"Molecular clouds in interstellar space can sometimes produce natural masers (the radio wavelength analogs of lasers) that shine with bright, narrow beams of radiation. Regions of active star formation generate some of the most spectacular such masers—in one case radiating as much energy in a single spectral line as does our Sun in its entire visible spectrum. In these sources, the maser radiation comes from molecules like water or OH that are excited by collisions and the radiation environment around the young stars."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-mysterious-star-mwc349.html

"Physicists in the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics (run jointly by LMU Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics) have developed an attosecond electron microscope that allows them to visualize the dispersion of light in time and space, and observe the motions of electrons in atoms."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-space-time-sensor-light-matter-interactions.html

"(Phys.org)—An international team of researchers has conducted an experiment that shows that the arrow of time is a relative concept, not an absolute one. In a paper uploaded to the arXiv server, the team describe their experiment and its outcome, and also explain why their findings do not violate the second law of thermodynamics."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-arrow-relative-concept-absolute.html

Colliding Neutron Stars Could Settle the Biggest Debate in Cosmology.

The Case of Nicolas Guéguen's Irregular Gender Research Findings

Nicolas Guéguen is one of the most prolific and high-profile Social Psychologists in the world today. His research into gender differences regularly attracts the attention of the news media. The very attention his work has brought him, however, may well prove his undoing.

Since 2015 scientists James Heathers and Nick Brown have been investigating his work, and what they've found appears alarming. Perhaps most disconcertingly, there are doubts about the authenticity of the data used in many of his analyses, and even about whether any data was ever collected in the first place. Almost as alarming, is the clear evidence that the methods involved in many of his published findings would, if the experiments were actually conducted (which they may not have been), have exposed research assistants to significant risk of harm the likes of which few IRB's would ever grant ethical approval for, and in fact it seems he was essentially granting ethical clearance to himself and his assistants with no independent ethical review involved.

Only slightly less alarming is the lack of credit given to the supposed army of research assistants (mostly students) Guéguen claimed to employ for his research. Many of his published findings credit him as the sole investigator, despite methods which would have required substantial time and effort for an entire team to gather. If the research, in fact, happened as described, then he has been by his own admission unethically denying hundreds, perhaps thousands of mostly unpaid student research assistants any credit for their contributions. Another concern relates to effect sizes: Guéguen often reports extremely large effect sizes, at levels rarely encountered in the social psychologies. While such effect sizes are possible, they tend only to be encountered with the most basic and reliable components of the human psyche.

Heathers and Brown reported their concerns to the French Psychological Society (SFP) in 2015, who ultimately dropped the matter despite the concerns never properly being answered, so the duo have gone public with their findings. Guéguen, it should be noted, has to-date satisfactorily or plausibly answered only a very small number of their concerns, while failing to provide more basic proof of his researches such as raw data sets, ethics committee reports, email correspondences, names and contact information for research assistants and confederates, or basically anything at all whatsoever that would put the question to bed once and for all.

While a gentlemanly agreement has traditionally prevailed in the sciences not to doubt that a researcher's published findings were authentic and ethically obtained without good reason to doubt it, especially since false findings are eventually discovered when other researchers can't replicate them, this may be one of those cases to prompt some efforts at ensuring that the prolific production of false (or plausibly false) findings are harder, if not impossible.

Although most scientists are indeed the sorts of high minded ladies and gentlemen for whom such gentlemanly agreements make the most sense, a single dishonest researchers should not be able to run amok creating false chains of evidence across entire domains of research, especially in historically controversy-ridden areas of research like gender differences. In the modern era of computers, mobile devices, and the cloud, it should be eminently possible to devise basic research protocols that ensure that published experiments have in fact been performed and their data collected as reported, and to keep any research lacking such proof from seeing the light of day and leading other researchers, or even the general public, on wild goose chases down dead end roads leading to bridges to nowhere.

#BlindMeWithScience #Psychology #BadScience

Large quantum systems tamed.
Quantum-computing devices can be more powerful than their classical counterparts, but controlling large quantum systems is difficult. Two studies report work that overcomes this challenge.

Parents May One Day Be Morally Obligated To EDIT Their BABY’S GENOME And Replace His/Her DEFECTIVE OR SUB-OPTIMAL GENES.

This way the next generation would not be burdened with unnecessary suffering and misery of millions of people and big medical / social expenditures.



https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-public/ethics-gene-editing-babies-crispr