An anonymous reader shares a report: Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions.

To gauge research quality, we count papers, citations, and calculate impact factors. The higher the scores, the better. Academic performance is often expressed in numbers. Why? Quantification reduces complexity, makes academia manageable, allows easy comparisons among scholars and institutions, and provides administrators with a feeling of grip on reality. Besides, numbers seem objective and fair, which is why we use them to allocate status, tenure, attention, and funding to those who score well on these indicators.

The result of this? Quantity is often valued over quality. In The Quantified Society I coin the term "indicatorism": a blind focus on enhancing indicators in spreadsheets, while losing sight of what really matters. It seems we're sometimes busier with "scoring" and "producing" than with "understanding." As a result, some started gaming the system. The rector of one of the world's oldest universities, for one, set up citation cartels to boost his citation scores, while others reportedly buy(!) bogus citations. Even top-ranked institutions seem to play the indicator game by submitting false data to improve their position on university rankings!

Nearly three-quarters of all known bacterial species have never been studied in scientific literature, while just 10 species account for half of all published research, according to a new analysis published on bioRxiv.

The study of over 43,000 bacterial species found that E. coli dominates with 21% of all publications, followed by human pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus. Microbes crucial for human health and Earth's ecosystems remain largely unexplored, University of Michigan biologist Paul Jensen reported.

A new $1-million project by non-profit Align to Innovate aims to help close this gap by studying 1,000 microbes under varying conditions.

By 2060, around one million Americans may develop dementia annually, with the lifetime risk after age 55 estimated at 42% and rising sharply with age. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Medicine. Scientific American reports: The latest forecast suggests a massive and harrowing increase from annual cases predicted for 2020, in which approximately 514,000 adults in the U.S. were estimated to be diagnosed with dementia -- an umbrella term that describes several neurological conditions that affect memory and cognition.

The new study also showed the lifetime risk of dementia increased progressively with older age. They estimated that after age 55, the lifetime risk of dementia is 42 percent, and continues to rise sharply to 56 percent after age 85. Groups that showed greater lifetime risks (between 44 and 59 percent after age 55) were Black adults, women and people who carried the allele APOE e4: this variation of the gene APOE, which codes for the protein apolipoprotein E, increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's is the most common cause of dementia, but the study focused on all forms.

"Neuralink Corp.'s brain-computer device has been implanted in a third patient," reports Bloomberg, "and the company has plans for about 20 to 30 more implants in 2025, founder Elon Musk said."

In an interview streamed on X.com, Musk says "We've got now three humans with Neuralinks implanted and they're all working well," according to The Times of India: "We upgraded the devices, they'll have more electrodes, basically higher bandwidth, longer battery life and everything. So, expect 20 or 30 patients this year with the upgraded Neuralink devices...."

"[O]ur next part will be Blindsight devices where even if somebody has lost both eyes or has lost the optic nerve, we can interface directly with the visual cortex in the brain and enable them to see. We already have that working in monkeys," Musk added.

"We're standing down on today's launch attempt," Blue Origin posted late last night, "to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window. We're reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt."

But soon Blue Origin will again attempt its very first orbital flight. And they'll also attempt to land their reusable Stage 1 on a drone in the Atlantic ocean...

Several hours Sunday night their rocket was fueled on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, awaiting ignition. Its three-hour launch window had just opened. And Blue Origin was webcasting it all live on their web page...

But whatever happened, Ars Technica's senior space editor Eric Berger got to talk to an "affable and anxious" Jeff Bezos: "It's pretty exciting, isn't it?" Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, said by way of greeting... I asked what his expectations were for the launch of New Glenn, which has a three-hour window that opens at 1 am ET (06:00 UTC) on Monday, January 13... "We would certainly like to achieve orbit, and get the Blue Ring Pathfinder into orbit," Bezos said. "Landing the booster would be gravy on top of that. It's kind of insane to try and land the booster. A more sane approach would probably be to try to land it into ocean. But we're gonna go for it."

