The number of doctoral graduates globally has grown steadily over recent decades, creating a massive imbalance between PhD holders and available academic positions. Among the 38 OECD countries, new doctorate holders almost doubled between 1998 and 2017.

China's doctoral enrollment has exploded from around 300,000 students in 2013 to more than 600,000 in 2023. This growth has forced PhD graduates into non-academic careers at unprecedented rates. A 2023 study of more than 4,500 PhD graduates in the United Kingdom found over two-thirds were employed outside academia.

In South Africa, 18% of more than 6,000 PhD graduates reported difficulty finding jobs related to their expertise. Some countries have begun adapting their doctoral programs. Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom now offer training and paid internships during doctoral studies, including "industrial PhD" programs where students conduct research in collaboration with companies.

Bacteria can be used to turn plastic waste into painkillers, researchers have found, opening up the possibility of a more sustainable process for producing the drugs. From a report: Chemists have discovered E coli can be used to create paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, from a material produced in the laboratory from plastic bottles. "People don't realise that paracetamol comes from oil currently," said Prof Stephen Wallace, the lead author of the research from the University of Edinburgh. "What this technology shows is that by merging chemistry and biology in this way for the first time, we can make paracetamol more sustainably and clean up plastic waste from the environment at the same time."

Writing in the journal Nature Chemistry, Wallace and colleagues report how they discovered that a type of chemical reaction called a Lossen rearrangement, a process that has never been seen in nature, was biocompatible. In other words, it could be carried out in the presence of living cells without harming them. The team made their discovery when they took polyethylene terephthalate (PET) -- a type of plastic often found in food packaging and bottles -- and, using sustainable chemical methods, converted it into a new material.

Microplastics are present in all beverages, but those packaged in glass bottles contain more microplastic particles than those in plastic bottles, cartons or cans. This was the surprising finding of a study conducted by the Boulogne-sur-Mer unit of the ANSES Laboratory for Food Safety. The scientists hypothesised that these plastic particles could come from the paint used on bottle caps. Water and wine are less affected than other beverages. These findings have highlighted a source of microplastics in drinks that manufacturers can easily take measures to address.

Perched in Chile's Andes mountains, "A revolutionary new space telescope has just taken its first pictures of the cosmos," reports National Geographic — "and they're spectacular." Formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, it's expected to bring "unprecedented detail" to space photography: The observatory has a few key components: A giant telescope, called the Simonyi Survey Telescope, is connected to the world's largest and highest resolution digital camera. Rubin's 27-foot primary mirror, paired with a mind-boggling 3,200-megapixel camera, will repeatedly take 30-second exposure images of vast swaths of the sky with unrivaled speed and detail. Each image will cover an area of sky as big as 40 full moons. Every three nights for the next 10 years, Rubin will produce a new, ultra-high-definition map of the entire visible southern sky. With this much coverage, scientists hope to create an updated and detailed "movie" they can use to view how the cosmos changes over time....

For the next decade, Rubin will capture millions of astronomical objects each day — or more than 100 every second. Ultimately, it's expected to discover about 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies that we've never seen before... When the observatory begins science operations in earnest later in 2025, its instruments will yield a deluge of astronomical data that will be too overwhelming to process manually. (Each night, the observatory will generate around 20 terabytes of data.) Astronomers expect high-quality observations taken with the telescope will help map out the structure of the universe, find comets and potentially hazardous asteroids in our solar system, and detect exploding stars and black holes in distant galaxies.

The observatory will also examine the optical counterparts of gravitational wave events — ripples in the fabric of space caused by some of the most energetic processes in the cosmos. By studying these events, astronomers hope to uncover the secrets of the invisible forces that shape the universe like dark matter and dark energy.
"Already, in just over 10 hours of test observations, the observatory has discovered 2,104 never-before-seen-asteroids," reports NPR, "including seven near-Earth asteroids, none of which pose any danger..." The basic idea is that the data "should let astronomers catch transient phenomena that they otherwise wouldn't know to look for, such as exploding stars, asteroids, interstellar objects whizzing in from other solar systems, and maybe even the movement of a giant planet that some believe is lurking out in our own solar system, beyond Pluto."

The telescope is a joint project between the U.S. Energy Department and its National Science Foundation — and it will stream a special live broadcast of its first images today at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) on their official YouTube channel (also simulacast at Space.com).

