This is an open access paper, you can read it here:
https://www.nature.com/article...

The core process they're using to convert CO2 into fuel is just about 100 years old. What they've done is develop a better catalyst for that process (a "traditional" Iron-Manganese-Potassium catalyst, but synthesized a new way). That is important!

There's a big error in the summary here: this process combines CO2 and hydrogen. This IS turning hydrogen into fuel.

This process is what the government people meant by "clean coal" 20 years ago. I'm a scientist, I wrote proposals back then to work on this exact process for "clean coal" programs. The core idea came from Nate Lewis, a chemist at Caltech who was the driving scientist behind "An Inconvenient Truth." In some alternate universe, when scientists and politicians made a push to fund and scale this technology in 2001, they would not have called it "clean coal" but some marketing term more palatable to environmentalists. In that case, we may have weaned ourselves off of fossil fuels by now. It's a shame we, as a species, have not worked harder on this.

Well, here's hoping we do better in the next 20 years!

Yeah... you answered the question, more or less, about what kind of person cares about twitter followers. You failed to catch the implication that the people who do care about twitter followers are not at all the people the rest of us would like running our government.

If you're an academic or a CEO and you care about "twitter followers," you're doing your job wrong. If you're in marketing or the entertainment industry, then sure, go crazy for it. The rest of us need to leave that medium to those folks and focus on having substantive discussions again.

I think you missed the point here.

Yes, they vaccinated 5,000 people. Of the 5,000 people they vaccinated 4,993 were faculty and 7 were among the group of 1300 trainees.

The point is that the university faculty put themselves at the front of the line and have tried to pass that terrible decision off on an algorithm.

If you click through to the ProPublica article, you'll see that some of the faculty recognized what was going on and were pretty horrified by it. It's hypocritical and poor policy (or par for the course for university bureaucracies).

Stanford Decided To Vaccinate Only Seven of Its Frontline COVID-19 Workers, Out of 5,000 Doses

That should fix it.

Really? Where can you buy a perovskite solar cell? They're cheap if you're allowed to ignore both the labor costs of the scientists making them and the environmental laws that prevent scaled up use of the materials used in that manufacture. So... they're not actually efficient on a cost basis yet.

Oxford PV has been working on this, and every year their commercial launch moves back by a year.

This is a very typical press release for a science paper. I'm a scientist and this kind of stuff is horrible. These are "grant manager" press releases designed to excite government grant managers and make statements that would never get through peer review in a journal article. It's dishonest.

For anyone who didn't catch it, they broke a record for a very particular type of solar cell. There are other solar cells with much higher efficiency. No where in there do they clearly or correctly articulate the reason for this type of cell (which is that perovskites can be printed, meaning they could potentially have a lower cost/energy than silicon... but there are still big manufacturing problems).

There's been tremendous progress in perovskite solar cell function and manufacturing over the last 10 years, but the gains have slowed down. The people trying to commercialize it are struggling. There's an opportunity to do something important with this technology. The problem that needs to be solved is scaling the manufacturing of completed cells (including encapsulation) while removing the lead from the manufacturing process and avoiding use of organic solvents. This paper doesn't help.

As a physicist, this looks like a simple algebraic rendition of relativity. It doesn't look like there's anything here that can't be found in an undergraduate relativity textbook.

Come on now. I'm a physicist, and alpha is a very interesting bit of physics. It's cool.

However, having someone with a career dependent on continuing grants in the area of improved alpha measurements call this "a big accomplishment" is the same as your local Ford dealer calling the new Mustang "a big accomplishment."

Why is this a big accomplishment? Why is it important? The right person to answer those questions is someone who is going to use the results. In this case, probably a cosmologist. If this was actually a big deal, they would be quoting a cosmologist quoted saying "This really helps focus us on where to look for Dark Energy". Why don't they have that quote? Is it sloppy science journalism by Nature or is it that none of the quotable cosmologists actually care about this measurement?

If you're immersed in academic culture, you're not going to hear about all the big discoveries in journals or at the conferences you're going to. The current generations of scientists are just as good as what we've had in the past, but the old systems of scientific communication isn't used by those folks. Of your list of five, I think only Planck would be out there publishing papers and trying to get grants. The rest would (rightly) see that approach as a waste of time.

The government sees universities and their slave labor as the place to go for foundational research because it is the lowest bidder. Industry sees academic research as a training ground. Honestly ask yourself: how can people that are treated like crap, paid almost nothing, and with less than 10 years of experience really be doing the most advanced science in the world? This divergence of views leads to some hurt feelings and not a lot of good communication. It's of course not true that academic research lags behind industry, just as it's not true that industrial research is only about making money.

I'm a scientist, and I could care less about this. It has no impact on me. However, when we commonly talk about "science," we're really talking about the contract research industry, where the product is a technical report written on behalf of some other organization. The value of that report is reflected by publication metrics, and maximizing those metrics is how you get more contracts.

