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This week's headlines:
	Journal impact factor 'distorts science'
	Is city growth driving malaria elimination?
	Moon mission paves way to 'green' steel
	Fast and painless way to better mental arithmetic
	Novel material shows promise for extracting uranium from seawater
	Gliding robot mimics flying fish
	Reading the unreadable
	Parcels find their way to you via the crowd
Journal impact factor 'distorts science'
May 17, 2013 | ABC News
An international declaration by more than 150 leading scientists and 75 scientific organisations is demanding a rethink of the role 'journal impact factor' plays in the evaluation of research. The Declaration on Research Assessment, released today, contains 18 recommendations for change and is signed by a coalition of scientists, journal editors, publishers and scientific and funding bodies. The statement was released to coincide with editorials in scientific journals around the world. The declaration highlights growing concern at the obsession in world science for publication in journals with a high impact factor. The most influential citation ranking system is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) that appears annually as part of the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge. This ranking reflects the average number of times a journal's papers are referenced or cited by other researchers during the preceding two years. Many institutions and funding bodies rate the success of a scientist based on the number of times they publish in a highly ranked journal. But signatories to the declaration say the system is flawed because its use of an average, rather than median number of citations per journal, means highly cited papers can artificially lift a journal's rankings. The declaration recommends research impact should be judged on the number of citations of the individual paper as well as other measures such as health outcomes, policy changes or diagnostic impact.
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Is city growth driving malaria elimination?
May 16, 2013 | SciDev / Malaria Journal
The elimination of malaria has closely followed patterns of urban growth over the past century, raising hope that booming urbanisation in developing nations will lead to further reductions in cases of what is still one of the world's top killers, says a study. Researchers from the UK and the US used global data on city growth and malaria transmission maps to examine the relationships between the changes in these factors between 1900 and 2000. They discovered that when 50 countries where malaria had existed in 1900 were finally certified as being malaria free, many more people were living in urban areas and the percentages of urbanised land were higher than is the case today in countries where malaria is still endemic. Furthermore, the rate of urbanisation from 1900 was faster in those countries that had eliminated malaria than in those where it remains. The close link also held for 29 countries that contained both areas declared malaria-free since 1900 and areas where malaria persists. In three-quarters of these countries, mostly in Asia and the Americas, malaria-free areas were more urbanised and urbanisation had increased more rapidly than in areas that still had malaria. The study also compared changes in malaria transmission in areas that are urban today versus those that have remained rural in 158 countries where malaria was endemic in 1900. It found that 82% of countries saw malaria transmission fall by more in urban than rural areas since 1900. The study says cities bring improved health, housing and wealth, all of which may cut malaria by contributing to changes in the behaviour of humans, mosquitoes and parasites. But it failed to resolve a 'chicken-and-egg' question: does increased urbanisation cut transmission or does reduced malaria promote development?
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Moon mission paves way to 'green' steel
May 09, 2013 | ABC News / AFP / Nature
The dream of 'green' steel is a reality with scientists from MIT unveiling a new method of extracting metallic iron from its ore while curbing CO2 emissions. The process uses electrolysis and may eventually result in cheaper steel of higher purity. Critically the only other by-product of the innovation is oxygen. About 1.5bn tonnes of iron is produced worldwide annually, contributing about five per cent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Despite its best efforts, until now the steel-making industry has had little success in developing environmentally friendly processing. The team's idea for the new approach arose while working on a NASA project to look for ways of producing oxygen on the moon - a key step toward future lunar bases. The researchers found a process called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE) could use iron oxide from the lunar soil to make oxygen in abundance, with no special chemistry. They tested the process using lunar-like soil from Meteor Crater in Arizona - which contains iron oxide from an asteroid impact thousands of years ago - finding it produced steel as a by-product. The original method used an iridium anode, but since iridium is expensive and supplies are limited, it was not a viable approach for bulk steel production. However the team identified an inexpensive metal alloy of chromium and iron that can replace the iridium anode in molten oxide electrolysis. Conventional steel plants are only economical if they can produce millions of tonnes of steel per year, whereas MOE could be viable for production of a few hundred thousand tonnes per year, according to the researchers.
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Fast and painless way to better mental arithmetic
May 16, 2013 | Science Daly / Current Biology
In the future, if you want to improve your ability to manipulate numbers in your head, you might just plug yourself in. So say researchers who report on studies of a harmless form of brain stimulation applied to an area known to be important for math ability. 'With just five days of cognitive training and noninvasive, painless brain stimulation, we were able to bring about long-lasting improvements in cognitive and brain functions,' says Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford. The improvements held for a period of six months after training. No one knows exactly how this relatively new method of stimulation, called transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS), works. But the researchers say the evidence suggests that it allows the brain to work more efficiently by making neurons fire more synchronously. The team had shown previously that another form of brain stimulation could make people better at learning and processing new numbers. But TRNS is even less perceptible to those receiving it. TRNS also has the potential to help even more people because it has been shown to improve mental arithmetic - the ability to add, subtract, or multiply a string of numbers in your head, for example - not just new number learning. Mental arithmetic is a more complex and challenging task, which more than 20% of people struggle with. Ultimately, with better integration of neuroscience and education, this line of study could really help humans reach our cognitive potential in math and beyond. It might also be of particular help to those suffering with neurodegenerative illness, stroke, or learning difficulties, according to the researchers.
