Author: John Timmer

Today, the UK's Wellcome Trust, a major funder of biomedical research, announced that it was partnering with a publisher called F1000 to create a new scientific journal. As its name implies, Wellcome Open Research will exclusively feature the research of people funded by the organization, and it will provide open access for anyone to view it—no subscription required. The journal will also have distinctive twists on what constitutes something worth publishing, as well as the peer review process.

Both the underlying technology and the approach to publishing will be borrowed from F1000. Authors will submit a work (more on what constitutes a work later), at which point it will undergo a brief editorial check for scientific validity. If it passes, it gets published online. At that point, peer reviewers will be invited to check the work out; their reviews, as well as their identity, will be public, so that anyone viewing the document can see it. The paper can then be revised based on the reviewers' comments; only when everyone is satisfied will the final product be submitted to scientific publication databases like PubMed.

Beyond the open peer review, Wellcome appears to be pushing for a greater opening up of the scientific process. In addition to works that are like a traditional scientific publication, the journal will happily take negative results (a hypothesis is wrong), null results (an experiment simply failed), and even just data sets. This is an acknowledgement that researchers typically do many experiments that are failures or produce results that aren't of general interest. But these results can be of value to the scientific community, if for no other reason than to warn them of experimental approaches that simply don't work.

With the 4th of July weekend about to begin, the US Energy Information Administration decided to look back to our nation's founding. So it plotted the country's energy use starting from 1776. Most of the result isn't a surprise: biomass had a long run before fossil fuels took over and stayed on top. But recent years have seen the biggest change since nuclear was added to the mix.

Biomass spent nearly a century on top of the US energy mix before being displaced by coal, although it never went above providing four quadrillion Btus (each Btu is a bit over 1,000 Joules). But biomass never entirely went away, and its resurgence this century puts it at its highest level ever. With nuclear holding steady and renewables surging to nearly the same level as hydropower, fossil fuels are on the verge of dropping below 80 percent of the US' energy mix.

Fossil fuels haven't been that low a percentage for over a century.

It's not an exaggeration to say that functional MRI has revolutionized the field of neuroscience. Neuroscientists use MRI machines to pick up changes in blood flow that occur when different areas of the brain become more or less active. This allows them to noninvasively figure out which areas of the brain get used when performing different tasks, from playing economic games to reading words.

But the approach and its users have had their share of critics, including some who worry about over-hyped claims about our ability to read minds. Others point out that improper analysis of fMRI data can produce misleading results, such as finding areas of brain activity in a dead salmon. While that was the result of poor statistical techniques, a new study in PNAS suggests that the problem runs significantly deeper, with some of the basic algorithms involved in fMRI analysis producing false positive "signals" with an alarming frequency.

The principle behind fMRI is pretty simple: neural activity takes energy, which then has to be replenished. This means increased blood flow to areas that have been recently active. That blood flow can be picked up using a high-resolution MRI machine, allowing researchers to identify structures in the brain that become active when certain tasks are performed.

Thursday marked the official end of the primary mission of NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Dawn demonstrated the potential of ion engines in the exploration of the Solar System, as it was able to rendezvous with and enter orbit around two different asteroids, Vesta and Ceres. Scientifically, its findings have changed what we thought we knew about some of the bodies of the asteroid belt.

Dawn isn't going to shut down now that its mission is over, as it's in reasonable working order and still observing Ceres. But there's a hint that NASA has bigger plans for the spacecraft.

Yesterday, the Jet Propulsion Lab (which operates Dawn) put up and then removed what it calls a "Dawn Journal" entry. The entry described the future plans for Dawn, and they don't involve staying in orbit around Ceres. Instead, the craft's ion engines will be used to gradually nudge it away from Ceres. The low-power, high-efficiency engines will take until the end of the year to get the spacecraft free of the dwarf planet's gravitational pull.

NASA's Dawn mission has achieved a number of firsts, including being the first spacecraft to go into orbit around two different bodies. The second of those destinations is Ceres, a dwarf planet that is by far the largest body in the asteroid belt. That visit has now shown us that a lot of our expectations for what we would find at Ceres were wrong: it's not an icy body, but liquid water has helped shape the dwarf planet's most dramatic features.

A couple of papers that analyze Dawn data have appeared in Nature journals this week. In one case, they suggest that the dwarf planet's composition is much rockier than we expected. But the other suggests that the mysterious bright spots found in some of Ceres' craters are the result of salty brines making their way to the surface.

Our thoughts about Ceres prior to Dawn's visit were dominated by the dwarf planet's relatively low density. This suggested to many people that it must be composed largely of water, although the surface was darker than you would expect from water ice that was expected to be a thin veneer over an icy world. Craters were also expected to be relatively scarce, as water ice is semi-viscous at the temperatures (120K and up) expected to be found on Ceres.

