A special set of editorials published in today's issue of the journal Science argue that social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason. The algorithms are running the show now, they argue, and the systems priorities are unfortunately backwards: "Rules of scientific discourse and the systematic, objective, and transparent evaluation of evidence are fundamentally at odds with the realities of debates in most online spaces." This produces what the authors call "homophilic self-sorting" -- the ones who are shown this content are the ones who are already familiar with it. In other words, they're preaching to the choir.

The stunning Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics. Even as the Omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly, to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next.

This is a book of strategies and tactical plays, written by practitioners, for practitioners. It is designed to help innovators develop more effective approaches to benefitting from early stage university research.

The growth of research projects relying on pervasive data — big datasets about people’s lives and activities that can be collected without them knowing — are testing the ethical frameworks and assumptions traditionally used by researchers and ethical review boards to ensure adequate protection of human subjects.

DAPSI goal is to make significantly easier for citizens to have any data which is stored with one service provider transmitted directly to another provider, addressing the challenge of personal data portability on the internet as foreseen under the GDPR.