An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an opinion piece in Scientific American, written by Jason Wright. Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University, where he is director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. From the piece: In August the White House announced (PDF) that the results of all federally funded research should be freely accessible by the end of 2025. This will be a big change for scientists in many fields but ultimately a good move for the democratization of research. Under this new guidance, many peer-reviewed papers would be free for the world to read immediately upon publication rather than stuck behind expensive paywalls, and the data that underlay these papers would be fully available and properly archived for anyone who wanted to analyze them. As an astronomer, I'm pleased that our profession has been ahead of the curve on this, and most of the White House's recommendations are already standard in our field.

NASA, as a federal agency that funds and conducts research, is onboard with the idea of freely accessible data. But it has a plan that goes much further than the White House's and that is highly problematic. The agency currently gives a proprietary period to some scientists who use particular facilities, such as a 12-month period for the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), so that those scientists can gather and analyze data carefully without fear of their work being poached. NASA is looking to end this policy in its effort to make science more open-access. Losing this exclusivity would be really bad for astronomy and planetary science. Without a proprietary period, an astronomer with a brilliant insight might spend years developing it, months crafting a successful proposal to execute it, and precious hours of highly competitive JWST time to actually perform the observations -- only to have someone else scoop up the data from a public archive and publish the result. This is a reasonable concern -- such scooping has happened before.

Without a proprietary period during which the astronomers who proposed given observations have exclusive access to the data, those researchers will have to work very quickly in order to avoid being scooped. Receiving credit for discoveries is especially important for early-career astronomers looking to establish their credentials as they search for a permanent job. Under such time pressure, researchers will need to cut corners, such as skipping the checks and tests that define careful work. Such a sloppy approach will lead to hasty results and incorrect conclusions to the detriment of the entire field. It also can lead to the erosion of work-life boundaries, with astronomers working long hours, sacrificing their health and family time so their result gets out before the competition's. This is bad for the culture of science and disproportionately affects those with children or other time-consuming personal circumstances (such as being a student, a caretaker or a full-time college instructor while also performing research). Allowing researchers to properly benefit from their work is critical for making astronomy as fair and equitable as possible. [...] "One potential alternative is to create a professional requirement that those who proposed an observation but have not published from it should be offered co-authorship on any paper that uses the data," suggests Wright, noting that it's "not currently the cultural norm in astronomy" and "comes with a whole host of complications."

"Another option is to change the standard for how credit is assigned for any observational work," adds Wright. "Astronomers could, for example, demand that any paper citing a result also cite the proposal that generated the enabling data. In this way, the proposal team could still accrue credit for its work, even if it wasn't the first to publish."

"In the end, though, such adjustments are secondary to the heart of the matter, which is that NASA's plan to eliminate the proprietary period for JWST data is bad for astronomy."

To discard the theory of dark matter, "you'll need to replace it with something even more bizarre: a force of gravity that, at some distances, pulls massive objects together and, at other distances, pushes them apart." That's how Science magazine describes a new study, adding that "The analysis underscores how hard it is to explain away dark matter" — even though "after decades of trying, physicists haven't spotted particles of dark matter floating around." [T]o do away with dark matter, theorists would also need explain away its effects on much larger, cosmological scales. And that is much harder, argues Kris Pardo, a cosmologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and David Spergel, a cosmologist at Princeton University. To make their case, they compare the distribution of ordinary matter in the early universe as revealed by measurements of the afterglow of the big bang — the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — with the distribution of the galaxies today....

Pardo and Spergel derived a mathematical function that describes how gravity would have had to work to get from the distribution of ordinary matter revealed by the CMB to the current distribution of the galaxies. They found something striking: That function must swing between positive and negative values, meaning gravity would be attractive at some length scales and repulsive at others, Pardo and Spergel report this week in Physical Review Letters. "And that's superweird," Pardo says...

