Payal Dhar

Instead of fully fledged manuscripts, Octopus and ResearchEquals allow researchers to publish individual units of research — from research questions and hypotheses to code, multimedia and presentations. The concept is called modular publishing, and both sites hope to push academics to think beyond conventional publications as the primary unit of scholarly research by breaking the research cycle into pieces.
“Journals do a very good job of disseminating findings,” says Alexandra Freeman at the...

Even though they were discovered only about a dozen years ago, MXenes (max-eens) have delighted materials engineers with their versatility. These conductive 2D layered nanomaterials are exceptionally durable, impermeable to electromagnetic radiation, and can store energy faster that materials currently used in batteries and supercapacitors.

Space is a hostile environment, with huge variations in temperature and ionizing radiation that degrades spacecraft surfaces. A research team has now developed a multifunctional, lightweight skin for spacecraft exteriors that provides thermal and radiation protection and can also harvest energy. Unlike existing thermal control systems, it requires no power or bulky add-ons.

Artificial intelligence has already shaved years off research into protein engineering. Now, for the first time, scientists have synthesized proteins predicted by an AI model in the lab and found them to work just as well as their natural counterparts.

The unique conditions on board the International Space Station are proving to be an excellent environment for studying stem cells, organoids and tissue regeneration.

Though AI bias is very real, it’s a fixable problem. Researchers assert that building accountability into AI is not just about computational approaches but looking at the sociological and other parameters behind the ideas and processes that generated these technologies and systems.

Tech companies — including several global VPN providers — and privacy advocates are bristling at new cyber requirements they say could jeopardize the security of Indian citizens. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) requirements compel data centers, virtual private servers, cloud services and VPN providers to collect troves of personal information about their customers from the moment they start using their products.

When legality trumps ethics it is society’s loss. A court case in India, pitting the upstart pirate websites Sci-Hub and Libgen (Library Genesis) against the global giants of peer-reviewed publishing, could help decide a critical issue: whether scientific information should be available only for a fee, or available free to citizens who are already funding it with their tax money and to the rest of the world.

Spider silk proteins known as spidroins can form hydrogels at body temperature, according to a new study. The study’s authors think that the gels could be tailored for a variety of biomedical applications, such as tissue engineering and drug delivery.

Replicating the human brain in software and silicon is a longstanding goal of artificial intelligence (AI) research. And while neuromorphic chips have made significant inroads in being able to run multiple computations simultaneously, and can both compute and store data, they are nowhere close to emulating the energy efficiency of the brain.

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have demonstrated a fast, scalable, and cost-effective method to produce films that change color when stretched. Using a digital projector and commercially available light-sensitive polymers, they were able to create large sheets of the material, which could find use in fields such as medicine and robotics.

As climate change edges from crisis to emergency, the aviation sector looks set to miss its 2050 goal of net-zero emissions. In the five years preceding the pandemic, the top four U.S. airlines—American, Delta, Southwest, and United—saw a 15 percent increase in the use of jet fuel. Despite continual improvements in engine efficiencies, that number is projected to keep rising. A glimmer of hope, however, comes from solar fuels.

Recent advances in soft robotics have opened up possibilities for the construction of smart fibers and textiles that have a variety of mechanical, therapeutic, and wearable possibilities. These fabrics, when programmed to expand or contract through thermal, electric, fluid or other stimuli, can produce motion, deformation, or force for different functions.