"When Apollo astronauts stumbled across shimmering orange beads on the moon, they had no idea they were gazing at ancient relics of violent volcanic activity," writes ScienceDaily. These glass spheres, tiny yet mesmerizing, formed billions of years ago during fiery eruptions that launched molten droplets skyward, instantly freezing in space. Now, using advanced instruments that didn't exist in the 1970s, scientists have examined the beads in unprecedented detail. The result is a remarkable window into the moon's dynamic geological history, revealing how eruption styles evolved and how lunar conditions once mirrored explosive events we see on Earth today...

Analyses of orange and black lunar beads have shown that the style of volcanic eruptions changed over time. "It's like reading the journal of an ancient lunar volcanologist," said Ryan Ogliore [an associate professor of physics at Missouri's Washington University, which has a large repository of lunar samples that were returned to Earth].
"The beads are tiny, pristine capsules of the lunar interior..." says Ogliore. "We've had these samples for 50 years, but we now have the technology to fully understand them..."

"The very existence of these beads tells us the moon had explosive eruptions, something like the fire fountains you can see in Hawaii today."

Thanks to Slashdot reader alternative_right for sharing the news.

alternative_right writes: We certainly weren't looking for it. What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale.'

While the observation is unprecedented, it's not wholly unexpected. In 2013, Texas A&M University materials scientist Michael Demkowicz worked on a study predicting that this kind of nanocrack healing could happen, driven by the tiny crystalline grains inside metals essentially shifting their boundaries in response to stress... That the automatic mending process happened at room temperature is another promising aspect of the research. Metal usually requires lots of heat to shift its form, but the experiment was carried out in a vacuum; it remains to be seen whether the same process will happen in conventional metals in a typical environment.

A possible explanation involves a process known as cold welding, which occurs under ambient temperatures whenever metal surfaces come close enough together for their respective atoms to tangle together. Typically, thin layers of air or contaminants interfere with the process; in environments like the vacuum of space, pure metals can be forced close enough together to literally stick.

"A single infusion of a stem cell-based treatment may have cured 10 out of 12 people with the most severe form of Type 1 diabetes," reports the New York Times.

"One year later, these 10 patients no longer need insulin. The other two patients need much lower doses." The experimental treatment, called zimislecel and made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston, involves stem cells that scientists prodded to turn into pancreatic islet cells, which regulate blood glucose levels. The new islet cells were infused and reached the pancreas, where they took up residence. The study was presented Friday evening at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association and published online by The New England Journal of Medicine...

Patients in the study began to need less insulin within a few months of being infused with new islet cells, and most stopped needing the hormone altogether at about six months [said Dr. Trevor Reichman, director of the pancreas and islet transplant program at University Health Network, a hospital in Toronto, and first author of the study]. He added that patients' episodes of hypoglycemia went away within the first 90 days of treatment.

If the study continues to show positive results, the company expects to submit an application to the FDA next year. "For the short term, this looks promising" for severely affected patients like those in the study," said Dr. Irl B. Hirsch, a diabetes expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. But patients in the trial had to stay on drugs to prevent the immune system from destroying the new cells. Suppressing the immune system, he said, increases the risk of infections and, over the long term, can increase the risk of cancer... Patients may have to take the immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives, the Vertex spokesperson said.

ScienceAlert reports: Casino lighting could be nudging gamblers to be more reckless with their money, according to a new study, which found a link between blue-enriched light and riskier gambling behavior. The extra blue light emitted by casino decor and LED screens seems to trigger certain switches in our brains, making us less sensitive to financial losses compared to gains of equal magnitude, researchers from Flinders University and Monash University in Australia found...

The researchers think circadian photoreception, which is our non-visual response to light, is playing a part here. The level of blue spectrum light may be activating specific eye cells connected to brain regions in charge of decision-making, emotional regulation, and processing risk versus reward scenarios.

"Under conditions where the lighting emitted less blue, people tended to feel a $100 loss much more strongly than a $100 gain — the loss just feels worse," [says the study's lead author, a psychologist at the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute]. "But under bright, blue-heavy light such as that seen in casino machines, the $100 loss didn't appear to feel as bad, so people were more willing to take the risk...." That raises some questions around ethics and responsibility, according to the researchers. While encouraging risk taking might be good for the gambling business, it's not good for the patrons spending their cash.
One professor involved in the study reached this conclusion. "It is possible that simply dimming the blue in casino lights could help promote safer gambling behaviors."

