Lifeboat Foundation

Why the slide?

It is important to understand the reasons for the drastic changes, Walsh says. The trend might stem in part from changes in the scientific enterprise. For example, there are now many more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek patents. That, in turn, has changed the incentives for how researchers go about their work. Large research teams, for example, have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found³ that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.

Finding an explanation for the decline won’t be easy, Walsh says. Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same. The rate of decline is also puzzling: CD indices fell steeply from 1945 to 1970, then more gradually from the late 1990s to 2010. “Whatever explanation you have for disruptiveness dropping off, you need to also make sense of it levelling off” in the 2000s, he says.

Is the Director General of the Pacific Community (SPC — https://www.spc.int/about-us/director-general) which is the largest intergovernmental organization in the Pacific and serves as a science and technology for development organization owned by the 26 Member countries and territories in the Pacific region.

SPC’s 650 member staff deliver services and scientific advice to the Pacific across the domains of Oceans, Islands and People, and has deep expertise in food security, water resources, fisheries, disasters, energy, maritime, health, statistics, education, human rights, social development and natural resources.

Continue reading “Dr. Stuart Minchin, Ph.D. — Sustainable Pacific Development Through Science, Knowledge & Innovation” »

Despite surges in fields like AI, medicine and nuclear energy, major advances in science and technology are slowing and are fewer and farther between than decades ago, according to a study published in Nature.

The researchers analyzed some 45 million scientific papers and 3.9 million patents between 1945 and 2010, examining networks of citations to assess whether breakthroughs reinforced the status quo or disrupted existing knowledge and more dramatically pushed science and technology off into new directions.

Across all major scientific and technological fields, these big disruptions—the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, which rendered earlier research obsolete, is a good example of such research—have become less common since 1945, the researchers found.

A Boeing 727 that spent much of its lifetime ferrying passengers across the world was deliberately crashed into a Mexican desert by a filing crew as part of a big science experiment.

New data shows that several types of the shelled reptiles can slow—and even stop—aging if the environmental conditions are right.

This year has seen remarkable developments in artificial intelligence, an inflection point for quantum computing, progress in aging research, a number of exciting discoveries in astronomy, a potentially revolutionary new material, and many more breakthroughs.

These were our top 20 most viewed blogs of 2022, in reverse order. See you in 2023!

Join the Pan Asian Alumni Network (PAAN) and the Alumni Club of New York City for a series of virtual panels featuring diverse perspectives from the UChicago alumni community exploring career pathways, philosophical questions and trends determining the future of data science and artificial intelligence.

The first program in our series, Careers in Data Science, brings together UChicago alumni across different industries to discuss their career pathways, highlight key industry trends, and share advice for anyone looking to break into these fields.

As computer scientists tackle a greater range of problems, their work has grown increasingly interdisciplinary. This year, many of the most significant computer science results also involved other scientists and mathematicians. Perhaps the most practical involved the cryptographic questions underlying the security of the internet, which tend to be complicated mathematical problems. One such problem — the product of two elliptic curves and their relation to an abelian surface — ended up bringing down a promising new cryptography scheme that was thought to be strong enough to withstand an attack from a quantum computer. And a different set of mathematical relationships, in the form of one-way functions, will tell cryptographers if truly secure codes are even possible.

Computer science, and quantum computing in particular, also heavily overlaps with physics. In one of the biggest developments in theoretical computer science this year, researchers posted a proof of the NLTS conjecture, which (among other things) states that a ghostly connection between particles known as quantum entanglement is not as delicate as physicists once imagined. This has implications not just for our understanding of the physical world, but also for the myriad cryptographic possibilities that entanglement makes possible.

A scientist shares what he’s learned about living longer, with the help of worms. Scientists are hard at work trying to understand what causes aging and how to help people stay healthy for longer. Biologist Matt Kaeberlein breaks down the science of longevity and tells us how he’s using a robot to test 100,000 aging drugs a year on microscopic worms and a long-term study on the aging of pet dogs. And we’ll leave the lab to visit Willie Mae Avery, the oldest person in Washington D.C., to hear what it’s like to live such a long life.

Portrait of 107-year-old Willie Mae Avery, D.C.‘s oldest living resident.
Credit: Photograph by Rebecca Hale, National Geographic.

Continue reading “What Science Tells Us About Living Longer | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic” »