I am a scientist and I have been a postdoc (and government grant manager and industrial scientist). This is not new, but is more new to biology than it is to other fields.
This problem is real. Our best researchers can't find a job and are "sitting on the sidelines." The investment in those folks by the government (i.e. your taxes) is going down the drain the longer they're unable to do meaningful work.
My feeling is that the underlying problem is the insulation of academics from the commercial world. Most science professors don't know what is involved in commercial work, don't know the relevant skills for commercial work, and don't have a network for landing jobs for students in industry. There are far too many professors who don't know how to train their students for anything other than academic work, and some who are adamantly against training their students for jobs outside of academia.
The result is that industry jobs that many PhDs expect to get go instead to people who left school with a BS or MS and received more relevant on-the-job training in industry. The truth is that there are very few jobs where the experience of a modern PhD is more meaningful than 6 years of industrial bench work. The government and academia still hire preferentially by degree, but those folks can't hire enough people to put a dent in the supply.
To fix this problem we need radical changes to the way we pursue science. Some possibilities for the future:
1) getting a PhD is "for fun." This is the current reality. If we all accept and understand this, that PhDs have no competitive advantage over MS students in the marketplace, there is no problem. If we do nothing, this will continue and will eventually make the PhD system obsolete.
2) Control of research direction shifts toward industry (i.e. professors become subcontractors on grants to people like Merk and IBM). I doubt many academics would like this, and there would absolutely be problems, but it would generate students with broader skillsets and networks.
3) Control of research shifts back toward government labs. This used to be the way things were. Government labs sat between industry and academia and facilitated movement of people, ideas and funding. Entire funding agencies that supported these labs are gone. Grant managers and review committees used to mostly be active scientists at government labs, that's no longer the case. This would be expensive to get back to and would really be unfair to the foreign scientists making up the majority of our young scientific workforce.
4) Set everyone on the GSA scale. Right now you can get a recent grad in his 3nd year of work funded at $60k/year on a grant to a commercial grantee, but it's almost impossible to get more than $25k for that same work done by a "graduate researcher" in academia. (Even if professors want to do right by their employees, they often can't.) So, don't allow any more $20k/year graduate students on grants. Everyone gets paid based on a combination of local cost of living and experience (years & degrees). That's the GSA scale (ok, it kind-of is). Removing the discount for students would remove free grad school for scientists, but would immediately fix the problem that the best bench scientists can't find jobs.
Whatever happens, the solution is not going to come from inside science. Scientific leaders range from completely disgusted with the human trafficking which is the modern research economy to openly hostile to the idea that this problem needs to be solved. Most people just don't know what to think. There will be no consensus amongst us in science on what, if anything, needs to be done.
Figure out what you really want to do with this. Do you want to understand everything very broadly? Do you want to become a specialist in a particular niche?
If the answer is broad understanding, lookup dogvomit's post and take the traditional coursework in the traditional order at your pace. There are sets of problems honed over the last 100 years to train people to think like physicists. Then you can go read Einstein and dense particle physics books; that's a lot of fun but probably won't go anywhere. Very, very few physicists contribute generally any more.
If you want to be a specialist, find a very well defined project you could really dig in to and enjoy. Something like one particular measurement you think you could do on your own. Pick something recent that you like. It's all out there on Google Scholar. Fill in the general physics you need as you go, but you'll probably need more engineering, software (and money) than anything else. Above all, please do get in touch with the people who inspired your work!
If you're able to successfully repeat a set of observations, or just do something that looks at all like what some grad student did 5 years ago, you will make their year by sharing it with them. If you can do that even once, you will be well on your way to contributing meaningfully to their field.
To put the time commitment in perspective, this is the kind of thing a new "generalist" physicist will do for 2-3 years full time while learning their specialty. Unless you really like this and find more than 10 hours a week to do it, it could easily take you 10+ years. That's ok. I'd be thrilled to find out someone outside traditional physics replicated my results from 10 years ago.
I think the majority of the scientific publishing culture and industry is bad for science. That said, this is not a fair criticism. It's entirely reasonable to tell someone you expect to see more data in order to publish and to start a conversation among the editor, reviewers and PI as to what is necessary to prove a point. Research is not a perfect process and does not progress in an orderly, predictable manner. There are going to be typos and blind spots in any paper.
