DailyDirt: Closer To Understanding Superconductivity

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The phenomenon of superconductivity could be extremely useful -- if the materials that exhibit the behavior could do so at ambient conditions. The first material discovered to conduct electricity with no resistance was mercury in 1911, but mercury requires temperatures below 10 °K to do this. In 1986, a high temperature superconductor was found that seemed to work around liquid nitrogen temperatures. We've made some progress pushing the limits of the superconductors we've made so far, and it looks like we may be on the cusp of a much better understanding these materials and how they work. Here are just a few links on the matter.

• Superconductivity at room temperature has been an unattainable goal for decades (or almost a century), until recently. Using short infrared laser pulses, a ceramic material was made superconducting at room temperature... for only a few picoseconds. [url]
• Over 60,000 papers have been published on so-called high temperature superconductors since 1986, but the phenomenon is not well understood at all. The "high temperatures" above -237 °C are still pretty chilly, but it's been hard to find examples of different superconductors that could help elucidate the mechanism. Researchers have recently discovered a new class of superconducting material, but we're still a long way from really understanding what's going on. [url]
• Physicists are starting to come up with better explanations for superconductivity and how it occurs. There doesn't seem to be any good reasons why superconductivity can't persist at room temperatures, but there may very well be practical barriers that we just haven't found yet. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: materials, mercury, physics, science, superconductivity, ybco

Nature Drops Its Paywall... But Replaces It With Insane, Anti-Research Proprietary DRM

from the screw-you,-researchers dept

We've written plenty about open access and how the big scientific journals profit off of publicly funded research by putting it behind a paywall, thereby greatly limiting the ability of knowledge (often paid for with our tax dollars) to be used to further discovery, research and innovation. The impact on society is tremendous, and unfortunate.

In the science realm, there are two "big" journal publishers: Nature and Science. If you're an academic releasing a scientific paper, those tend to be the two journals you most want your papers to appear in. So, it seemed like good news when Nature claimed it was moving away from a paywall and going to allow open access to the research papers it publishes. But the details suggest that whoever came up with this plan did it for the stupidest of reasons. Nature's own report on this change of plans kicks off by highlighting how ridiculously limited and encumbered with DRM this new offering will be:

All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December.

Well, even that's an exaggeration. The full press release notes that it's not that everything will be "free to read" but rather that those who do subscribe will be able to freely "share" the works (in this annoying, limited, proprietary DRM manner). Also "100 media outlets and blogs" will be given access as well, so that they can also share the works in this annoying, limited proprietary way:

Subscribers to 49 journals on nature.com will be able to share a unique URL to a full text, read-only version of published scientific research with colleagues or collaborators in the most convenient way for them, e.g. via email and social media. Included are the world's most cited scientific publication, Nature; the Nature family of journals and fifteen other quality science journals. This new initiative will be available to scientists and students at more than 6,000 universities and organizations worldwide, and serve the more 10 million monthly unique visitors to nature.com. This sharing is intended for personal, non-commercial use. To further aid collaboration, forthcoming annotation functionality will enable subscribers to share comments and highlighted text with their colleagues.

100 media outlets and blogs across the globe that report on the findings of articles published on nature.com will be able to provide their own readers with a link to a full text, read-only view of the original scientific paper. Thousands of high-quality scientific papers will be available. Nature has published some of the leading scientific stories of our time, such as the Human Genome; the structure of DNA; Dolly the Sheep; the invention of the laser; the identification of the AIDS virus and the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer.

Is this more open than the full paywall? Sure. But, it's such a hamfisted way of "opening up" that it makes things even more annoying. If you can't download, copy or print the text -- and you have to install annoying proprietary software -- it makes it a hell of a lot harder for researchers to actually make use of the text to, you know, contribute to their own research. Of course, the announcement also notes that Nature's owner, Macmillan, just happens to have a "majority investment" in ReadCube, the proprietary DRM platform that the company is using.

In other words, this has little to do with true open access. Instead, it's a rather cynical attempt to pretend to be open access, while trying to pump up its own investment in some crappy DRM system. So, sure, kudos for taking a layer off the top of the paywall, but this is hardly a revolutionary step. It still seems very much designed to make it as annoying and inconvenient as possible to actually share knowledge. I mean, this is the very same Nature that, just months ago, was trying to pressure researchers from universities that had open access policies to get those universities to waive those policies when seeking to get published in Nature...

Filed Under: copying, copyright, drm, journals, nature, paywall, readcube, research, science, scientists
Companies: macmillan, nature

DailyDirt: Crowdfunding Science!