The world is awash in our waste heat. Our computers, our motors, our electrical generating plants—all of them shed heat into the environment. That's in part because there's no easy way to capture its energy and put it to use. All the existing methods we have for harvesting waste heat are either inefficient or uneconomical.

Now, some researchers have come up with a new method of grabbing some of that waste heat and potentially putting it to work. Their system relies on nothing more complex than water and a polymer membrane and, even in its first test form, it's already capturing roughly half of the possible Carnot efficiency available to the system.

We already generate lots of electricity via heat differences. It's just that those differences are large—large enough to create the pressure differences needed to drive turbines. Waste heat often becomes waste simply because the temperature differences are small, on the order of dozens of degrees Celsius, rather than hundreds.

The pictures that came from New Horizons' flyby of Pluto have set off a scramble to make sense of the dwarf planet's terrain. Pluto's clearly geologically active, with mountains and fresh surfaces that haven't been pummeled by impacts yet. One of those features, Sputnik Planum, appears to be an ocean of frozen nitrogen, fed by nitrogen glaciers that line its shores. But a new analysis suggests that this isn't the only ocean on the dwarf planet.

An analysis of the internal structure and heating of Pluto indicates that there are two likely probabilities: either it has a deep ocean of liquid water, or the water on Pluto has frozen solid and compacted into a dense form of ice called ice II. And the authors of the analysis suggest that the liquid ocean makes more sense given Pluto's surface features.

The analysis was done in a similar manner to the ones that tackled Sputnik Planum: figure out Pluto's composition and its heat budget and trace the effects of the heat as it escapes to the surface. The heat itself comes from Pluto's rocky core, which carries some of the same radioactive isotopes that help keep the Earth's core nice and toasty. Above that, however, Pluto is mostly water, with difficult-to-determine fractions of things like ammonia and methane.

The LIGO detector has now seen at least two black hole mergers. The second merger it spotted was about what we would expect given a binary system of two massive stars. Both explode, leaving black holes behind that are just a bit more massive than the Sun; these later go on to merge.

But the first merger detected by LIGO was something rather unusual given that both black holes were around 30 times the Sun's mass. So far, we have not observed anything that could produce black holes in that mass range. Now, a new modeling study suggests that mergers with these sorts of masses might be common—but only if stars can collapse directly into a black hole without exploding first. This situation would require some of the Universe's most luminous stars to simply be winking out of existence.

The black holes involved in these mergers almost certainly began their existence as binary star systems. So in the new study, the authors performed a massive number of simulations of these systems using a modeling package called StarTrack. The simulations took into account the different amount of heavy elements present at different times in the Universe's existence—there are 32 different levels of heavy elements, and the team ran 20 million simulations at each of them. The simulations also took into account various models of the collapse of massive stars, as well as whether the process generated an asymmetrical force that could kick the resulting black hole into an energetic orbit.

You might not guess that economists spend a whole lot of time thinking about auto mechanics, but they actually have a technical term for the service that the mechanics provide: credence goods. Credence goods are typically services where the person who receives the service is incapable of evaluating whether the service was provided quickly and efficiently or even if the needed service was provided at all.

These types of services aren't limited to auto mechanics—other examples include medical care and cab rides in unfamiliar cities. Economists find these services interesting because we can learn from them about human financial interactions in cases where one of the parties might have an incentive to be dishonest.

A study of Austrian computer repair shops shows that plenty of said parties succumb to that incentive. The study also shows a common feature of modern economics that makes matters worse: insurance that covers the cost of the repairs.

Nuclear power plants are the only current source of low-carbon electricity that can be built just about anywhere. But the Fukushima disaster has raised some significant questions about the wisdom of putting plants just anywhere. Now, after a decades-long battle, a plant in California that sits near several fault lines will not be relicensed when its current certifications expire in the middle of next decade. The decision will bring an end to nuclear power in the golden state, which has the most aggressive climate goals in the US.

At the time Fukushima occurred, California had two licensed nuclear reactors. But a faulty refurbishment had put the San Onofre in limbo; due to the uncertainty, its owners eventually decided to permanently shutter the plant. That left Diablo Canyon as the only operational plant in the state. That site had been controversial since before the plant was operational, as it is situated near several fault lines and on the coast; Fukushima did little to allay those fears.

Diablo Canyon's two reactors were scheduled to be relicensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2024 and 2025. Now, in a deal negotiated between the utility and environmental groups, that relicensing won't occur. The deal calls for the lost generating power to be replaced by a mix of renewable energy, grid-scale storage, and efficiency measures.