Blue Origin has built a considerable amount of infrastructure on a drone ship, Jacklyn, that will be waiting offshore for the rocket to land upon. Was Bezos not concerned about putting that hardware at risk? "I'm worried about everything," he admitted. However, the rocket has been programmed to divert from the ship if the avionics on board the vehicle sense that anything is off-nominal. And there is, of course, a pretty good chance of that happening. "We've done a lot of work, we've done a lot of testing, but there are some things that can only be tested in flight," Bezos said. "And you can't be overconfident in these things... The reality is, there are a lot of things that go wrong, and you have to accept that, if something goes wrong, we'll pick ourselves up and get busy for the second flight."
Bezos also pointed out that 7% of all the people who have ever flown into space have done so on a Blue Origin vehicle — including himself, an experience he told Ars Technica "is kind of hard to beat... That really was very meaningful for a whole bunch of reasons.

"But this is, you know, the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people. And it's a really big deal. You know, you don't get very many first flights, yeah, and here we go."

The rocket's payload nose cone (or fairing) has the signatures of thousands of Blue Origin employees, according to a Blue Origin post on Instagram, calling it "a tribute to the hard work and passion for mission we all have here..." More details about the launch:

• Space.com notes that the launch "was initially scheduled for Jan. 10 and then Jan. 12, but Blue Origin postponed it due to rough offshore weather that could affect a rocket landing on the company's recovery ship in the Atlantic." Space Force officials forecast the chance of good liftoff conditions Sunday night were 50%.

• "We want to be clear about our objectives," Blue Origin posted Sunday on X.com. "This is our first flight and we've prepared rigorously for it. But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations is a replacement for flying this rocket. Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious — but we're going for it. No matter what happens, we'll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch."

• While Blue Origin's "New Shephard" capsule can hold up to six passengers, the New Glenn's capsule has 30 times that capacity.

• Space.com notes the rocket is carrying a payload: a test version of the company's new 'Blue Ring' spacecraft platform to validate its orbit-to-ground communications capabilities.

• To get the next generation excited about space travel, Blue Origin's web site is selling an 11.5-inch , 636-piece model of the New Glenn rocket (complete with a retractable launch tower).

The University of Colorado Boulder's magazine recently wrote: What happened during the "Snowball Earth" period is perplexing: Just as the planet endured about 100 million years of deep freeze, with a thick layer of ice covering most of Earth and with low levels of atmospheric oxygen, forms of multicellular life emerged. Why? The prevailing scientific view is that such frigid temperatures would slow rather than speed evolution. But fossil records from 720 to 635 million years ago show an evolutionary spurt preceding the development of animals...

Carl Simpson, a macroevolutionary paleobiologist at CU Boulder, has found evidence that cold seawater could have jump-started — rather than suppressed — evolution from single-celled to multicellular life forms.
That evidence is described in Quanta magazine: Simpson proposes an answer linked to a fundamental physical fact: As seawater gets colder, it gets more viscous, and therefore more difficult for very small organisms to navigate. Imagine swimming through honey rather than water... To test the idea, Simpson, a paleobiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his team conducted an experiment designed to see what a modern single-celled organism does when confronted with higher viscosity... In an enormous, custom-made petri dish, [grad student Andrea] Halling and Simpson created a bull's-eye target of agar gel — their own experimental gauntlet of viscosity. At the center, it was the standard viscosity used for growing these algae in the lab. [Green algae, which swims with a tail-like flagellum.] Moving outward, each concentric ring had higher and higher viscosity, finally reaching a medium with four times the standard level. The scientists placed the algae in the middle, turned on a camera, and left them alone for 30 days — enough time for about 70 generations of algae to live, swim around for nutrients and die...

After 30 days, the algae in the middle were still unicellular. As the scientists put algae from thicker and thicker rings under the microscope, however, they found larger clumps of cells. The very largest were wads of hundreds. But what interested Simpson the most were mobile clusters of four to 16 cells, arranged so that their flagella were all on the outside. These clusters moved around by coordinating the movement of their flagella, the ones at the back of the cluster holding still, the ones at the front wriggling.
"One thing that you learn about small organisms from a physics point of view is that they don't experience the world the same way that we do, as larger-bodied organisms," Simpson says in the university's article. It says that instead unicellular organisms are specifically "affected by the viscosity, or thickness, of sea water," and Simpson adds that "basically, that would trigger the origin of animals, potentially."

Last year Simpson posted a preprint on biorxiv.org. (And he also co-authored an article on "physical constraints during Snowball Earth drive the evolution of multicellularity.")