In a paper posted in June to the preprint server arXiv, theoretical cosmologists Constantinos Skordis and Tom Zlosnik of the Czech Academy of Sciences present a dark matter-less theory of modified gravity they say jibes with CMB data. To do that, researchers add to a theory like general relativity an additional, tunable field called a scalar field. It has energy, and through Einstein's equivalence of mass and energy, it can behave like a form of mass. Set things up just right and at large spatial scales, the scalar field interacts only with itself and acts like dark matter...

Skordis's and Zlosnik's paper is "very exciting," Pardo says. But he notes that in some sense it merely replaces one mysterious thing — dark matter — with another — a carefully tuned scalar field. Given the complications, Pardo says, "dark matter is kind of the easier explanation."

"YouTube has a huge problem right now," argues videogame streamer Markiplier. "People's accounts are being suspended without reason, without provocation, and their appeals to get it back are being denied without explanation."

Engadget revisits "YouTube's occasionally questionable moderation" -- in this case, people being banned simply for using too many emojis (or "emotes") in their comments to videogame-streamer Markiplier during a YouTube-produced choose-your-own-adventure special. The service says it has reinstated legions of Markiplier fans' accounts after they were banned simply for spamming emotes (and not even to a great degree) while voting during a live playthrough of the interactive movie A Heist with Markiplier.

Not all of the accounts have been restored, Markiplier said, but YouTube added that it was "looking into" both why human moderators denied appeals and how it might "prevent this in the future." The change of heart came after Markiplier (aka Mark Fischbach) posted a video illustrating both how trivial the bans were, examples of denied appeals and the consequences for some users.

As he explained, this didn't just kick people out of chat. It affected entire Google accounts -- people lost videos, channel memberships or access to important services they needed, all because they spammed several emotes in one line. He also blasted YouTube for claiming that appeals were carefully reviewed, noting that there was at least one instance where someone succeeded with an appeal, and was almost immediately banned again for seemingly no reason... The incident highlights the complications and limitations of YouTube's approach to moderation. While the sheer size of YouTube virtually mandates some form of automated policing, it's not guaranteed to correctly interpret everything (especially if it's asked to be particularly strict).

dryriver writes: The BBC has a longish story on a Mexican surgeon who makes his patients wear a VR headset that distracts them from the surgical procedure being performed on them. While Dr Mosso cuts and removes and stitches, the patient flies through a 3D VR re-creation of Machu Picchu or other fantastical places, oblivious to being in an otherwise -- for many patients -- stress inducing surgical setting. This removes the need to give patients powerful sedatives or painkillers to keep them calm and prevent their blood pressure from fluctuating. The surgeon only anesthetizes the part of the body where the surgery is performed, while the patient is absorbed in colorful and immersive VR worlds. An excerpt from the report: "The surgeon makes his first cut and blood spills down Ana's leg. She's surrounded by medical equipment -- stools, trolleys, swabs, syringes -- with super-bright surgical lamps suspended above the bed. Her vital signs are displayed on monitors just behind. But Ana is oblivious. She's immersed in a three-dimensional re-creation of Machu Picchu. She begins her journey with a breathtaking aerial view of the ancient city clinging to the mountainside, before swooping down to explore the details of stepped terraces, moss-covered walls and tiny stone huts. Mosso watches her carefully. A 54-year-old surgeon at Panamerican University in Mexico City, he's on a mission to bring virtual reality into the operating room. Mosso is using VR as a high-tech distraction technique, allowing surgeons to carry out operations that would normally require powerful painkillers and sedatives, with nothing more than local anaesthetic. He's trying to prove that reducing drug doses in this way not only slashes costs for Mexico's cash-strapped hospitals, but cuts complications and recovery times for patients too."

Almost a year ago you had a chance to ask professor Kevin Fu about medical device security. A number of events (including the collapse of his house) conspired to delay the answering of those questions. Professor Fu has finally found respite from calamity, coincidentally at a time when the FDA has issued guidance on the security of medical devices. Below you'll find his answers to your old but not forgotten questions.