, and are supposed to cost no more than $1 million each. NASA still has to negotiate the contract amounts with the study groups, but it expects the total cost of the effort to come in at around $11 million.
Watch this preview of the Perseid Meteror shower that’ll blaze through the sky this weekend.
The fusion of a sperm cell with an egg cell is the very first step in the process that leads to new individuals in sexually reproducing species. Fundamental as this process may be, scientists are only now beginning to understand the complexities of how it works.
In a paper published in PLOS Biology, researchers have described the detailed structure of proteins that enable sperm-egg fusion in two different species: a flowering plant and a protozoan. The researchers hope that revealing the process in these species and their relatives might bring scientists a step closer to understanding it across sexual species, including humans and other vertebrates.
“It’s surprising to me that we still don’t know how a human sperm fuses with a human egg,” said Mark Johnson, an associate professor of biology at Brown University and a study co-author. “One of the things we hope this paper will do is establish a structural signature for the proteins that make gamete fusion work in these species so that we might be able to look for it in species where those protein mechanisms are still unknown.”