There's a video showing algae in Simpson's lab clumping together in viscous water. "This observed behavior adds evidence to Simpson's hypothesis that single-celled organisms clumped together to their mutual advantage during the 'Snowball Earth' period," says the video's description, "thus adding momentum to the rise of multicellular organisms." But Simpson says in the university's article, "To actually see it empirically means there's something to this idea."

Simpson and colleagues have now received a $1 million grant to study grains of sand made from calcium carbonate and called ooids, since their diameter "could be a proxy measurement of Earth's temperature for the last 2.5 billion years," according to the university's article. Geologist Lizzy Trower says the research "can tell us something about the chemistry and water temperature in which they formed." And more importantly, "Does the fossil record agree with the predictions we would make based on this theory from this new record of temperature?" Trower and Simpson's work also has potential implications for the human quest to find life elsewhere in the universe, Trower said. If extremely harsh and cold environments can spur evolutionary change, "then that is a really different type of thing to look for in exoplanets (potentially life-sustaining planets in other solar systems), or think about when and where (life) would exist."

"This year, superconductivity — the flow of electric current with zero resistance — was discovered in three distinct materials," reports Quanta magazine. "Two instances stretch the textbook understanding of the phenomenon. The third shreds it completely...."

After four years of reserch a team at Columbia assembled a "two-sheet device, cooled it down, and watched it superconduct..." A lab at Cornell found "a species of superconductivity that no one had seen coming." And then "Over the summer, a graphene device produced a mythical form of superconductivity: The discoveries stem from a recent revolution in materials science: All three new instances of superconductivity arise in devices assembled from flat sheets of atoms. These materials display unprecedented flexibility; at the touch of a button, physicists can switch them between conducting, insulating, and more exotic behaviors — a modern form of alchemy that has supercharged the hunt for superconductivity. It now seems increasingly likely that diverse causes can give rise to the phenomenon. Just as birds, bees and dragonflies all fly using different wing structures, materials seem to pair electrons together in different ways. Even as researchers debate exactly what's happening in the various two-dimensional materials in question, they anticipate that the growing zoo of superconductors will help them achieve a more universal view of the alluring phenomenon...

[C]ustomizable 2D devices had freed them from the drudgery of designing, growing, and testing new crystals one by one. Researchers would now be able to quickly re-create the effects of many different atomic lattices in a single device and find out exactly what electrons are capable of. The research strategy is now paying off. This year, physicists found the first instances of superconductivity in 2D materials other than graphene, along with a completely novel form of superconductivity in a new graphene system. The discoveries have established that the earlier graphene superconductors mark just the outskirts of a wild new jungle...

The experimentalists are amassing a treasure trove of data for theorists to explain. [Cornell's superconductivity-discovering researchers] Mak and Shan hope that this abundance will let theorists predict ways to create superconductivity that experiments can confirm. That would demonstrate a true understanding of the phenomenon, which would mark both an academic achievement and a key step toward designing materials for revolutionary new technologies.
The article points out that already, superconductivity has "enabled the development of MRI machines and powerful particle colliders.

"If physicists could fully understand how and when the phenomenon arises, perhaps they could engineer a wire that superconducts electricity under everyday conditions rather than exclusively at low temperatures, as is currently the case. World-altering technologies — lossless power grids, magnetically levitating vehicles — might follow."

Wikipedia's massive dataset helped researchers identify three styles of curiosity -- "busybody," "hunter," and "dancer" -- based on how users navigate its pages (see: wiki rabbit hole). These curiosity styles reflect broader social trends and highlight curiosity's role in connecting information rather than merely acquiring it. Scientific American reports: In this lexicon, a busybody traces a zigzagging route through many often distantly related topics. A hunter, in contrast, searches with sustained focus, moving among a relatively small number of closely related articles. A dancer links together highly disparate topics to try to synthesize new ideas. "Curiosity actually works by connecting pieces of information, not just acquiring them," says University of Pennsylvania network scientist Dani Bassett, cosenior author on a recent study of these curiosity types in Science Advances. "It's not as if we go through the world and pick up a piece of information and put it in our pockets like a stone. Instead we gather information and connect it to stuff that we already know."