In this case, obviously Nature should not have published in the end. We can't know how that decision was reached unless we see all the correspondence between the editor, reviewers and PI. It would be much more useful to the scientific community to see how the PI managed to convince the reviewers to allow publication, rather than to debate what is really a standard rejection response.
Does that mean it's the only way to gather that information? Would it be possible to develop alternate tools?
Look. Whether you like it or not, we are developing the measurement techniques and hardware that are going to make this antiquated approach to biology obsolete. Feel free to yell and scream while the field passes you by.
It's not fair at all to link opposition to gain in function research to an "anti-science" mindset. You should be ashamed that you're resorting to that argument.
This is something which is seriously debated in the pages of serious journals, at scientific conferences and by government program managers. To link valid concerns to an "anti-science" crowd is political bullshit maneuvering.
There is a very real and valid cost/benefit analysis to be done on pursuing this work. As biology catches up to the physical sciences in scope and function, you're going to deal with the same issues we have dealt with (I am a physicist). One of those lessons is that scientists don't get to decide the purpose of our work. It doesn't matter what you write in your paper, or what the program manager tells you the purpose of the work is. It doesn't matter WHY someone does the work, all that matters is WHAT the work is. It's extremely naÃve to think an abstract in a research paper can properly define the purpose of a piece of research.
There are experiments and research paths we do not follow because the intellectual benefit does not outweigh the very real possibilities for misuse. You asked how you expect people to validate these hypothesis without the work? Take a page from physical science and learn to use computer modeling and limited experimental work in lieu of full studies. Do some tool development. Don't just throw up your hands and insist this is the only way. It's not.
This will require a cultural change, and there will be lots of hand-wringing over whether new results are valid, but biology will be a more mature field for it.
I've worked for the government in a scientific job, with a lot of IT folks. It was probably the most relaxed atmosphere I've worked in. No expectation to dress better than business casual. No expectation to work overtime. No expectation to really get anything done.
It's that last one that's really the killer. If you're not focused on getting projects done, first and foremost, then you're not going to attract good people.
A good engineer isn't necessary when the jobs at a government office survive only by making the right political and budgetary statements at precisely the right times. With very few exceptions, technical success or failure just doesn't have much influence on your career in the government.
Lastly, 140 engineers will make no difference. The federal government is huge. The office I worked in was a backwater, nearly forgotten location. We had a staff of 5000 people, about half of them engineers and scientists. There are thousands of engineers in the government right now who would love to work on meaningful projects. It's not a lack of talent or manpower that keeps those projects from happening.
TFA says this in about 10 pages, with all the gory details.
Can we try no to have clickbait headlines? TFA is a blog called "Ask Ethan" so it makes sense for the title to be a question. A more appropriate headline here would have been "Dark Matter and Dark Energy don't Impact the Big Bang."
Well, that's a terrible summary. At least they linked to the actual paper.
Good on Charlie for getting all this press out of the paper. This is continuation of work started when I worked in his lab (thin graphene transistors can be made with e-beam lithography, that gets you a bandgap and you can actually think about making a digital transistor, this paper has better measurements and better e-beam lithography - there now you don't have to read either of the papers).
It's not clear that any of this stuff will ever be used as actual digital logic. I think it's more likely to see commercialization as an analog transistor in a sensor (reason #1 - no e-beam litho required). Someone from Charlie's group will likely be part of making active graphene electronics work out. He's got former students or postdocs at Intel and IBM, and there are at least two of us with graphene based startup companies. So, we're working on making graphene electronics something other than an academic curiosity.
I think we'd all rather see a world where China competes with the west in science and technology.
I am a scientist and I complain a lot about corruption in funding, publishing, and public representation of science; but as a whole it's a very honest and productive enterprise. This is much better than competing to see who can maintain the lowest cost labor pool or the biggest weapons.
There's a concept in your post that doesn't quite come across as clearly as it should:
People who are very successful academic scientists are only publishing for a few years, because they're able to go get significantly better jobs outside of academia.
The 1% of folks who are publishing for 16 years strait are very good at getting grants and publishing papers, but have failed during that 16 years to do anything sufficiently interesting or important to distract them from the academic grind for even one year. Most of the great professors I know have spent at least a year starting a company, working for the government, launching a spacecraft or some other very useful, but non-publishable work.