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Crowdfunding wallet designs and various gadgets may be fun and bring about some innovative products that might not normally get funding, but a lot of popular crowdfunding campaigns are relatively straightforward development projects and shouldn't be all that risky for backers. Crowdfunding actual scientific ventures adds a bit more risk for backers because no one can really say how an experiment will turn out -- unless the experiment has been done before. Adding to the challenge for scientific crowdfunding is the jargon and scientific understanding necessary for a backer to know what a particular project is actually trying to do. If you want to support some science, here are just a few science-related projects to check out.

• There's a non-zero chance that an effective Ebola treatment already exists in the database of FDA-approved drugs. Computational models could help identify which existing drugs might be suitable targets, and this approach has worked for other diseases, finding possible antimalarial drugs and anti-viral targets. [url]
• Some biohackers wanted to see if they could extend the range of human vision by taking vitamin A2 doses for a while. They've published the data they've collected, but the conclusion seems to be that you probably shouldn't take vitamin A2 for long periods of time in the hopes of being able to see in the near infrared. Also, the participants in this study reported an increase in nightblindness. [url]
• TRUDI (Tele-Robotic Ultrasound Distance Imaging) is an ultrasound robot that allows doctors to obtain diagnostic measurements remotely. It might look a little creepy for a robot arm to go straight for a patient's neck in the pitch video, but this robot can measure other parts of the circulatory system, too. [url]
• If you ever wanted an open source real-time PCR machine, you can pre-order one for about $1,300. This isn't the first open source PCR thermocycler, but this version has a lot of nice bells and whistles, including a touchscreen and some analytics software. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: biohackers, crowdfunding, ebola, nightblindess, open source, pcr, real-time pcr thermocycler, science, telemedicine, trudi, ultrasound robot, vitamin a2
Companies: experiment.com, gofundme, kickstarter, medstartr

Another Reason For Moving To Open Access: Encouraging Scientific Debates

from the it's-good-to-share dept

Techdirt has written often enough about how copyright is used to censor criticism. QuestionCopyright.org has an interesting post that offers a variation on that theme: copyright getting in the way of a scientific debate.

A band of researchers has been tirelessly trying to demonstrate that a body of scientific work which rests on a paper from over 10 years ago is completely wrong. The only problem is, their argument isn't being allowed to stand or fall on its merits -- instead, copyright restrictions are interfering with their ability to make their case at all.

The issue is that in order to make their case, the researchers need to re-use figures from one of the papers they are questioning. Unfortunately, fair use doesn't necessarily help here, because the journal publishing their new paper, Public Library of Science (PLOS) ONE, uses the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license for all its material. Fair use cannot be used to change the license under which the images are released -- only the copyright holders can do that, which means the latter are effectively able to block their republication in PLOS ONE:

[The publisher] Wiley has responded ... saying that while they'll allow re-use with no fee under standard copyright, they won't simply relicense the images to be compatible with PLOS ONE's non-restrictive distribution policy. (What Wiley actually says is that they are "unable to change [the images'] copyright status", which is simply false.) It isn't yet clear how this will be resolved. Offering the image at no fee for this one use is not a particularly helpful move on Wiley's part: the restrictions would still be quite onerous, because Wiley's one-off exception would not be passed along to PLOS ONE's readers — instead, they too would have to ask Wiley for permission if they wanted to use the figures in a scientific critique... and so on, ad infinitum.

But over on the Scholary Communications blog at Duke University, Kevin Smith doesn't think that's the case:

the claim that you cannot include material used as fair use in a CC-licensed article is bogus. In fact, it happens all the time. I simply do not believe that no one who publishes in PLoS journals ever quotes from the text of a prior publication; the ubiquitous academic quotation, of course, is the most common form of fair use, and I am sure PLoS publishes CC-licensed articles that rely on that form of fair use every day. The irony of this situation is that it points out that PLoS is applying a standard to imagery that it clearly does not apply to text. But that differential treatment is not called for by the law or by CC licenses; fair use is equally possible for figures, illustrations and text from prior work, and the CC licenses do not exclude reliance on such fair uses.

The solution, he suggests, is the following:

I think there is a way forward here, which is for PLoS to agree to publish the article with all of the borrowings under fair use or by permission clearly marked, just as they would do if those borrowings were all in the form of textual quotations.

Others -- including PLOS -- may disagree. In any case, what this episode highlights is that bridging the two worlds -- journals published under traditional licenses, and those using ones from Creative Commons -- is not straightforward. Relying on fair use as Smith suggests may not be an acceptable solution for some researchers wishing to publish in open access titles, since they might be unhappy about the lack of legal certainty. With open access, that's simply not an issue, since the license is explicitly designed to allow sharing -- and thus healthy scientific debate -- as a matter of course.