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Novel material shows promise for extracting uranium from seawater
May 16, 2013 | Technology Review
The world’s oceans contain nearly a thousand times as much uranium as conventional reserves, and researchers have spent decades trying to develop an efficient way to extract it. Experts say it is important to develop such technology because it could serve as insurance in case supplies of uranium for nuclear reactors ever become scarce. The most advanced system today employs plastic fibres with uranium-binding chemical groups grafted onto their surface. Now, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have designed a metal-organic framework (MOF) to collect common uranium-containing ions dissolved in seawater. In lab tests, the material was at least four times better than the conventional plastic adsorbent at drawing uranium from artificial seawater. Metal-organic frameworks are considered very promising for certain technological applications, including gas storage and chemical separation. Their structure can be tuned for different purposes. This allows them to be made extremely porous, resulting in very high surface areas—an order of magnitude larger than that of zeolites, a porous material already used in many commercial adsorbents. And like organic polymers, metal-organic frameworks have surfaces that can be modified so as to bind to specific molecules.
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Gliding robot mimics flying fish
May 19, 2013 | New Scientist
It mimics the leaping glides of flying fish and needs no external power. The Jump Glider could be the first in a new generation of robots, harnessing aerodynamic lift to travel further than it would if it simply hopped, and without using additional energy. Researchers at Stanford University in California created the robot, which is 30 cm long and has a battery charged by a solar cell. Its motor compresses a lightweight carbon-fibre spring, which when released flings the robot into the air. The robot's wing then pivots to maximise lift. At the peak of its leap, the wing flattens out to prolong glide time. In tests, the Jump Glider managed to fly about 5 metres per hop. The way in which the robot stores and releases energy is impressive, says Chris Melhuish, director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK, who develops robots that scavenge energy from their environment. Because the Jump Glider uses the sun's rays to recharge, he envisages that the robots could be deployed in a swarm, communicating wirelessly, to carry out coordinated environmental monitoring or mapping missions across vast areas like the Australian outback.
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Reading the unreadable
May 16, 2013 | TG Daily
Pioneering X-ray technology is making it possible to read fragile rolled-up historical documents for the first time in centuries. Old parchment is often extremely dry and liable to crack and crumble if any attempt is made to physically unroll or unfold it. The new technology, however, eliminates the need to do so by enabling parchment to be unrolled or unfolded ‘virtually’ and the contents displayed on a computer screen. Developed at Cardiff University and Queen Mary, University of London, the breakthrough means historians will be able to access previously unusable written sources and gain new insight into the past. No other technique developed anywhere in the world has the capability to make text concealed in rolled or folded historical parchments genuinely legible. The system has now been tested successfully on a medieval legal scroll provided by the Norfolk Record Office. In a completely innovative approach to the problem, the technique works by scanning parchment with X-rays in order to detect the presence of iron contained in ‘iron gall ink’ – the most commonly used ink in Europe between the 12th and 19th centuries. Using a method called microtomography, a 3-dimensional ‘map’ showing the ink’s exact location is built up by creating images made from a series of X-ray 'slices' taken through the parchment.
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Parcels find their way to you via the crowd
May 16, 2013 | New Scientist
Jane yawns and climbs the stairs from the subway at 145th Street, New York. She's almost home. A stranger rises from a bench as she approaches, catching her eye. 'Jane Murphy? Here's your package.' This is the ultimate aim of a crowd-powered delivery system dreamed up by a group of Microsoft researchers. Fictional Jane never has to deviate from her normal route to pick up her package. Instead, it is sent via a chain of people – an algorithm calculates the fastest route using aggregated location data from New York tweeters. The idea, dubbed TwedEx, could make it possible to deliver purchases to customers on the move, as well as making it cheaper to send them. Basic crowdsourced systems already exist, which hire strangers from the internet to deliver packages. But TwedEx is different because it taps into existing human journeys. All the sender need do is write the recipient's unique identifier on the package, their Twitter handle, for example, and let the TwedEx algorithm and the crowd do the rest. By learning people's average movements from their past Twitter data, TwedEx predicts which people to hand a package to at intermediate locations based on the package's final destination. A user would tell the network they had a package, the system would work out the best route and then each person in the chain would be told who to give the parcel to, as well as where, and when. So far, TwedEx only exists in a simulation, but Microsoft is discussing building an app for a real-world pilot.
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