With medical devices efficacy and safety are very closely linked. If you're providing a product that monitors blood glucose and you do a poor job of it, your customer makes incorrect medical decisions that are potentially life threatening. The closer an app gets to providing such "actionable" information, the more likely it is that it requires FDA approval.
That said, this "can't be overseen" thing is silly. The FDA doesn't have the resources to oversee ALL smartphone health apps, they don't want to, and they shouldn't. There's no debate there. If the next generation of phones include electrocardiogram electrodes or a sophisticated spectrometer, the FDA is going to regulate the health software using those tools. That's really the news coming out of that FDA statement.
Universities generally insist that all IP developed as part of a sponsored agreement is owned by the university (as opposed to the inventors or the funders - the two normal ways of doing things). This isn't the "classic" troll behavior, but it's not much better. It has the same result of depriving the actual inventors (small business, professors, grad students) of an opportunity to commercialize their work. It deprives the funders (US government, non profits, small and large business) of IP they should rightly own as well as discouraging people from working together.
Almost all of the research done by universities is done via such sponsored research agreements, not internal funding.
I suppose I was one of the early pioneers in this field, I didn't know it had a name. A few years ago we published a paper on attaching three different olfactory receptors to carbon nanotube transistors and exposing the resulting devices to a half dozen or so chemicals while monitoring the responses. We were trying to produce something which was more usable (i.e. real-time) than the electrochemical methods described in TFA (to be clear, TFA describes very good work, we just had a different approach).
I wouldn't say this is a field which is taking off. It is significantly difficult to combine proteins with electronics. There are very, very few people/research groups who have the combination of abilities and experience to make these devices and properly interpret the results. More often than not, researchers perform laboratory, one-off measurements they can understand, but have no relevance to modern electronics or systems usable outside of the lab they were built in. Another common issue is performing measurements you don't understand, coming to conclusions that are wrong and sending the field off in a useless direction. It is very, very difficult to both build a good experiment AND properly interpret the results. The physics/chemistry guys don't understand the biology and the biologists don't understand the physics/chemistry. It can take many years to just learn to talk to eachother and stop assuming that "standard" processes, assumptions and statistics are applicable. Getting funding for this stuff can be a challenge, because no one really has claimed this field and none of the funding agencies (in the US, at least) seem to understand it. There are a handful of senior academics who can do this stuff, and a growing number of mid-career guys like me, but we're still a very small group.
If people are interested in what's going on with this field, I would recommend looking up the work of Phil Collins at UC Irvine, Ethan Minot at Oregon State and Charlie Johnson at University of Pennsylvania. I'm sure there are other good groups out there, but I know those guys are good.
This is a great study, really cool. The title is unfortunate (it's clickbait), saved only by the weak qualifier "simple".
The science question here is what is the charge carrier when you rub two identical materials together, electrons or ions? This study does a great job of showing that it's not electrons. At the end of the paper, they point out that small amounts of water adsorbed on the surfaces of these oxides should create H+ and OH- ions in a density that does explain the static generation effect.
This water layer ion creation effect is fairly well known in materials physics. Until now, I don't think it was well known that it played any role in static generation.
This work is part of the Living Foundries program at DARPA (or at least, related to it). There are collaborating labs working on developing ribosomes to interpret new types of DNA, and other groups working on new amino acids to work with those ribosomes. The whole idea is to change what bio-manufacturing (think fermenting) can do, expanding into materials (drugs, fuels...) existing biology can't work with. This whole effort is going to be going on for many more years.
"Physics" is not just one thing anymore. The guy writing TFA, Ethan Siegel, is a bonified professional physicist. Reading the comments, you can see he just didn't know this one thing as well as he thought. How does that happen?
I don't know that there's any physicist going through training today or in the last 20 years who really understands "all" of physics.
Physics PhDs learn most of physics up to about 1910 (even that is a stretch, but at least the complete fields up to that point are introduced and sketched out), and the next 100 years are based on your specialty. The limits of energy density for photons are usually in this realm of "introduced only if directly important to your specialty."
It's up to the individual to fill in the gaps after formal classes, and it can be very hard to figure out what you don't know. It's particularly hard because of the oversimplified way physics is generally taught in undergrad, even to physics majors. Your old reference books may not actually be correct. I'm sure I've got a physics textbook around which claims almost exactly what Ethan said in his blog; the "why" of pair generation is just too distracting.
