/2017

German researchers resign from Elsevier journals in push for nationwide #open_access

Five leading German scientists have resigned from their editorial positions at journals published by Elsevier, the latest step in a battle over open-access and subscription policies between the Dutch publishing giant and a consortium of German libraries, universities, and research institutes.

▻http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/german-researchers-resign-elsevier-journals-push-nationwide-open-access

#Elsevier #résistance #édition_scientifique #université #science #publications_scientifiques #Allemagne

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ajouté à la métaliste sur l’éditions scientifique :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/1036396

Alexandra Elbakyan, une chercheuse du Kazakhstan qui a créé un outil pour libérer les recherches scientifiques.
►http://www.lemonde.fr/festival/article/2017/07/27/alexandra-elbakyan-la-kazakhe-pirate-d-articles-scientifiques_5165479_441519
#paywall

Can you tell whether this photo has been manipulated? | Science | AAAS
▻http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/can-you-tell-whether-photo-has-been-manipulated

http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_main_large/public/Image-1-with-all-mainpulations_16x9+%281%29_0.jpg?itok=ZfDkFhQV

Images can influence memories of the past, so if people can’t tell a real photo from a doctored one, bogus images might alter what they believe and remember, the scientists say.

#Photoshop #Fake_news #Mémoire

Why modern mortar crumbles, but Roman concrete lasts millennia | Science | AAAS
▻http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/why-modern-mortar-crumbles-roman-concrete-lasts-millennia

http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_main_large/public/cc_144008_16x9.jpg?itok=zpvX8ozS

Modern concrete—used in everything from roads to buildings to bridges—can break down in as few as 50 years. But more than a thousand years after the western Roman Empire crumbled to dust, its concrete structures are still standing. Now, scientists have finally figured out why: a special ingredient that makes the cement grow stronger—not weaker—over time. Scientists began their search with an ancient recipe for mortar, laid down by Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius in 30 B.C.E. It called for a concoction of volcanic ash, lime, and seawater, mixed together with volcanic rocks and spread into wooden molds that were then immersed in more sea water. History contains many references to the durability of Roman concrete, including this cryptic note written in 79 B.C.E., describing concrete exposed to seawater as: “a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and everyday stronger.” What did it mean? To find out, the researchers studied drilled cores of a Roman harbor from Pozzuoli Bay near Naples, Italy. When they analyzed it, they found that the seawater had dissolved components of the volcanic ash, allowing new binding minerals to grow. Within a decade, a very rare hydrothermal mineral called aluminum tobermorite (Al-tobermorite) had formed in the concrete. Al-tobermorite, long known to give Roman concrete its strength, can be made in the lab, but it’s very difficult to incorporate it in concrete. But the researchers found that when seawater percolates through a cement matrix, it reacts with volcanic ash and crystals to form Al-tobermorite and a porous mineral called phillipsite, they write today in American Mineralogist. So will you be seeing stronger piers and breakwaters anytime soon? Because both minerals take centuries to strengthen concrete, modern scientists are still working on recreating a modern version of Roman cement.

#innovation #nouveau versus #progrès

Global publishing giant wins $15 million damages against researcher for sharing publicly-funded knowledge | Privacy Online News
▻https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2017/06/global-publishing-giant-wins-15-million-damages-researcher-sh

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/scihub.png

The court awarded $15 million damages to the scientific publisher on the basis of 100 articles published by #Elsevier that had been made available without permission on Sci-Hub and a similar site called LibGen. At the time of writing, Sci-Hub claims to hold 62 million scientific research papers – probably a majority of all those ever published – most of which are unauthorized copies. According to a report in the scientific journal Science last year, it is Elsevier which is most affected by #Sci-Hub’s activities:

#libgen

Hundreds of years later, plants domesticated by ancient civilizations still dominate in the Amazon | Science | AAAS
▻http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/hundreds-years-later-plants-domesticated-ancient-civilizations-still-dom

http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_main_large/public/cc_Photo-20-%28c%29-Carolina-Levis-2_16x9.jpg?itok=lr7cm7mS

After Europeans brought smallpox and other highly infectious diseases to the Amazon in the 15th and 16th centuries, millions of native people died and much of their civilization was wiped out. But it didn’t disappear entirely. Left behind was a verdant, leafy legacy in the untold numbers of palms and other trees that had been cultivated across the Amazon. Now, researchers report that Pre-Columbian peoples had a significant impact on Amazonian forest diversity by making their favorite species much more common.

The findings “contribute to an emerging consensus that Pre-Colombians altered most of the Amazon,” says Joe Wright, an ecologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, who was not involved in the research.