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Filed Under: copyright, creative commons, debate, fair use, open access, science

DailyDirt: We're Still Discovering New Forms Of Water

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Water is one of the most important substances for life. Although it's a pretty simple molecule, water has some surprising and complex characteristics. (eg. Ice floats on water.) We see water everyday, but we probably don't think too much about its unique chemical properties (ahem, it's not organic, but it's technically true that it doesn't contain fat or sugar). Here are just a few more scientific tidbits on dihydrogen monoxide.

• Water can be supercooled well below its typical freezing point, but its structure at temperatures between -41 °C and -113 °C hasn't been studied until recently. The trick is using femtosecond X-ray laser pulses and shooting them at supercooled water droplets just before the water freezes. [url]
• According to computer modeling, supercooled (virtual) water can split into two different phases. Virtual water molecules under certain pressures and temperatures can assemble in (at least) two different ways, forming a less dense and more dense phase. Finding experimental evidence of this prediction is the next step.... [url]
• Nebraska Ice is the nickname for "Two Dimensional Bilayer Ice I" -- a form of water that contracts instead of expanding when freezing. Three dimensional ice has 15 known crystalline forms, and two dimensional ice has 2 known frozen structures. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: chemistry, dihydrogen monoxide, ice, nebraska ice, science, supercooling, water

Researchers Retract Academic Paper Because Company Complains The Results Hurt Its Profits

from the did-someone-say-cyanide? dept

An important aspect of the academic publishing process is the facility to retract papers at a later date if the work turns out to have serious errors or -- in rare cases -- to be fraudulent. For many years, the site Retraction Watch has played an important role in keeping track of when papers are retracted -- and why. But even with that long experience, its writers were surprised by the following case:

It's not unusual for us to hear allegations that journals have caved to corporate demands that they retract papers. And companies have certainly objected to the publication of results that painted their products in an unflattering light.

But what we've never explicitly seen is a retraction notice that comes right out and says that they only reason a paper is being removed from the literature is that a company complained. That's the jaw-dropping case with "Visual defects among consumers of processed cassava (gari)," a paper published earlier this year in the African Journal of Food Sciences

Here's why the retraction was made:

The retraction is based on the fact that a Gari processing company has requested the retraction this paper from journal's website and publisher's database since it is crumbling their business inputs to their competitors leading to a drastic reduction in customers and consumers hence affecting their productivity and profitability.

Well, that's hardly a surprise given what the paper claimed:

The visual acuity of consumers of gari showed a significant decrease (P<0.05) when compared with that of the non consumers of gari. The incidence of color blindness is higher in gari consumers than the non consumers. Visual defects are correlated to the frequency of eating gari, for how long gari has been eaten and age. The high prevalence of visual defects among the consumers of gari may be due to the exposure to unsafe amount of cyanide in gari that was consumed over a long period of time.

Some comments to the post on Retraction Watch also raise questions about the validity of those results. But given the seriousness of the potential health issues, the correct response is surely to repeat the research with even greater rigor, rather than simply making the paper and its troubling results disappear.

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Filed Under: gari, profits, retractions, science

DailyDirt: Allotropes Of Carbon

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Most people are familiar with graphite and diamonds, but elemental carbon comes in plenty of other forms. Buckyballs weren't discovered until 1985, but since then, all kinds of fullerene structures and carbon nanotubes have been made. And maybe we haven't found all the different kinds of carbon yet. Here are just a few links on some of them.

• Carbon nanofoam can exhibit magnetic properties temporarily. This form of carbon is a spongy solid, and it was first made in a lab in 2004 using pulsed lasers that create a web of carbon tubes at temperatures exceeding 10,000°C. [url]
• A linear form of carbon (called carbyne or linear acetylenic carbon) could be strangely strong, exotic material. However, it's not easy to come by carbyne chains that are more than a few dozen atoms long (so far). [url]
• There's a patented process for making chaoite -- the naturally-occurring mineral form of carbon found near meteorite impacts. The exact structure of chaoite is not well known, but the patent office still granted a patent for making the stuff. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: allotrope, buckyball, carbon, carbyne, chaoite, chemistry, diamond, fullerenes, linear acetylenic carbon, materials, nanofoam, science

DailyDirt: Judging The Quality of Science

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The Scientific Method is often taught as a linear process that proceeds from hypothesis to theory. In practice, science -- like any other human endeavor -- can be much more haphazard. Science isn't perfect, but it has some built in processes for error correction to help weed out mistakes and outright fraud. There are some well-known issues with the traditional peer review mechanism, but science is adapting and coming up with new ways to improve its results and conclusions. Here are just a few links on judging the quality of science.