I will reserve my general snark regarding nanotechnology to highlight the fact these guys are putting the grad student up front and acknowledging that he really did all the work.
Could it be? An ethical professor? Professor Pantelides, Vanderbilt and Oak Ridge deserve a ton of credit for breaking the traditional assignment-of-credit mold here. Good job guys.
I'm a nanotechnologist who has worked on all these materials, and I've got to support your sentiment here.
Graphene is a great material, it's got a lot of cool properties and it won the Nobel Prize. People discovered that you could make something like graphene, but it had a lot of oxygen incorporated into it. They called it "graphene oxide," with a shorthand of "graphene." Then, other people found that you get more interesting stuff if you replace the oxygen with hydrogen in graphene oxide, leading to "reduced graphene oxide" with a shorthand of... "graphene."
These are all different materials with very different properties. It is very confusing trying to explain this all to people who are not immersed in the field, particularly because everyone seems to default to calling all these materials "graphene." It would be like using the same words to describe electronics grade silicon, glass and sand. Yes, they're all types of silicon, but all of these different materials should have distinct names.
The problem many nanotechnologists have (and I'm one of them) is that they believe if they can only show the right lab measurement, then the rest of the world will come calling and "they" will solve the commercialization problems related to their technology.
The real truth is that no number of studies like this will get graphene any closer to "real world devices." No one is going to solve the fundamental problems of manufacturing process development and material reproducibility for us. Neat lab tricks on "hero devices" aren't going to do it.
We already load up teachers with tech they have no idea how to use.
Teachers are not engineers or programmers.
Look, the landscape of teaching is shifting enough already. We're seriously going to drive these folks crazy if we continue to change major parts of their job on a yearly basis. The least we could do is give them a little time to catch up with the regulatory changes in teaching before starting on another technology refresh.
You have to disclose any foreign investors in an application for government funding; usually you have to disclose all VC firms invested in your company. If the government doesn't like your investors, they're allowed to disqualify you from receiving a contract even if the work has no security implications at all.
If these guys are trying to invest and hide where they're from, that's different, but that's not what the FBI says is happening.
Investing in companies is hardly what I would call stealing.
Foreign companies can come in and poach talent and taxpayer funded research from Universities and the startups that come out of them. There's nothing illegal or even remotely unethical there. This is what we wanted! Russian capitalists investing in US companies, US students and US schools. Even if their goal is to move the company to Russia, that's part of how capitalism and globalization work. If we want to encourage researchers to stay in the US, we should do more to encourage direct domestic investment in startups rather than secondary investments like hedge funds.
If we want to completely protect our basic R&D, we have to classify it. That would be sure to drive researchers out of the country.
What you describe is very close one of my first jobs when I worked for the government (100 proposals, one week, pick 4 winners, summary comments for all). It's not so hard to pick out the "good, but risky" proposals. (Another way to split up your proposal list is to point out that 80 of the proposals will be a re-hash of the same stuff, 30 of the proposals will be nonsense and 10 proposals will actually be about something unique and relevant.)
The most common reason for a creative proposal failing is simply that the program manager wasn't ready for it. You don't want to surprise a program manager because they have to properly prepare the bureaucracy around them to support your project *before* they get your proposal.
When a review committee makes a decision, there are still several government people who have to sign off on that decision before the money flows. There will always be at least one lawyer and one accountant with veto power over a committee selected proposal.
The last thing a program manager wants to do is end the fiscal year with money in their accounts. That can get them demoted or fired. They meet with their support staff sometimes for a year ahead of reviewing proposals to make sure everyone knows what's coming. Slowing things down, or failing to execute a grant, because of administrative surprises is very, very risky for a program manager. There's strong pressure to select institutions who have already worked with the office, and projects that fit well with the briefings given to everyone before proposals were solicited. For unusual ideas, it's better to convene a workshop and spend the next year developing a program around it (by which point all the usual suspects are involved).
Now it used to be that universities themselves funded research, and government scientists used to have broad authority to assign funding, and defense contractors had to spend 15% of their budgets on exploratory research, and we didn't have postdocs... To change things back requires a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a scientist and I have been a postdoc (and government grant manager and industrial scientist). This is not new, but is more new to biology than it is to other fields.
