US Science Research Articles

US science to be open to all

US science to be open to all

America’s research adviser: Science's go-to guy

With the ear of politicians and the respect of researchers, Norman Augustine is the most influential non-scientist in US science.

Leadership hurdles

Asian researchers and engineers are too rarely made US science leaders, say Lilian Gomory Wu and Wei Jing

Fiscal cliff is bad news for US science

Fiscal cliff is bad news for US science

Time to stop relying on things past

US science advocates are depending on strategies and statistics that may not survive contemporary politics, says David Goldston.

The inhibiting factors that principal investigators experience in leading publicly funded research

Securing public funding to conduct research and leading it by being a principal investigator (PI) is seen as significant career development step. Such a role brings professional prestige but also new responsibilities beyond research leadership to research management. If public funding brings financial and infrastructure support, little is understood about the inhibiting factors that publicly funded PIs face given the research autonomy offered by publicly funded research. Our study finds that there are three key PI inhibiting factors (1) political and environmental, (2) institutional and (3) project based. Traditional knowledge, skills and technical know-how of publicly funded PIs are insufficient to deal with the increasing managerial demands and expectations i.e. growing external bureaucracy of public funding agencies. Public funding is no longer the ‘freest form of support’ as suggested by Chubin and Hackett (Peerless science: peer review and US science policy. Suny Press, New York, 1990) and the inhibiting factors experienced by publicly funded PIs limits their research autonomy. We also argue that PIs have little influence in overcoming these inhibiting factors despite their central role in conducting publicly funded research.

High stakes for US science

High stakes for US science

Building Potemkin schools: Science curriculum reform in a STEM school

‘Potemkin schools’ is used as the phrase to capture what a US science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) public speciality high school becomes as a result of its institutional branding. By way of an examination of the efforts of one teacher drawn into school branding through his ‘inquiry-based reform’ of an Advanced Chemistry course, this paper illuminates the tensions between the rhetorical intentions to engage in curriculum innovation and the reality of constraints and conflicting goals. The teacher, unable to resolve the tensions, was pushed into formalizing and routinizing his ideas into a reform project without understanding what was behind the rhetoric of the school’s self-image statements. The need to find and develop a ‘language’ to talk and think about ‘inquiry-based’ reform and its processes in meaningful terms and not in slogans is discussed. The irrationality and complexity of the reform which emerged from the findings contrast with the rationality of building Potemkin villages, hence illuminating the complexity in curriculum reform in STEM schools.

US science: The Obama experiment

Nearly four years after US President Barack Obama pledged to put science in its rightful place, Nature asks if he kept his word.

Giants all around — apart from the squid

Giants all around — apart from the squid

Millennial Health Care: Change You Can Believe in

Millennial Health Care: Change You Can Believe in

US science and technology eminence is in trouble, says report

NRC urges federal, state, and business actions to bolster research universities. NRC urges federal, state, and business actions to bolster research universities.

Team-based learning: A practical guide: AMEE Guide No. 65

Team-based learning™ (TBL) is an instructional strategy developed in the business school environment in the early 1990s by Dr Michaelsen who wanted the benefits of small group learning within large classes. In 2001, a US federal granting agency awarded funds for educators in the health sciences to learn about and implement the strategy in their educational programs; TBL was put forward as one such strategy and as a result it is used in over 60 US and international health science professional schools. TBL is very different from problem-based learning (PBL) and other small group approaches in that there is no need for multiple faculty or rooms, students must come prepared to sessions, and individual and small groups of students (teams) are highly accountable for their contributions to team productivity. The instructor must be a content-expert, but need not have any experience or expertise in group process to conduct a successful TBL session. Students do not need any specific instruction in teamwork since they learn how to be collaborative and productive in the process. TBL can replace or complement a lecture-based course or curriculum.

Last-minute wins for US science

Last-minute wins for US science

Scan Problems in Digital CORONA Satellite Images from USGS Archives

The scientific value and relevance of declassified CORONA satellite images has been affirmed by numerous research projects and publications. From 1996 on, duplicates of the CORONA film were available in all standard analog photographic products, including film negatives and photo prints. Since September 2004, the analog imagery is no longer available and has been replaced by digital images produced by the US Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS) Scanning Department. This paper points out a heretofore undetected and not negligible problem with the digital imagery. A calibration error in the Leica DSW700 photogrammetric scanner has created gaps between scan tiles. We analyzed the effects these errors have on resulting DSMs and checked the extent of the scanning problem. Part of the USGS archive, i.e. images ordered and scanned between September 2004 and November-December 2007, have comparable scan errors but are nevertheless archived and available for future orders.