#amazonie #forêt #peuples_premiers #permaculture #jardin-forêt #horticulture

Cocaine trafficking is destroying Central America’s forests | Science | AAAS
▻http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/cocaine-trafficking-destroying-central-america-s-forests

http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_main_large/public/CCNationalGeographic_2328450_16x9.jpg?itok=NKLiFBKQ

Kendra McSweeney knew that something was off. When the geographer at The Ohio State University in Columbus traveled to Honduras’s La Mosquitia region in 2011 to study its indigenous communities, she saw changes to the once lushly forested landscape that shocked her: huge, indiscriminate clearings in the middle of nowhere.

When she asked locals what was going on, they insisted on a sole culprit. “Los narcos.” Drug smugglers who had moved into the region in the mid-2000s—right around the time Mexico’s war on drugs intensified, and almost a decade after McSweeney herself had lived in eastern Honduras. Traffickers in the region had to figure out a way to funnel their money into the legal economy, and land clearing—in the form of cattle ranching, agro-industrial plantations, and timber extraction—was the preferred way to do it.

#drogue #cocaïne #forêt #déforestation #amérique_centrale

http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/inline__699w__no_aspect/public/deforestation-updated.png?itok=f9Hqz2vX

Vast set of public CVs reveals the world’s most migratory scientists | Science | AAAS
▻http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/vast-set-public-cvs-reveals-world-s-most-migratory-scientists

Science analyzed data from a new source: ORCID, the nonprofit organization that assigns unique identity codes to researchers (see full data set). ORCID wasn’t designed for that purpose, but its database of 3 million scientists—by far the largest public data set of academic CVs ever released—may become a vital tool for charting their flow around the world.

#recherche #migrations #datasource
▻http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.48s16

Where have all the #insects gone ?
►http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insects-gone #insectes #biodiversité #biodiversity

Where have all the insects gone? | Science | AAAS
►http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/where-have-all-insects-gone

http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_main_large/public/insects_main.jpg?itok=C8kCuACp

No one can prove that the pesticides are to blame for the decline, however. “There is no data on insecticide levels, especially in nature reserves,” Sorg says. The group has tried to find out what kinds of pesticides are used in fields near the reserves, but that has proved difficult, he says. “We simply don’t know what the drivers are” in the Krefeld data, Goulson says. “It’s not an experiment. It’s an observation of this massive decline. The data themselves are strong. Understanding it and knowing what to do about it is difficult.”

#insectes

Medical school to examine whether professor published paper partly written by chemical company
▻http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/medical-school-examine-whether-professor-published-paper-partly-written-

Officials at a medical school in New York State say they will investigate a faculty member who, according to internal documents released last week by a federal court in California, put his name on a paper partially ghostwritten by employees at #Monsanto, the giant agricultural chemicals company based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Officials at the New York Medical College (NYMC) in Valhalla, New York, had not heard of the ghostwriting allegation until they were contacted by ScienceInsider, says Jennifer Riekert, the college’s vice president of communications. “Now that we’re aware of this, we’re going to have to obtain the materials involved and learn all we can about this situation,” she says.

At issue is a 2000 paper published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. It concluded that a review of studies of one of Monstano’s most successful products, the widely-used herbicide #Roundup, showed no evidence of harmful effects on people.

#corruption #fraude

The Polluted Brain
▻http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/brain-pollution-evidence-builds-dirty-air-causes-alzheimer-s-dementia

The link between air pollution and dementia remains controversial—even its proponents warn that more research is needed to confirm a causal connection and work out just how the particles might enter the brain and make mischief there. But a growing number of epidemiological studies from around the world, new findings from animal models and human brain imaging studies, and increasingly sophisticated techniques for modeling #PM2.5 exposures have raised alarms. Indeed, in an 11-year epidemiological study to be published next week in Translational Psychiatry, USC researchers will report that living in places with PM2.5 exposures higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) standard of 12 µg/m3 nearly doubled dementia risk in older women. If the finding holds up in the general population, air pollution could account for roughly 21% of dementia cases worldwide, says the study’s senior author, epidemiologist Jiu-Chiuan Chen of the Keck School of Medicine at USC.

Deepening the concerns, this month researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada reported in The Lancet that among 6.6 million people in the province of Ontario, those living within 50 meters of a major road—where levels of fine pollutants are often 10 times higher than just 150 meters away—were 12% more likely to develop dementia than people living more than 200 meters away.

#pollution #air #cerveau #démence #santé