This problem is real. Our best researchers can't find a job and are "sitting on the sidelines." The investment in those folks by the government (i.e. your taxes) is going down the drain the longer they're unable to do meaningful work.
My feeling is that the underlying problem is the insulation of academics from the commercial world. Most science professors don't know what is involved in commercial work, don't know the relevant skills for commercial work, and don't have a network for landing jobs for students in industry. There are far too many professors who don't know how to train their students for anything other than academic work, and some who are adamantly against training their students for jobs outside of academia.
The result is that industry jobs that many PhDs expect to get go instead to people who left school with a BS or MS and received more relevant on-the-job training in industry. The truth is that there are very few jobs where the experience of a modern PhD is more meaningful than 6 years of industrial bench work. The government and academia still hire preferentially by degree, but those folks can't hire enough people to put a dent in the supply.
To fix this problem we need radical changes to the way we pursue science. Some possibilities for the future:
1) getting a PhD is "for fun." This is the current reality. If we all accept and understand this, that PhDs have no competitive advantage over MS students in the marketplace, there is no problem. If we do nothing, this will continue and will eventually make the PhD system obsolete.
2) Control of research direction shifts toward industry (i.e. professors become subcontractors on grants to people like Merk and IBM). I doubt many academics would like this, and there would absolutely be problems, but it would generate students with broader skillsets and networks.
3) Control of research shifts back toward government labs. This used to be the way things were. Government labs sat between industry and academia and facilitated movement of people, ideas and funding. Entire funding agencies that supported these labs are gone. Grant managers and review committees used to mostly be active scientists at government labs, that's no longer the case. This would be expensive to get back to and would really be unfair to the foreign scientists making up the majority of our young scientific workforce.
4) Set everyone on the GSA scale. Right now you can get a recent grad in his 3nd year of work funded at $60k/year on a grant to a commercial grantee, but it's almost impossible to get more than $25k for that same work done by a "graduate researcher" in academia. (Even if professors want to do right by their employees, they often can't.) So, don't allow any more $20k/year graduate students on grants. Everyone gets paid based on a combination of local cost of living and experience (years & degrees). That's the GSA scale (ok, it kind-of is). Removing the discount for students would remove free grad school for scientists, but would immediately fix the problem that the best bench scientists can't find jobs.
Whatever happens, the solution is not going to come from inside science. Scientific leaders range from completely disgusted with the human trafficking which is the modern research economy to openly hostile to the idea that this problem needs to be solved. Most people just don't know what to think. There will be no consensus amongst us in science on what, if anything, needs to be done.
Figure out what you really want to do with this. Do you want to understand everything very broadly? Do you want to become a specialist in a particular niche?
If the answer is broad understanding, lookup dogvomit's post and take the traditional coursework in the traditional order at your pace. There are sets of problems honed over the last 100 years to train people to think like physicists. Then you can go read Einstein and dense particle physics books; that's a lot of fun but probably won't go anywhere. Very, very few physicists contribute generally any more.
If you want to be a specialist, find a very well defined project you could really dig in to and enjoy. Something like one particular measurement you think you could do on your own. Pick something recent that you like. It's all out there on Google Scholar. Fill in the general physics you need as you go, but you'll probably need more engineering, software (and money) than anything else. Above all, please do get in touch with the people who inspired your work!
If you're able to successfully repeat a set of observations, or just do something that looks at all like what some grad student did 5 years ago, you will make their year by sharing it with them. If you can do that even once, you will be well on your way to contributing meaningfully to their field.
To put the time commitment in perspective, this is the kind of thing a new "generalist" physicist will do for 2-3 years full time while learning their specialty. Unless you really like this and find more than 10 hours a week to do it, it could easily take you 10+ years. That's ok. I'd be thrilled to find out someone outside traditional physics replicated my results from 10 years ago.
I think the majority of the scientific publishing culture and industry is bad for science. That said, this is not a fair criticism. It's entirely reasonable to tell someone you expect to see more data in order to publish and to start a conversation among the editor, reviewers and PI as to what is necessary to prove a point. Research is not a perfect process and does not progress in an orderly, predictable manner. There are going to be typos and blind spots in any paper.
In this case, obviously Nature should not have published in the end. We can't know how that decision was reached unless we see all the correspondence between the editor, reviewers and PI. It would be much more useful to the scientific community to see how the PI managed to convince the reviewers to allow publication, rather than to debate what is really a standard rejection response.
