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Technology-transfer activities have surged since the 1980s, but only few inventions are bound to become a commercial success. Academic patenting requires professional strategies and should be motivated by goals beyond licensing revenue.
An understanding of a material's microscopic architecture is important to improve its mechanical properties. Poisson's ratio, which celebrates its bicentenary this year, continues to provide a good metric for that.
The papers we published in 2008 and 2009 received on average 29.9 citations each in 2010. However, nearly 30% of them were cited more than 30 times, contributing to roughly two-thirds of the impact factor.
Following the Fukushima disaster nuclear energy has an uncertain future at best. But whether we can really afford to abandon nuclear power remains an open question.
Citation analyses can condense scholarly output into numbers, but they do not live up to peer review in the evaluation of scientists. Online usage statistics and commenting could soon enable a more refined assessment of scientific impact.
As the United States Congress confronts budgeting challenges, whether federal funding of scientific research is perceived as an investment or a discretionary expense will have long-term consequences.
The 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry rewards a family of techniques for forging carbon-carbon bonds that have already helped to create new organic materials.
Would the publication of anonymous referee reports and editorial decision letters of published papers benefit the scientific debate? Results from a trial seem to suggest this.