Publications are marketing documents. We are producing marketing copy when we write an article. The text can be true, it can have high standards. Economically, it's still marketing. That's the name of the industry that scientific papers live in.

Nature is a premium brand in this market. It's like Ferrari or Rolex. It's brand value is partly based on being expensive. Just as you wouldn't expect a Ferrari to be affordable, you can't expect Nature to be affordable. Similarly, you expect Nature to perform this marketing function at a high level, and it does!

Publishing has nothing to do with science as we imagine it is: the advancement of human knowledge and capability. If that's what you want to do, go find a research job where publication metrics are not tied to professional success (for example, SpaceX, or Pfizer, or some similar place where something other than a report indicates value).

Yeah, I think the analogy is stretched pretty thin, and I'm not at all a computer scientist, so I'm sure I'm missing many details here. Essentially, we can't understand "bits" in biology right now, because there's not yet an understanding of what the "bits" are and what the "system" is. It's not clear there is a difference; studying "bits" may be a fools errand.

While I'm not a computer scientist, I am a biological physicist, and I build the tools and the data streams necessary for system level measurements without the artificial frameworks of "-omics." This is something that's been building for the last 20 years, and is likely to continue building for the next 20.

Biology is undergoing a revolution as meaningful and fundamental as the introduction of quantum mechanics and relativity was to physics at the start of the 20th century. The difference is that it's not a few famous theories leading the charge, but a change in the way of thinking and experimentation across almost every sub-field of biology. It's slow and hard to see day-to-day, but no less fundamental. It's easy to remember that until very recently, biology had more in common with butterfly collecting (to use a cliche) than with a reductionist science like physics or computer science. To put it simply, for most of the 20th century biology was about collecting facts instead of a quest for the secrets of life. So we were all taught how to collect facts.

The frustration in TFA about not getting the details and wonder of biology taught early on comes from the fact that we're still figuring out the fundamentals of how biology works.

The major revelation of the human genome project is still being digested by the science community. That revelation was the certainty that we only have about 30,000 genes. If you look back at the editorials that were written in science journals when the human genome was published, you'll see some despair that the project didn't find some potential greater store of information in the genetic code. The thing is, we contain over 2 million different types of proteins. Our DNA is not a static code for manufacturing proteins, it's dynamic, and only a very small piece of an incredibly complex system that directs protein creation (itself only a small part of how biology works). Figuring out that complex system is rightly a conveyor belt for Nobel Prizes.

While this has been easily understood and (more or less) accepted by biologists for 20 years, what to do about it is more difficult. For some of us, it means that the separation of sub-fields of biology into protein biology, genetics, epigenetics, developmental biology, etc. are human created structures that lead us to think about biology in incorrect ways. The "revolution" in biology could be summarized by saying that system biology is really the only way to gain a complete understanding of what's happening.

Now, that sounds great, and we can all get excited about the engineering looking diagrams and pseudo-code style descriptions of system biology. The problem now is that our experimental understanding of biology has been (and continues to be) through the use of old -omics related lab tools. We purify out a single component and freeze it in time. As the TFA says, the one thing conserved across biological fields are the tools used. They've been conserved across fields for 30+ years, we've simply made them faster and easier to use. With such a large number of potential components, each changing function over time, this approach is obviously not going to be giving us very useful information. It's the equivalent in software of taking apart code line by line, giving each line to a different person, and then hoping they're able to make the logical connections on their own to the lines they've never seen.

When you sit down and understand how biologists have been able to take these snapshots of biological components and fit them into some functioning model of biological system activity, you'll realize that the only things more amazing than biology are the biologists themselves who have essentially performed miracles so that we can generate the tiny bit of understanding that we have today.

It's my understanding that when writing a headline as a question, there needs to be the possibility that the answer is "no". That's just not the case here.

The weird thing about this election is that Biden's policies didn't really matter. Is he going to push us toward a new world where tech companies are broken up or are we headed toward another laissez faire period like we had under Obama?

That... just doesn't really matter. We all believe what we want, the point is that Biden is likely to implement policy in a predictable and classically conservative manner (slow change) rather than the disruptive and radical change we've had under Trump. And, I think that's what most of us want (notably, we're likely to have a split government, that's a pretty strong indication that people want to slow things down).

With that thought in mind, we're in for some really long and boring committee meetings on anti-trust issues as well as changes to the tariff policy with China. There will be years of depositions, articles, and statements by experts before anything really happens.

This is a really strange time. I think some people will find the idea in that last paragraph really soothing, and others will be horribly disappointed.

You know, we always talk about how there isn't enough health care in this country. Why isn't the call to go out and learn to be a home health aide or an orderly or something that might actually be attainable and useful by an untrained person with time on their hands?