Tissue culture is definitely a thing.
Does that mean it's the only way to gather that information? Would it be possible to develop alternate tools?
Look. Whether you like it or not, we are developing the measurement techniques and hardware that are going to make this antiquated approach to biology obsolete. Feel free to yell and scream while the field passes you by.
It's not fair at all to link opposition to gain in function research to an "anti-science" mindset. You should be ashamed that you're resorting to that argument.
This is something which is seriously debated in the pages of serious journals, at scientific conferences and by government program managers. To link valid concerns to an "anti-science" crowd is political bullshit maneuvering.
There is a very real and valid cost/benefit analysis to be done on pursuing this work. As biology catches up to the physical sciences in scope and function, you're going to deal with the same issues we have dealt with (I am a physicist). One of those lessons is that scientists don't get to decide the purpose of our work. It doesn't matter what you write in your paper, or what the program manager tells you the purpose of the work is. It doesn't matter WHY someone does the work, all that matters is WHAT the work is. It's extremely naÃve to think an abstract in a research paper can properly define the purpose of a piece of research.
There are experiments and research paths we do not follow because the intellectual benefit does not outweigh the very real possibilities for misuse. You asked how you expect people to validate these hypothesis without the work? Take a page from physical science and learn to use computer modeling and limited experimental work in lieu of full studies. Do some tool development. Don't just throw up your hands and insist this is the only way. It's not.
This will require a cultural change, and there will be lots of hand-wringing over whether new results are valid, but biology will be a more mature field for it.
I've worked for the government in a scientific job, with a lot of IT folks. It was probably the most relaxed atmosphere I've worked in. No expectation to dress better than business casual. No expectation to work overtime. No expectation to really get anything done.
It's that last one that's really the killer. If you're not focused on getting projects done, first and foremost, then you're not going to attract good people.
A good engineer isn't necessary when the jobs at a government office survive only by making the right political and budgetary statements at precisely the right times. With very few exceptions, technical success or failure just doesn't have much influence on your career in the government.
Lastly, 140 engineers will make no difference. The federal government is huge. The office I worked in was a backwater, nearly forgotten location. We had a staff of 5000 people, about half of them engineers and scientists. There are thousands of engineers in the government right now who would love to work on meaningful projects. It's not a lack of talent or manpower that keeps those projects from happening.
The answer is no.
TFA says this in about 10 pages, with all the gory details.
Can we try no to have clickbait headlines? TFA is a blog called "Ask Ethan" so it makes sense for the title to be a question. A more appropriate headline here would have been "Dark Matter and Dark Energy don't Impact the Big Bang."
Well, that's a terrible summary. At least they linked to the actual paper.
Good on Charlie for getting all this press out of the paper. This is continuation of work started when I worked in his lab (thin graphene transistors can be made with e-beam lithography, that gets you a bandgap and you can actually think about making a digital transistor, this paper has better measurements and better e-beam lithography - there now you don't have to read either of the papers).
It's not clear that any of this stuff will ever be used as actual digital logic. I think it's more likely to see commercialization as an analog transistor in a sensor (reason #1 - no e-beam litho required). Someone from Charlie's group will likely be part of making active graphene electronics work out. He's got former students or postdocs at Intel and IBM, and there are at least two of us with graphene based startup companies. So, we're working on making graphene electronics something other than an academic curiosity.
I think we'd all rather see a world where China competes with the west in science and technology.
I am a scientist and I complain a lot about corruption in funding, publishing, and public representation of science; but as a whole it's a very honest and productive enterprise. This is much better than competing to see who can maintain the lowest cost labor pool or the biggest weapons.
There's a concept in your post that doesn't quite come across as clearly as it should:
People who are very successful academic scientists are only publishing for a few years, because they're able to go get significantly better jobs outside of academia.
The 1% of folks who are publishing for 16 years strait are very good at getting grants and publishing papers, but have failed during that 16 years to do anything sufficiently interesting or important to distract them from the academic grind for even one year. Most of the great professors I know have spent at least a year starting a company, working for the government, launching a spacecraft or some other very useful, but non-publishable work.
