Academic research news covering universities, labs, grant outcomes, replication debates, and cross-disciplinary studies.
This commentary argues that academia suffers from a research crisis driven by groupthink, and suggests potential institutional fixes to encourage intellectual diversity and methodological rigor. It contends that current incentive structures reward conformity over genuine discovery, and proposes reforms to peer review and funding.
A University of Toronto experiment published in Physical Review Letters shows photons can spend a negative amount of time inside a cloud of rubidium atoms. The measured excitation time for transmitted photons fell as low as minus 0.82 times a baseline of 10-20 nanoseconds, based on 70 hours of data collection.
A PLOS One study shows cows can match human faces to voices, spending more time staring at unfamiliar faces. When familiar voices were paired with matching videos, cows focused longer, indicating cross-modal recognition.
Geng Hongwei, a bioscience PhD dropout from Beihang University, has gained over two million followers by exposing academic fraud. His April video highlighted suspicious data in a Nature paper by Tongji University dean Wang Ping, including columns of figures ending in 5 or differing by exactly 0.3.
The UK government is reviewing research centres that connect academia and businesses. The review aims to assess their effectiveness and impact.