• The Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford is planning to develop a meta-research institution to research... research. The new lab will be called METRICS for short, and it'll study factors like irreproducibility and publication bias. [url]
• Jimmy Wales has decided that no pseudo-science will be accepted for publication on Wikipedia. Wales says, "If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals -- that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately." [url]
• As more scientific research is done more globally, is the diversity of the researchers influencing the quality of the results? Some analysis suggests that papers with geographically diverse authors are better, in the metric of getting more citations. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: jimmy wales, meta-research, peer review, publication bias, reproducibility, science, wikipedia

Mosaic: The Publishing Of Science, And The Science Of Publishing

from the moral-rights dept

The UK-based Wellcome Trust is the second-largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It was one of the main backers of the Human Genome Project, which pioneered the idea of open data by placing all its results in the public domain, and of open access. Recently, it began a new project exploring openness:

First there was open source software, given away for anybody to download, use and share without charge. Then there was open access publishing, the movement to make the results of scientific research freely available to read without paying journal subscription fees. Today, the Wellcome Trust is launching a fresh experiment in open information, this time in science journalism.

Mosaic, our new digital publication devoted to long-form features about the science of life, is not only free for anybody to read. Its content is also freely available for anybody else to republish or share through their own publications and platforms.

Of course, "freely available" can mean many things. Here's more about the license Mosaic will be published under:

when we were starting out on the development of Mosaic, one of the first principles we put in place was that the features we published should have a Creative Commons (CC) licence. We want as many people to be able to read our stories as possible, and so we’ll be publishing features on the Mosaic site and making it simple for others to take our content and re-use it.

While Creative Commons is well established in scholarly circles, its use in journalism is still relatively sparse. The investigative journalism newsroom Propublica, and The Conversation, which brings together professional editors and university experts, both publish under CC licences (do let us know if you know of other examples).

The license we’ve chosen for Mosaic is Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY), which is the most open of the licences.

Well, arguably CC0 is more open -- it's akin to placing something in the public domain, with no restrictions whatsoever. Still, CC-BY is certainly an extremely generous license, allowing almost anything to be done with the articles, provided authorship is acknowledged. Of course, that could be problematic, as the Wellcome Trust recognizes:

Might adaptation, if done poorly, damage our reputation for quality and depth, or the author’s reputation? Might some adaptations distort the story? In the former case, the original, crafted version will always be on the Mosaic site, the licence allows us to insist that attribution requires a link back and and that the edited nature of an adapted or abridged piece must be signposted. In the latter case, the licence protects the author’s 'moral rights', which include the right not to have the work distorted, mutilated, modified or subjected to derogatory action which would be prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation.

Although such "moral rights" are rarely invoked in the US, in Europe they are more important. However, as the Wellcome Trust itself points out, this is more of a theoretical problem than a real one:

it appears such cases [of distortion] are very few and far between and problems that do arise are usually due to miscommunication or misunderstanding. What is more, it is the nature of the internet that work published even under the most restrictive licences is often taken and adapted by others without any consent -- while often illegal, this is extremely difficult to police. So while it was good to think through potential issues, our conclusion was that we should offer our work in good faith. We trust others' editorial judgment.

That's both a good summary of the situation, and an eminently pragmatic solution. If only more publishers adopted it, instead of trying to stamp out every kind of unauthorized online use, however minor, and however disproportionate the effort required.

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Filed Under: knowledge, mosaic, open access, publishing, science
Companies: wellcome trust

USPTO Awards Patent To Disgraced Scientist For Fraudulent Work

from the I-don't-even dept

Here on Techdirt, we're pretty inured to the excesses of the patent system. But just when you think you've seen everything and plumbed the deepest depths of ridiculousness, along comes something like this:

Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk electrified the science world 10 years ago with his claim that he had created the world's first cloned human embryos and had extracted stem cells from them. But the work was later found to be fraudulent, and Dr. Hwang was fired from his university and convicted of crimes.

Despite all that, Dr. Hwang has just been awarded an American patent covering the disputed work, leaving some scientists dumbfounded and providing fodder to critics who say the Patent Office is too lax.

But it would be too easy to mock the USPTO for explaining that:

the system operates on an honor code and that patent examiners cannot independently verify claims.

Instead, I'd like to draw attention to this revealing comment from Kevin E. Noonan, a biotechnology patent lawyer, as quoted in the New York Times story:

"If it's bad, it's not going to be worth very much," Mr. Noonan said. "Who is going to sue on this patent?"

The answer, of course, is many people would -- specifically, patent trolls, who have no problems taking a worthless patent and using the mere threat of litigation to squeeze money out of companies just to get them to go away. That, and patents being granted on discredited ideas, as here, are just some of the many problems that the USPTO needs urgently to address.

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Filed Under: hwang woo-suk, patent, science, stem cells, uspto