Chaos erupts in the US science as Trump’s team tries to freeze federal grants
What the ESA lists tells us about conservation law: Why high-impact-factor journals have more citations than taxon-specific journals
Regional journals, taxa-specific journals and the Journal of the Lepidopterists Society were the most important sources of citations.
The study, published in Conservation Biology, highlights how conservation law relies on the type of rigorous practical work that is typically published in niche journals but is not rewarded by academic promotion and funding systems.
Getting a species added to the ESA can be an important way for a Biologist to help protect populations, because the Species Act gives it the power to stop logging, construction and problematic fishing practices.
In order to get the jobs they want, graduate students are usually advised not to publish in taxon-specific journals. It is great science even if it is. and it has applications to other systems, it’s a very limited audience and it’s going to be harder for them to get a job.”
The team also created an “ESA listing impact factor”, which was based on the fraction of papers that a journal publishes that go on to be cited by the ESA. Pacific Science had a conventional impact factor of 0.74 and was the highest ranked journal.
The study’s findings do not devalue theory-driven science that appeals to high-impact-factor journals. They emphasize the importance of supporting researchers who want to do other work without taking away from their career prospects. “That is really important science when it comes to conservation that we stand to lose if we don’t incentivize this kind of very baseline data collection,” says Choi.
The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: Discovering dark proteins in the human genome as a gift of the United States during the Nazi siege
The human genome contains thousands of darkproteins that have been previously overlooked. Now the search is on to find out what they do. The 12 min read is nature.
In his book The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, author Simon Parkin tells the story of the city’s Plant Institute — the world’s first proper seed bank — during the 1941-1944 Nazi siege. “The institute’s staff members sacrificed themselves, one by one, to protect a collection for which the whole raison d’être was to one day save humanity from starvation,” writes reviewer Simon Ings. Despite unthinkable privation, Vadim Stepanovich Lekhnovich, the curator of the tuber collection, later said that “it wasn’t difficult not to eat the collection. It was impossible to eat your life’s work, the work of your colleagues.
Plans to ramp up fossil-fuel extraction in the United States doesn’t have to spell the end of decarbonization efforts or lead to further environmental degradation, argues energy geographer Jennifer Baka. What matters now is that it’s done right. Factors like how the infrastructure needed to run the projects impacts the local area should be considered when deciding on the regulation of energy projects. “The economic and environmental trade-offs of drilling can then be better evaluated,” Baka writes. It is important to fostering growth and avoiding a catastrophe.
Researchers in the United States are struggling after the administration of President Donald Trump froze a lot of federal grants and loans. A federal judge temporarily blocked the order on 28 January, but many US universities had already advised faculty members against spending federal grant dollars. In a memo the Trump administration tried to clarify what was and wasn’t covered by the freeze, but it didn’t say when the pause would be lifted and scientists were worried about long term effects. It will be simpler to destroy the world’s greatest scientific ecology than to rebuild it, according to a developmental Biologist.
Fast radio bursts: the origin of strange flashes of energy in galaxies? An ancient galaxy that traces its origins
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) — mysterious, millisecond-long flashes of energy — might be even weirder than we thought. Magnetars, dead stars that usually form in young galaxies, are thought to be the source of most FRBs. The edge of an ancient galaxy that had slowed stellar activity has been traced as the origin of an FRB, which suggests that some may have come from somewhere else. The origin story of the FRB is not boring, and is far from solved, according to astronomer Wen-FAi Fong.