Future Mars geophysical observatories for understanding its internal structure, rotation, and evolution

Our fundamental understanding of the interior of the Earth comes from seismology, geodesy, geochemistry, geomagnetism, geothermal studies, and petrology. For the Earth, measurements in those disciplines of geophysics have revealed the basic internal layering of the Earth, its dynamical regime, its thermal structure, its gross compositional stratification, as well as significant lateral variations in these quantities. Planetary interiors not only record evidence of conditions of planetary accretion and differentiation, they exert significant control on surface environments.We present recent advances in possible in-situ investigations of the interior of Mars, experiments and strategies that can provide unique and critical information about the fundamental processes of terrestrial planet formation and evolution. Such investigations applied on Mars have been ranked as a high priority in virtually every set of European, US and international high-level planetary science recommendations for the past 30 years. New seismological methods and approaches based on the cross-correlation of seismic noise by two seismic stations/landers on the surface of Mars and on joint seismic/orbiter detection of meteorite impacts, as well as the improvement of the performance of Very Broad-Band (VBB) seismometers have made it possible to secure a rich scientific return with only two simultaneously recording stations. In parallel, use of interferometric methods based on two Earth–Mars radio links simultaneously from landers tracked from Earth has increased the precision of radio science experiments by one order of magnitude. Magnetometer and heat flow measurements will complement seismic and geodetic data in order to obtain the best information on the interior of Mars.In addition to studying the present structure and dynamics of Mars, these measurements will provide important constraints for the astrobiology of Mars by helping to understand why Mars failed to sustain a magnetic field, by helping to understand the planet’s climate evolution, and by providing a limit for the energy available to the chemoautotrophic biosphere through a measurement of the surface heat flow. The landers of the mission will also provide meteorological stations to monitor the climate and obtain new measurements in the atmospheric boundary layer.

New Push to Bring US Biological Collections to the World's Online Community

On the sprawling campus of the US Department of Agri ­ culture’s Agricultural Research Ser vice (ARS) in Beltsville, Maryland, Shannon Dominick, scientific col­ lections coordinator of the National Fungus Collections, stands over a light table and gingerly opens an envelope encasing an 88­year­old specimen of Polyporus pterygodes. The fungus was gathered by Kaneyoshi Sawada, a pioneer of Asian mycology. Using tweezers, Dominick carefully arranges the sample so that it can be photographed with a simple digital camera. The photo will be uploaded to a laptop computer and sent to a researcher in China, who is studying the Sawada collection. The process of capturing the image of a single species can take up to 30 minutes. The federal government is tak­ ing significant steps to accelerate the pace of making US science collections like this one publicly available online through digitization, including both collection data and images for each specimen. The National Fungus Col­ lections are far ahead of many others: Roughly three­quarters of their more than one million specimens have the label data—who collected it, when and where it was collected, what species sible” of their collections information available online within 36 months. This was strengthened in December when Congress passed the America Competes Act, putting the directive into law. Unfortunately, the law did not come with extra funding. it is—searchable online, but includ­ ing images in its digital catalog is a gargantuan task that collections staff have not been able to accomplish, given their limited resources. Not that Dominick wouldn’t love to. The col­ lection is “awesome,” she says, and the idea of making it accessible to the world is exciting. “Free and public— digitization is great,” she says. As part of the federal push, in July, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the first of major new grants—totaling $100 million over a 10­year period—to further the digi­ tization of biological collections. The grants were a response to a 2010 stra­ tegic plan developed by the biological collections community, Establishing a National Digital Biological Collections Resource, for rapidly bringing online all biological specimens, an effort described as “a grand challenge” meant “to transform the practice of collections­based biological research, scientific achievement, and interna­ tional research collaboration.” Meanwhile, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a memo in October 2010 to the heads of all federal departments and agencies, directing them, among other measures, to make as much “as pos­

Crunch time for US science

Researchers must make a stronger case for funding in the face of a perfect storm of budget cuts and eroding political support, says Jay Gulledge.

Scientists Want More Children

Scholars partly attribute the low number of women in academic science to the impact of the science career on family life. Yet, the picture of how men and women in science – at different points in the career trajectory – compare in their perceptions of this impact is incomplete. In particular, we know little about the perceptions and experiences of junior and senior scientists at top universities, institutions that have a disproportionate influence on science, science policy, and the next generation of scientists. Here we show that having fewer children than wished as a result of the science career affects the life satisfaction of science faculty and indirectly affects career satisfaction, and that young scientists (graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) who have had fewer children than wished are more likely to plan to exit science entirely. We also show that the impact of science on family life is not just a woman's problem; the effect on life satisfaction of having fewer children than desired is more pronounced for male than female faculty, with life satisfaction strongly related to career satisfaction. And, in contrast to other research, gender differences among graduate students and postdoctoral fellows disappear. Family factors impede talented young scientists of both sexes from persisting to research positions in academic science. In an era when the global competitiveness of US science is at risk, it is concerning that a significant proportion of men and women trained in the select few spots available at top US research universities are considering leaving science and that such desires to leave are related to the impact of the science career on family life. Results from our study may inform university family leave policies for science departments as well as mentoring programs in the sciences.

Debt deal sets day of reckoning

US science agencies avoid immediate pain but could be devastated by automatic cuts in 2013.