With medical devices efficacy and safety are very closely linked. If you're providing a product that monitors blood glucose and you do a poor job of it, your customer makes incorrect medical decisions that are potentially life threatening. The closer an app gets to providing such "actionable" information, the more likely it is that it requires FDA approval.
That said, this "can't be overseen" thing is silly. The FDA doesn't have the resources to oversee ALL smartphone health apps, they don't want to, and they shouldn't. There's no debate there. If the next generation of phones include electrocardiogram electrodes or a sophisticated spectrometer, the FDA is going to regulate the health software using those tools. That's really the news coming out of that FDA statement.
There's a big assumption here that large factories are wirelessly networked...
That's not a great assumption.
Universities generally insist that all IP developed as part of a sponsored agreement is owned by the university (as opposed to the inventors or the funders - the two normal ways of doing things). This isn't the "classic" troll behavior, but it's not much better. It has the same result of depriving the actual inventors (small business, professors, grad students) of an opportunity to commercialize their work. It deprives the funders (US government, non profits, small and large business) of IP they should rightly own as well as discouraging people from working together.
Almost all of the research done by universities is done via such sponsored research agreements, not internal funding.
I suppose I was one of the early pioneers in this field, I didn't know it had a name. A few years ago we published a paper on attaching three different olfactory receptors to carbon nanotube transistors and exposing the resulting devices to a half dozen or so chemicals while monitoring the responses. We were trying to produce something which was more usable (i.e. real-time) than the electrochemical methods described in TFA (to be clear, TFA describes very good work, we just had a different approach).
I wouldn't say this is a field which is taking off. It is significantly difficult to combine proteins with electronics. There are very, very few people/research groups who have the combination of abilities and experience to make these devices and properly interpret the results. More often than not, researchers perform laboratory, one-off measurements they can understand, but have no relevance to modern electronics or systems usable outside of the lab they were built in. Another common issue is performing measurements you don't understand, coming to conclusions that are wrong and sending the field off in a useless direction. It is very, very difficult to both build a good experiment AND properly interpret the results. The physics/chemistry guys don't understand the biology and the biologists don't understand the physics/chemistry. It can take many years to just learn to talk to eachother and stop assuming that "standard" processes, assumptions and statistics are applicable. Getting funding for this stuff can be a challenge, because no one really has claimed this field and none of the funding agencies (in the US, at least) seem to understand it. There are a handful of senior academics who can do this stuff, and a growing number of mid-career guys like me, but we're still a very small group.
If people are interested in what's going on with this field, I would recommend looking up the work of Phil Collins at UC Irvine, Ethan Minot at Oregon State and Charlie Johnson at University of Pennsylvania. I'm sure there are other good groups out there, but I know those guys are good.
No, that's NOT mentioned in the actual study, just in the press release. Not sure why they're speculating about that at all.
This is a great study, really cool. The title is unfortunate (it's clickbait), saved only by the weak qualifier "simple".
The science question here is what is the charge carrier when you rub two identical materials together, electrons or ions? This study does a great job of showing that it's not electrons. At the end of the paper, they point out that small amounts of water adsorbed on the surfaces of these oxides should create H+ and OH- ions in a density that does explain the static generation effect.
This water layer ion creation effect is fairly well known in materials physics. Until now, I don't think it was well known that it played any role in static generation.
This is the most insightful comment here.
This work is part of the Living Foundries program at DARPA (or at least, related to it). There are collaborating labs working on developing ribosomes to interpret new types of DNA, and other groups working on new amino acids to work with those ribosomes. The whole idea is to change what bio-manufacturing (think fermenting) can do, expanding into materials (drugs, fuels...) existing biology can't work with. This whole effort is going to be going on for many more years.
"Physics" is not just one thing anymore. The guy writing TFA, Ethan Siegel, is a bonified professional physicist. Reading the comments, you can see he just didn't know this one thing as well as he thought. How does that happen?
I don't know that there's any physicist going through training today or in the last 20 years who really understands "all" of physics.
Physics PhDs learn most of physics up to about 1910 (even that is a stretch, but at least the complete fields up to that point are introduced and sketched out), and the next 100 years are based on your specialty. The limits of energy density for photons are usually in this realm of "introduced only if directly important to your specialty."