The research has been published in Scientific Reports.

Thanks to Slashdot reader alternative_right for sharing the news.

It's not dark matter, writes Space.com. But astronomers have discovered "a vast tendril of hot gas linking four galaxy clusters and stretching out for 23 million light-years, 230 times the length of our galaxy.

"With 10 times the mass of the Milky Way, this filamentary structure accounts for much of the universe's 'missing matter,' the search for which has baffled scientists for decades...." [I]t is "ordinary matter" made up of atoms, composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons (collectively called baryons) which make up stars, planets, moons, and our bodies. For decades, our best models of the universe have suggested that a third of the baryonic matter that should be out there in the cosmos is missing.

This discovery of that missing matter suggests our best models of the universe were right all along. It could also reveal more about the "Cosmic Web," the vast structure along which entire galaxies grew and gathered during the earlier epochs of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe.... The newly observed filament isn't just extraordinary in terms of its mass and size; it also has a temperature of a staggering 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius). That's around 1,800 times hotter than the surface of the sun...

The team's research was published on Thursday (June 19) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Models of the cosmos (including the standard model of cosmology) "have long posited the idea that the missing baryonic matter of the universe is locked up in vast filaments of gas stretching between the densest pockets of space..." the article points out. But now thanks to Suzaku, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) satellite, and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, "a team of astronomers has for the first time been able to determine the properties of one of these filaments, which links four galactic clusters in the local universe."

Team leader Konstantinos Migkas (of the Netherlands' Leiden Observatory) explained the significance of their finding. "For the first time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the cosmos — something that's not happened before."

"It seems that the simulations were right all along."

ScienceDaily reports: Researchers from MIT and Scripps have unveiled a promising new HIV vaccine approach that generates a powerful immune response with just one dose. By combining two immune-boosting adjuvants alum and SMNP the vaccine lingers in lymph nodes for nearly a month, encouraging the body to produce a vast array of antibodies. This one-shot strategy could revolutionize how we fight not just HIV, but many infectious diseases. It mimics the natural infection process and opens the door to broadly neutralizing antibody responses, a holy grail in vaccine design. And best of all, it's built on components already known to medicine.
Thanks to Slashdot reader alternative_right for sharing the news.

French President Emmanuel Macron urged Europe to reassert itself as a global space power, warning that France risks being sidelined in the low Earth orbit satellite market dominated by players like SpaceX and China. Phys.Org reports: Macron spoke at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget outside the French capital a day after France more than doubled its stake in satellite operator Eutelsat, the EU rival to Elon Musk's Starlink. Macron called for more investment as the European space industry struggles to remain competitive in the face of US and Chinese rivals. "SpaceX has disrupted the market, Amazon is also getting involved. China is not far behind, and I think we all need to be very clear-headed," Macron said. Europe must become "a space power once again, with France at its heart," he said. He warned that Europeans were "on the verge of being completely" squeezed out of the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation market.

Macron said France and its partners should not be reliant on non-European constellations in low orbit, calling it "madness." He called non-European players to team up with France. "This must be the solution for our major strategic partners in the Gulf, India, Canada and Brazil," he said. "We really need to succeed in increasing our collective investment effort," Macron added, noting the importance of private investors and public-private collaboration. He also said France planned to organize a space summit in early 2026 to "mobilize our public and private partners across the globe."

An anonymous reader shares a report: At tens of thousands of shoreline cleanups across the United States in recent years, volunteers logged each piece of litter they pulled from the edges of lakes, rivers and beaches into a global database. One of the most common entries? Plastic bags. But in places throughout the United States where plastic bags require a fee or have been banned, fewer bags end up at the water's edge, according to research published this week in Science.

Lightweight and abundant, thin plastic bags often slip out of trash cans and recycling bins, travel in the wind and end up in bodies of water, where they pose serious risks to wildlife, which can become entangled or ingest them. They also break down into harmful microplastics, which have been found nearly everywhere on Earth. Using data complied by the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, researchers analyzed results from 45,067 shoreline cleanups between 2016 to 2023, along with a sample of 182 local and state policies enacted to regulate plastic shopping bags between 2017 and 2023. They found areas that adopted plastic bag policies saw a 25 to 47 percent reduction in the share of plastic bag litter on shorelines, when compared with areas without policies. The longer a policy was in place, the greater the reduction.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: The colossal black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning almost as fast as its maximum rotation rate. That's just one thing astrophysicists have discovered after developing and applying a new method to tease apart the secrets still hidden in supermassive black hole observations collected by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The unprecedented global collaboration spent years working to give us the first direct images of the shadows of black holes, first with M87* in a galaxy 55 million light-years away, then with Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own galaxy. [...]

