Blogs
Academic freedom in the US has had a rough few weeks. Colleges in Florida and North Carolina, where faculty are accused of politically indoctrinating students, have been in the crosshairs. And an advanced high school curriculum on African American studies was targeted as indoctrination and subsequently watered down—also a slap in the face to the nation’s recognition of February as &ldq
I don’t even know if I should write this blog post, since my thoughts on the subject are still evolving. But maybe this will help me put them in some kind of order! The subject is the generative language systems like ChatGPT and its competitors, and I realize that vast numbers of pixels have been sacrificed commenting on these things already. But it’s clear that the publication cycle t
I’ve written here before about attempts to use machine learning techniques to find rules for synthetic organic reaction conditions (and for the related problem of stringing the best of these together to make synthetic routes to new molecules). My current take is that these are in the “No reason it should be impossible” category, which (if you’re a techno-optimist), is equiv
Editor's Blog
Academic freedom in the US has had a rough few weeks. Colleges in Florida and North Carolina, where faculty are accused of politically indoctrinating students, have been in the crosshairs. And an advanced high school curriculum on African American studies was targeted as indoctrination and subsequently watered down—also a slap in the face to the nation’s recognition of February as &ldq
Anthony (Tony) Fauci will step down this month as chief medical advisor to US President Joe Biden and as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the US National Institutes of Health. I interviewed Fauci for an editorial we published today that reflects on the lessons he has learned throughout his long career in public service. A lightly edited transcript of
An accomplished actor best known for his portrayal of Captain Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce in the US television series M*A*S*H, Alan Alda has taken on another impactful role in recent years: champion of science communication. Having served for 14 years as the host of Scientific American Frontiers, a public television show devoted to explaining recent advances in science and technology, in
Royce W. Murray, a pioneer in electrochemistry, chemically modified electrodes, self-assembled monolayers, and ionic liquids, died on 6 July at age 85. Much of how we think about modifying surfaces and measuring changes induced by those modifications comes from Murray’s lab. Murray’s scientific accomplishments have been enumerated elsewhere, but those who knew him will best remember hi
Ten years ago, an editorial in Science remarked on how little progress had been made on improving the postdoctoral experience since a landmark report in 2000 detailed the variability of such positions. Postdoctoral scholars (postdocs) are hardly better off in 2022; however, postdoctoral fellowship programs can serve as the nuclei for changes that have long been recognized as necessary for improvin
The past 2 years have been a period of mourning, anger, fear, and exhaustion for Asian Americans: 16% of Asian American adults were victims of hate crimes in 2021, up from 12.5% in 2020; 31% worry “all the time” or “often” about being victimized because of their race; and 36% have changed their routines over concerns about personal safety. Despite the increase in anti-Asian
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Visuals
The design team at Science works with a vibrant, talented community of illustrators every week. Their work captures the complex, often nuanced stories of research findings, policy changes, and the scientific community at large. Here are a few of the illustrations that stood out in our team’s minds from 2022.
2022 was a banner year for the Science family of journals′ social media: We hit 3 million followers on Science Twitter. News from Science Twitter reached half a million followers, and Science Instagram grew to 200K (and then some). We experimented with new ways to accurately communicate science in visually engaging ways, promoting short-form video and audio for the first time, as well as Twitter threads.
The graphics team at Science creates scientific visualizations that convey complex concepts with the highest standards for both accuracy and aesthetics. Using a multitude of creative disciplines and visual resources, we use graphic design, cartography, and data visualizations to tell beautiful and informative scientific stories. Our favorites from 2022 covered a range of research areas, from astro
The multimedia team produces the Science Podcast; creates videos on research, news, and original stories; and helps enrich Science content with audio and video. We asked the team to choose a few memorable highlights from throughout the year. Here are their picks for 2022.
Audio
After looking back through the year, Science Podcast host Sarah Crespi produced an entire segment of her favorite podcas
In the Pipeline
I don’t even know if I should write this blog post, since my thoughts on the subject are still evolving. But maybe this will help me put them in some kind of order! The subject is the generative language systems like ChatGPT and its competitors, and I realize that vast numbers of pixels have been sacrificed commenting on these things already. But it’s clear that the publication cycle t
I’ve written here before about attempts to use machine learning techniques to find rules for synthetic organic reaction conditions (and for the related problem of stringing the best of these together to make synthetic routes to new molecules). My current take is that these are in the “No reason it should be impossible” category, which (if you’re a techno-optimist), is equiv
If I had to pick a characteristic of the natural world that distinguishes it from the man-made one, it would be: the closer you look, the more you see. That obtains for some very good underlying reasons. The first is that the natural world can often operate at a finer level of detail than we humans can manage by design, at least outside of an advanced chip fabrication facility. The second is that
Christopher Walsh passed on earlier this month, and those of us who work in chemical biology owe him quite a debt. In his time at MIT,Harvard, and Dana-Farber he deliberately worked in the borderlands between departments of chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and pharmacology, to the benefit of all concerned. He was one of the pioneers in bringing a "chemist's sensibility" into many biological topic
Here’s a defense against bacterial infection that you might not have heard of: “nutritional immunity”. It’s been known for a long time that bacterial and protozoans have easier access to some vital nutrients than they do to others, and that one particular bottleneck is iron. Iron is a vital component for some key enzymes, and the problem is that bioavailable iron is relativ
Here’s some pure process chemistry from the group at Amgen, looking at the synthesis of their well-known KRAS (G12C) drug, sotorasib. That one of course targets the mutant Cys residue in that variation of the protein, but that covalent warhead isn’t the subject of this paper. Instead, it’s looking at what would seem to be a much easier part of the structure, a Suzuki-Miyaura coup