Lithium-ion batteries have allowed us to make some pretty impressive advancements in energy storage.They're not the most environmentally sustainable option, as they still lose capacity and degrade over time, and there is a slight risk of them exploding, but generally speaking, they've been the best option for our needs. — Read the rest

In exciting news, a study funded by the California Grape Commission says adding 2 cups of grapes to a typical high-fat diet can stave off fatty liver disease and increase your lifespan.

From Healthline.com

Lead author John Pezzuto, PhD, dean and professor of pharmaceutics of the Western New England University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, said that his research demonstrates how eating grapes could help to offset some of the effects of a high fat Western diet.

Sci-Hub provides free access to millions of papers and books. Its disregard for copyright makes it the target of legal threats, but its mission of providing open access to publicly-funded studies has made it overwhelmingly popular among scientists and lay readers alike. — Read the rest

Scientists in Japan developed a method to freeze dry mouse sperm on sheets of specially-prepared paper. The sheets are stored in a "sperm book" and the samples could then be removed and attached to a postcard for mailing. The technique enables the sperm to be sent around to other researchers cheaply and safely. — Read the rest

A recent study published in the scientific journal Joule, titled "Solar and wind grid system value in the United States: The effect of transmission congestion, generation profiles, and curtailment," proposes a massive predicament in renewable power: it's too cheap. — Read the rest

Dr. Rachel Levine was confirmed as assistant secretary for health by the U.S. Senate following her work as Pennsylvania's secretary of health during the Covid pandemic. In an otherwise party-line 52-48 vote, Sens. Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Collins (R-Maine) were the only Republicans who voted to confirm Levine. — Read the rest

A bunch of scientists figured out that you can rock fruit flies to sleep, just like sweet little babies.

This adorable finding is reported in a recent edition of Cell Reports. It's long been known that rocking helps many animals sleep, because — as the framework in this paper hypothesizes, anyway — when you're rocked your system gradually screens out stimulus, which reduces our arousal, and leads to sleepiness. — Read the rest

According to researchers, stay-at-home orders in the US and around the globe are helping those working from home grab an extra 15 minutes of sleep per night. For college students, it's even up to 30 extra minutes each night. — Read the rest

My family stopped wiping down all our groceries to "disinfect" them a couple months ago, mostly because of hygiene exhaustion. Then in May, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention clarified its own Web page about how COVID-19 spreads to state that "based on data from lab studies on COVID-19 and what we know about similar respiratory diseases, it may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this isn't thought to be the main way the virus spreads." — Read the rest

The Open Insulin project ("a team of Bay Area biohackers working on newer, simpler, less expensive ways to make insulin") is trying to create an open source hardware system for making insulin in small batches, through a process that uses engineered yeast to "produce a modified proinsulin protein, and an enzyme to convert the modified proinsulin into insulin glargine" so that insulin co-ops can produce and test their own insulin for a cost "from ten thousand to a few tens of thousands of dollars."

In September, a consortium of 11 of Europe's largest science funders announced, "Plan S," whereby they would no longer fund research unless the grantees promised that the results would be published in an open access journal, which anyone could read and copy for free. — Read the rest

If you're not an academic or scientist, then you probably have no idea how off kilter research scholarship has become. 

Remember the fantastic attention experiment in which you have to count the times the basketball is passed? (If you don't know it, watch the video before reading the rest of this post.)

In a recent paper in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica, University of Cadiz psychologists suggest that like the gorilla experiment, "selective attention" based on our preconceptions about possible extraterrestrials and how they may communicate may cause us to overlook evidence of their existence. — Read the rest

When researchers write, we don't just describe new findings -- we place them in context by citing the work of others. Citations trace the lineage of ideas, connecting disparate lines of scholarship into a cohesive body of knowledge, and forming the basis of how we know what we know.

In the open access debate, advocates for traditional, for-profit scholarly journals often claim that these journals add value to the papers they publish in the form of editorial services that improve their readability and clarity.

I've written an op-ed on The Wire, a prominent nonprofit publication in India about access to knowledge. Access to scientific knowledge has been colonized by a few publishers who have improperly laid claim to the ocean of knowledge. This situation is morally untenable and contrary to law. — Read the rest

The cost of lomustine, a veteran cancer drug, have skyrocketed after a startup bought the rights to it and hiked prices 1,400 percent.

According to the Wall Street Journal, lomustine was sold by Bristol-Myers Squib for years under the brand name CeeNU at a price of about $50 a capsule for the highest dose.

In High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities, a group of academic and industry neuroscientists survey a self-selected group of 3,715 MENSA members about their mental health history and find a correlation between high IQ and clinical anxiety and depression disorders, an effect they attribute to "overexitabilities" — "the same heightened awareness that inspires an intellectually gifted artist to create can also potentially drive that same individual to withdraw into a deep depression."

Robbo writes, "A number of so-called scientific journals have accepted a Star Wars-themed spoof paper. The manuscript is an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes. We know this because Neuroskeptic wrote it and posted about it on the Discover Magazine site. — Read the rest

In Global proliferation of cephalopods a paper in Current Biology, an esteemed group of marine biologists reports that the population of octopuses (and other cephalopods) is booming thanks to its ability to adapt quickly to ocean acidification and temperature change, which is killing off other types of marine life at alarming rates.