The team tracked more than 482,000 people using Wikipedia's mobile app in 50 countries or territories and 14 languages. The researchers charted these users' paths using "knowledge networks" of connected information, which depict how closely one search topic (a node in the network) is related to another. Beyond just mapping the connections, they linked curiosity styles to location-based indicators of well-being, inequality, and other measures. In countries with higher education levels and greater gender equality, people browsed more like busybodies. In countries with lower scores on these variables, people browsed like hunters. Bassett hypothesizes that "in countries that have more structures of oppression or patriarchal forces, there may be a constraining of knowledge production that pushes people more toward this hyperfocus." The researchers also analyzed topics of interest, ranging from physics to visual arts, for busybodies compared with hunters (graphic). Dancer patterns, more recently confirmed, were excluded. Editor note: This article was published on December 24, 2024, based on a study published in October, 2024.

SysEngineer shares a report from the Associated Press: A spacecraft has beamed back some of the best close-up photos yet of Mercury's north pole. The European and Japanese robotic explorer swooped as close as 183 miles (295 kilometers) above Mercury's night side before passing directly over the planet's north pole. The European Space Agency released the stunning snapshots Thursday, showing the permanently shadowed craters at the top of of our solar system's smallest, innermost planet. Cameras also captured views of neighboring volcanic plains and Mercury's largest impact crater, which spans more than 930 miles (1,500 kilometers).

Early life exposure to toxic PFAS "forever chemicals" could impact economic success in adulthood, new first-of-its-kind research [PDF] suggests. From a report: The Iowa State University and US Census Bureau working paper compared the earnings, college graduation rates, and birth weights of two groups of children -- those raised around military installations that had firefighting training areas, and those who lived near bases with no fire training site.

The military began using PFAS-laden firefighting foam in the early 1970s, which frequently contaminated the drinking water supplies in and around bases. Those who lived in regions with firefighting training areas earned about 1.7% on average less later in life, and showed a graduation rate about 1% lower. Those born between 1981-1988 earned about $1bn less in today's earnings, or about $1,000 a person on average, compared to those who did not live near the firefighting training sites.

The data also shows lower birth weights among the population -- a factor linked to lower economic success later in life. The findings "highlight the importance of careful scrutiny of novel chemicals," said Irene Jacz, a study co-author and Iowa State economist. "We think that there's a causal effect from PFAS here but it's really hard to say, 'Oh it's all brain chemistry, or health effects' so there's a need for more research" Jacz said. The paper is not yet peer-reviewed, but will soon go through the process.

Three mathematicians have developed a breakthrough method for proving whether numbers can be written as fractions, solving a problem that has puzzled researchers for decades. Frank Calegari, Vesselin Dimitrov and Yunqing Tang proved the irrationality of an infinite collection of numbers related to the Riemann zeta function, building on Roger Apery's landmark 1978 proof about a single such number.

The new approach, which relies on 19th-century mathematical techniques, has already helped settle a 50-year-old conjecture about modular forms and could lead to more advances in number theory.

Christie Wilcox reports via Science.org: Both longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) and humans can figure out how to work together to move an unwieldy object through a series of obstacles. So scientists pitted the two against each other. They had individuals and groups of different sizes of both species maneuver a T-shaped object through holes in walls (as seen in the video above), both of which were scaled to the body size of the participants. This kind of puzzle is hard for ants because their pheromone-based communication doesn't account for the kind of geometry needed to get the object through the doors. To make the experiments even more comparable, the team also took away the humans' communication in some of the trials by making them wear sunglasses and masks and forbidding talking and gestures. So the people, like the ants, had to work together without language, relying on the forces generated by their fellow participants to figure out how to move the T-shaped piece.

The groups of ants were much better at solving the puzzle than individual ants, exhibiting what the researchers described as "emergent" collective memory -- an intelligence greater than the sum of its parts. The groups of humans, on the other hand, often didn't do better when working together, especially if they weren't allowed to talk. In fact, multiple people sometimes performed worse than individuals -- and worse than the ants. The researchers posit that, in the absence of the ability to discuss and debate, individuals attempt to reach a consensus quickly rather than fully assessing the problem. This "groupthink," they suggest, leads people toward fruitless "greedy" efforts where they directly pull the T toward the gaps in the wall, rather than the less obvious, correct solution of pulling the object into the space between first. Whereas the ants "excel in cooperation," they write, humans need to be able to talk through their reasoning to avoid simply going with what they think the crowd wants. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), located at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains just north of Los Angeles, has been temporarily shuttered due to the nearby Eaton fire. "JPL is closed except for emergency personnel. No fire damage so far (some wind damage) but it is very close to the lab. Hundreds of JPLers have been evacuated from their homes & many have lost homes. Special thx to our emergency crews. Pls keep us in your thoughts & stay safe," JPL Director Laurie Leshin announced via X today (Jan. 8). Space.com reports: JPL is federally funded but managed by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The center runs many of NASA's high-profile robotic missions, such as the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers and the $5 billion Europa Clipper, which recently launched to explore an intriguing ocean moon of Jupiter.