It's up to the individual to fill in the gaps after formal classes, and it can be very hard to figure out what you don't know. It's particularly hard because of the oversimplified way physics is generally taught in undergrad, even to physics majors. Your old reference books may not actually be correct. I'm sure I've got a physics textbook around which claims almost exactly what Ethan said in his blog; the "why" of pair generation is just too distracting.
I will reserve my general snark regarding nanotechnology to highlight the fact these guys are putting the grad student up front and acknowledging that he really did all the work.
Could it be? An ethical professor? Professor Pantelides, Vanderbilt and Oak Ridge deserve a ton of credit for breaking the traditional assignment-of-credit mold here. Good job guys.
I'm a nanotechnologist who has worked on all these materials, and I've got to support your sentiment here.
Graphene is a great material, it's got a lot of cool properties and it won the Nobel Prize. People discovered that you could make something like graphene, but it had a lot of oxygen incorporated into it. They called it "graphene oxide," with a shorthand of "graphene." Then, other people found that you get more interesting stuff if you replace the oxygen with hydrogen in graphene oxide, leading to "reduced graphene oxide" with a shorthand of... "graphene."
These are all different materials with very different properties. It is very confusing trying to explain this all to people who are not immersed in the field, particularly because everyone seems to default to calling all these materials "graphene." It would be like using the same words to describe electronics grade silicon, glass and sand. Yes, they're all types of silicon, but all of these different materials should have distinct names.
The problem many nanotechnologists have (and I'm one of them) is that they believe if they can only show the right lab measurement, then the rest of the world will come calling and "they" will solve the commercialization problems related to their technology.
The real truth is that no number of studies like this will get graphene any closer to "real world devices." No one is going to solve the fundamental problems of manufacturing process development and material reproducibility for us. Neat lab tricks on "hero devices" aren't going to do it.
We already load up teachers with tech they have no idea how to use.
Teachers are not engineers or programmers.
Look, the landscape of teaching is shifting enough already. We're seriously going to drive these folks crazy if we continue to change major parts of their job on a yearly basis. The least we could do is give them a little time to catch up with the regulatory changes in teaching before starting on another technology refresh.
You have to disclose any foreign investors in an application for government funding; usually you have to disclose all VC firms invested in your company. If the government doesn't like your investors, they're allowed to disqualify you from receiving a contract even if the work has no security implications at all.
If these guys are trying to invest and hide where they're from, that's different, but that's not what the FBI says is happening.
Investing in companies is hardly what I would call stealing.
Foreign companies can come in and poach talent and taxpayer funded research from Universities and the startups that come out of them. There's nothing illegal or even remotely unethical there. This is what we wanted! Russian capitalists investing in US companies, US students and US schools. Even if their goal is to move the company to Russia, that's part of how capitalism and globalization work. If we want to encourage researchers to stay in the US, we should do more to encourage direct domestic investment in startups rather than secondary investments like hedge funds.
If we want to completely protect our basic R&D, we have to classify it. That would be sure to drive researchers out of the country.
What you describe is very close one of my first jobs when I worked for the government (100 proposals, one week, pick 4 winners, summary comments for all). It's not so hard to pick out the "good, but risky" proposals. (Another way to split up your proposal list is to point out that 80 of the proposals will be a re-hash of the same stuff, 30 of the proposals will be nonsense and 10 proposals will actually be about something unique and relevant.)
The most common reason for a creative proposal failing is simply that the program manager wasn't ready for it. You don't want to surprise a program manager because they have to properly prepare the bureaucracy around them to support your project *before* they get your proposal.
When a review committee makes a decision, there are still several government people who have to sign off on that decision before the money flows. There will always be at least one lawyer and one accountant with veto power over a committee selected proposal.
The last thing a program manager wants to do is end the fiscal year with money in their accounts. That can get them demoted or fired. They meet with their support staff sometimes for a year ahead of reviewing proposals to make sure everyone knows what's coming. Slowing things down, or failing to execute a grant, because of administrative surprises is very, very risky for a program manager. There's strong pressure to select institutions who have already worked with the office, and projects that fit well with the briefings given to everyone before proposals were solicited. For unusual ideas, it's better to convene a workshop and spend the next year developing a program around it (by which point all the usual suspects are involved).
Now it used to be that universities themselves funded research, and government scientists used to have broad authority to assign funding, and defense contractors had to spend 15% of their budgets on exploratory research, and we didn't have postdocs... To change things back requires a lot.