Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Curiosity finds evidence for a habitable lake…on Mars

The report in SCIENCE is here. News story here. Short version: the Curiosity Mars Rover has found very strong evidence for a water-filled lake that lasted a minimum of thousands of years in Gale Crater (the landing site). Importantly, the lake’s PH (acidity) would have supported life. Even more exciting, there appears to be evidence for organic material–money quote from the news story:

When SAM heated the samples, the lakebed samples emitted more carbon dioxide than equal-size dust samples did, and their carbon dioxide came off at lower temperatures. Those observations suggested that heating the dust had simply decomposed naturally occurring, inorganic carbonate minerals, but that heating the lakebed samples had burned organic matter. Most telling, as carbon dioxide from the lakebed surged, the level of oxygen gas from decomposing perchlorates dropped. On seeing those data, one SAM team member reportedly declared, “This is combustion of organic carbon, folks.”

The Impact Factor debate goes critical….

Nobelist Randy Shekman will boycott of Cell, Nature and Science, story here.  Money quote from the article in The Guardian:

Schekman said pressure to publish in “luxury” journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.

Are we at a tipping point? Potentially so, particularly with regards to the use of Impact Factor as a metric in assessing quality of scientific publications. Further quoting:

A journal’s impact factor is a measure of how often its papers are cited, and is used as a proxy for quality. But Schekman said it was “toxic influence” on science that “introduced a distortion”. He writes: “A paper can become highly cited because it is good science – or because it is eye-catching, provocative, or wrong.”

The Shared Services crisis….

I first heard about this issue about a week ago mainly because of my alumni connection to the University of Michigan. Turns out the issue is happening at UT Austin also. The Chronicle has the story here.

The macro picture is that public universities are looking for every last cent in efficiencies as they struggle to find a sustainable business model for the future. The big picture is described pretty accurately with regards to Berkeley here, hat tip to Tyler Cowen.