The Eaton fire sparked up on Tuesday evening (Jan. 7) near Altadena, which is just north of Pasadena. It has burned at least 1,000 acres (400 hectares) to date, according to CBS News, which cited the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire). The Eaton fire is one of several big blazes churning through the Los Angeles area, driven and spread by record-setting winds. The biggest and most destructive is the Palisades Fire, which is laying waste to the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on the west side of the city.

The Register's Connor Jones reports: Marc Rogers, DEF CON's head of security, faces tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills following an accident that left him with a broken neck and temporary quadriplegia. The prominent industry figure, whose work has spanned roles at tech companies such as Vodafone and Okta, including ensuring the story lines on Mr Robot and The Real Hustle were factually sound, is recovering in hospital. [...] Rogers said it will be around four to six weeks before he returns to basic independence and is able to travel, but a full recovery will take up to six months. He begins a course of physical therapy today, but his insurance will only cover the first of three required weeks, prompting friends to set up a fundraiser to cover the difference.

Rogers has an impressive cyber CV. Beginning life in cybersecurity back in the '80s when he went by the handle Cjunky, he has gone on to assume various high profile roles in the industry. In addition to the decade leading Vodafone UK's cybersecurity and being the VP of cybersecurity strategy at Okta, as already mentioned, Rogers has also worked as head of security at Cloudflare and founded Vectra, among other experiences. Now he heads up security at DEF CON, is a member of the Ransomware Taskforce, and is the co-founder and CTO at AI observability startup nbhd.ai.

If you hadn't heard of him from any of these roles, or from his work in the entertainment biz, he's also known for his famous research into Apple's Touch ID sensor, which he was able to compromise on both the iPhone 5S and 6 during his time as principal researcher at Lookout. Other consumer-grade kit to get the Rogers treatment include the short-lived Google Glass devices, also while he was at Lookout, and the Tesla Model S back in 2015. "It's a sad fact that in the US GoFundMe has become the de facto standard for covering insurance shortfalls," Rogers said. "I will be forever grateful to my friends who stood it up for me and those who donated to it so that I can resume making bad guys cry as soon as feasibly possible."

The cybersecurity community has rallied together to support Rogers' fundraiser, which has accrued over $83,000 in donations. The goal is $100,000.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People who get their coffee hit in the morning reap benefits that are not seen in those who have shots later in the day, according to the first major study into the health benefits of the drink at different times. Analysis of the coffee consumption of more than 40,000 adults found that morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause and 31% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease during a 10-year follow-up period than those who went without. But the benefits to heart health appeared to vanish in people who drank coffee throughout the day, the researchers found, with medical records showing no significant reduction in mortality for all-day drinkers compared with those who avoided coffee. [...]

The study suggests that a morning dose of coffee is better for the heart than an evening one, but it does not explain why. One possible explanation is that drinking coffee later in the day can disrupt circadian rhythms and levels of hormones such as melatonin. This in turn affects sleep, inflammation and blood pressure, all of which can harm heart health. In an accompanying editorial, Prof Thomas Luscher, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals in London, notes that many all-day drinkers sleep poorly, adding that coffee seems to suppress melatonin, a hormone that is important for inducing sleep in the brain. The effects are driven largely by caffeine, but coffee contains hundreds of other bioactive compounds that affect our physiology. The researchers say some substances in the blood that drive inflammation often peak in the morning and could be countered by anti-inflammatory compounds in a morning coffee. "This explanation applies to both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee," they write. "Overall, we must accept the now substantial evidence that coffee drinking, particularly in the morning hours, is likely to be healthy," Luscher writes. "Thus, drink your coffee, but do so in the morning!"

The study has been published in the European Heart Journal.