Their results show, among other things, that Sgr A* is not only spinning at close to its maximum speed, but that its rotational axis is pointed in Earth's direction, and that the glow around it is generated by hot electrons. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the magnetic field in the material around Sgr A* doesn't appear to be behaving in a way that's predicted by theory. M87*, they discovered, is also rotating rapidly, although not as fast as Sgr A*. However, it is rotating in the opposite direction to the material swirling in a disk around it -- possibly because of a past merger with another supermassive black hole. The findings have been detailed in three papers published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. They can be found here, here, and here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Earth could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide emissions. That's the stark warning from more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global warming. [...] At the beginning of 2020, scientists estimated that humanity could only emit 500 billion more tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) -- the most important planet-warming gas -- for a 50% chance of keeping warming to 1.5C. But by the start of 2025 this so-called "carbon budget" had shrunk to 130 billion tonnes, according to the new study.

That reduction is largely due to continued record emissions of CO2 and other planet-warming greenhouse gases like methane, but also improvements in the scientific estimates. If global CO2 emissions stay at their current highs of about 40 billion tonnes a year, 130 billion tonnes gives the world roughly three years until that carbon budget is exhausted. This could commit the world to breaching the target set by the Paris agreement, the researchers say, though the planet would probably not pass 1.5C of human-caused warming until a few years later.

Last year was the first on record when global average air temperatures were more than 1.5C above those of the late 1800s. A single 12-month period isn't considered a breach of the Paris agreement, however, with the record heat of 2024 given an extra boost by natural weather patterns. But human-caused warming was by far the main reason for last year's high temperatures, reaching 1.36C above pre-industrial levels, the researchers estimate. This current rate of warming is about 0.27C per decade -- much faster than anything in the geological record. And if emissions stay high, the planet is on track to reach 1.5C of warming on that metric around the year 2030. After this point, long-term warming could, in theory, be brought back down by sucking large quantities of CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But the authors urge caution on relying on these ambitious technologies serving as a get-out-of-jail card. "For larger exceedance [of 1.5C], it becomes less likely that removals [of CO2] will perfectly reverse the warming caused by today's emissions," warned Joeri Rogelj, professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London.

"Reductions in emissions over the next decade can critically change the rate of warming," he added. "Every fraction of warming that we can avoid will result in less harm and less suffering of particularly poor and vulnerable populations and less challenges for our societies to live the lives that we desire."

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A team of biologists from Northeastern University and the University of Kentucky has found one of the key molecules involved in axolotl regeneration. It's a crucial component in ensuring the body grows back the right parts in the right spot: for instance, growing a hand, from the wrist. "The cells can interpret this cue to say, 'I'm at the elbow, and then I'm going to grow back the hand' or 'I'm at the shoulder... so I'm going to then enable those cells to grow back the entire limb'," biologist James Monaghan explains.

That molecule, retinoic acid, is arranged through the axolotl body in a gradient, signaling to regenerative cells how far down the limb has been severed. Closer to the shoulder, axolotls have higher levels of retinoic acid, and lower levels of the enzyme that breaks it down. This ratio changes the further the limb extends from the body. The team found this balance between retinoic acid and the enzyme that breaks it down plays a crucial role in 'programming' the cluster of regenerative cells that form at an injury site. When they added surplus retinoic acid to the hand of an axolotl in the process of regenerating, it grew an entire arm instead.

In theory, the human body has the right molecules and cells to do this too, but our cells respond to the signals very differently, instead forming collagen-based scars at injury sites. Next, Monaghan is keen to find out what's going on inside cells -- the axolotl's, and our own -- when those retinoic acid signals are received. The research is published in Nature Communications.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the Cool Down: A team of chemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented a new process to separate crude oil components, potentially bringing forward a replacement that can cut its harmful carbon pollution by 90%. The original technique, which uses heat to separate crude oil into gasoline, diesel, and heating oil, accounts for roughly 1% of all global energy consumption and 6% of dirty energy pollution from the carbon dioxide it releases.

"Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size?" said Zachary P. Smith, associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and senior author of the study, as previously reported in Interesting Engineering. The team invented a polymer membrane that divides crude oil into its various uses like a sieve. The new process follows a similar strategy used by the water industry for desalination, which uses reverse osmosis membranes and has been around since the 1970s. [The membrane excelled in lab tests. It increased the toluene concentration by 20 times in a mixture with triisopropylbenzene. It also effectively separated real industrial oil samples containing naphtha, kerosene, and diesel.]

SpaceX's Starship exploded on its test stand in South Texas ahead of an engine test, marking the fourth loss of a Starship this year. "In three previous test flights, the vehicle came apart or detonated during its flight," notes the Washington Post. No injuries were reported but the incident highlights ongoing technical challenges as SpaceX races to prove Starship's readiness for deep-space travel. From the report: In a post on the social media site X, SpaceX said that the explosion on the test stand, which could be seen for miles, happened at about 11 p.m. Central time. For safety reasons, the company had cleared personnel from around the site, and "all personnel are safe and accounted for," it said. The company is "actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials," the post continued. "There are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities, and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while safing operations continue."

Starship comprises two stages -- the Super Heavy booster, which has 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft itself, which has six. Before Wednesday's explosion, the spacecraft was standing alone on the test stand, and not mounted on top of the booster, when it blew up. The engines are test-fired on the Starship before it's mounted on the booster. SpaceX had been hoping to launch within the coming weeks had the engine test been successful. [...] In a post on X, Musk said that preliminary data pointed to a pressure vessel that failed at the top of the rocket. You can watch a recording of the explosion on YouTube.

SpaceX called the incident a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," which caught the attention of Slashdot reader hambone142. In a story submitted to the Firehose, they commented: "I worked for a major computer company whose power supplies caught on fire. We were instructed to cease saying that and instead say the power supply underwent a 'thermal event.' Gotta love it."

ChatGPT-assisted writing dampened brain activity and recall in a controlled MIT study [PDF] of 54 college volunteers divided into AI-only, search-engine, and no-tool groups. Electroencephalography recorded during three essay-writing sessions found the AI group consistently showed the weakest neural connectivity across all measured frequency bands; the tool-free group showed the strongest, with search users in between.

In the first session 83% of ChatGPT users could not quote any line they had just written and none produced a correct quote. Only nine of the 18 claimed full authorship of their work, compared with 16 of 18 in the brain-only cohort. Neural coupling in the AI group declined further over repeated use. When these participants were later asked to write without assistance, frontal-parietal networks remained subdued and 78% again failed to recall a single sentence accurately.

The pattern reversed for students who first wrote unaided: introducing ChatGPT in a crossover session produced the highest connectivity sums in alpha, theta, beta and delta bands, indicating intense integration of AI suggestions with prior knowledge. The MIT authors warn that habitual reliance on large language models "accumulates cognitive debt," trading immediate fluency for weaker memory, reduced self-monitoring, and narrowed neural engagement.

Nature will automatically publish peer review reports and author responses alongside all newly submitted research papers starting this week. The flagship scientific journal previously offered transparent peer review as an optional service since 2020, while Nature Communications has required it since 2016.

All exchanges between authors and anonymous reviewers will become publicly accessible (reviewer identities remain confidential unless they choose disclosure). Nature aims to open what it calls the "black box" of science by revealing the months-long conversations that shape research papers before publication.

Honda has successfully conducted a surprise launch and landing test of its prototype reusable rocket as part of its plan to achieve suborbital spaceflight by 2029. Reuters reports: Honda R&D, the research arm of Japan's second-biggest carmaker, successfully landed its 6.3-meter (20.6-foot) experimental reusable launch vehicle after reaching an altitude of 271 meters (889 feet) at its test facility in northern Japan's space town Taiki, according to the company. While "no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies, Honda will continue making progress in the fundamental research with a technology development goal of realizing technological capability to enable a suborbital launch by 2029," it said in a statement.

Honda in 2021 said it was studying space technologies such as reusable rockets, but it has not previously announced the details of the launch test. A suborbital launch may touch the verge of outer space but does not enter orbit. Studying launch vehicles "has the potential to contribute more to people's daily lives by launching satellites with its own rockets, that could lead to various services that are also compatible with other Honda business," the company added.