Month: March 2019

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Brooks | Getty Images)

A researcher's most important grant is often the first one. These grants provide the money for critical equipment and pay for technicians, graduate students, and post-graduate researchers—the key ingredients to successful labs. Because of all it enables, getting that first grant is an essential step toward launching a research career. As a result, problems in our system that bias who gets these grants may have an outsized influence on the trajectory of research.

But that's exactly what a new study in JAMA seems to have found. While first-time grants in the biosciences are given to men and women at roughly even numbers, the male grant recipients tend to get more money from the same number of grants. While the situation definitely appears to be problematic, there are some subtleties in the data that suggest the situation is complex and that this isn't an across-the-board problem. The disparities are still large enough that they could be contributing to disparities in the research community.

Start me up

When a university or research center hires a new faculty member, it promises them little more than a bit of unoccupied lab space and some money. Every bit of research the new faculty wants to do requires equipment and consumables like chemicals and enzymes. And since they'll be busy writing grants and teaching, they need to hire some people to actually start doing the research. The money provided by the university helps greatly in this regard, but it tends to run out quickly if there's any expensive equipment involved.

Mark Zuckerberg discussing issues with an audience. (This time he used a blog post, though.) (credit: Facebook)

On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a more-than-3,000-word blog post that seems to declare a major shift in Facebook's strategy. In it, he says he believes that "a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today's open platforms."

Zuckerberg explains that he wants Facebook to build a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform, and describes his vision thusly:

Public social networks will continue to be very important in people's lives—for connecting with everyone you know, discovering new people, ideas and content, and giving people a voice more broadly. People find these valuable every day, and there are still a lot of useful services to build on top of them. But now, with all the ways people also want to interact privately, there's also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that's focused on privacy first.

He acknowledges Facebook is an odd fit for this approach, saying, "frankly we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing," but:

Enlarge (credit: Blizzard / Aurich)

Two years ago, Blizzard announced its intention to release a series of remastered classic games, and so far, the company is making good on that promise. StarCraft Remastered launched as a solid, faithful recreation in August 2017, while Blizzard is still currently working on World of WarCraft Classic and WarCraft III: Reforged.

That leaves one classic-minded Blizzard fanbase in the cold: the Diablo fans. These are the fans who, to some measure, let Blizzard have it after seeing the unveil of smartphone-only "freemium" game Diablo Immortal in place of any "Diablo IV" news at BlizzCon 2018. Which is to say: the word "Diablo" is a touchy one as of late.

Which brings us to today's seriously surprising news: Blizzard has just put Diablo 1 on sale digitally, a first for that 1996 game, with no prior announcement. It's not a remaster, per se, but it does come with some quality-of-life updates and is Blizzard's first DRM-free game launch in years.

Enlarge / With its nose cone open, Dragon reveals its docking mechanism while approaching the station's Harmony module. (credit: NASA)

One of the big questions surrounding the first launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft was how the Russians would react. They have held considerable sway in the International Space Station partnership by controlling access to the orbiting laboratory since the 2011 retirement of NASA's Space Shuttle. So far, the Russian response has been one of throwing small bits of shade here and there but trying not to be too obvious about it.

On Sunday, when SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, the Russian space corporation sequestered cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko in the Russian segment of the station. This was, Roscosmos said, so that Kononenko could take emergency action in case the Dragon became uncontrollable and crashed into the space station.

After the successful docking, Roscosmos tweeted a Russian language congratulation to NASA, but underscored the fact "that flight safety must be above reproach." An hour later it published a rare tweet in English, sending "its sincere compliments to the colleagues from NASA," but without the emphasis on vehicle safety. Neither tweet mentioned SpaceX. (Later, Roscosmos said NASA ordered the ship and, therefore, deserved the congratulations.)