International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

  In southern Sweden, one of the largest science and technology infrastructure projects is being built. The European Spallation Source facility’s main aim “is to build and operate the world’s most powerful neutron source, enabling scientific breakthroughs in research related to materials, energy, health and the environment, and addressing some of the most important societal challenges of our time .” Up to 3 000 guest researchers will perform experiments here in any given year, beginning in 2023. An island off Finland’s southwestern coast will house the world’s first nuclear waste storage facility. About 400 metres below the ground, a specially built tomb is ready to receive spent nuclear fuel and keep it safely stored for about a million years. Sweden has begun constructing its own deep disposal site. France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are next. AI is shaping the future of humanity. To safeguard it, the EU intends to act as a watchdog and regulate AI by finalising the Ar...

University research data looks like something from outer space – let’s zoom in and see what’s there Research institutions need the right tools to discover their strengths and weaknesses, to plan for the future, and to make a greater impact for the communities of tomorrow. In this post, Digital Science’s VP Research Futures, Simon Porter, uses a digital telescope to view the ‘galaxies’ of research within our best and brightest institutions – and explains why that matters. When we see new images of our universe through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), we’re left in awe of the unique perspective we’ve witnessed, and something about our own universe – even the perception of our own existence – has altered as a result. What we see are entirely new galaxies, and worlds of possibility. That’s also what I see when I look at the research data spanning our many universities and research institutions globally. Each one of these institutions represents its own unique u...

Dr Alison Mitchell, Chief of Staff, Digital Science. In keeping with many Digital Science new starters, Chief of Staff Alison Mitchell has had an exhilarating first few months at the company. Here she reflects on the theme of change in terms of leadership and growth in a complex organization. For many years I’ve watched Digital Science from afar, and I’ve always been aware of its long-held commitment to helping researchers and research institutions make a difference. For more than a decade, Digital Science has been committed to maximizing the impact research and researchers can have throughout society. We do this by providing researchers with the full range of data they need, by giving them access to analytics that enable better decision-making about research, and by supplying better tools to help communicate the outcomes – including the impact – of their research more broadly.  We’re in an era of major crises across the world that can be solved only through open debate a...

Mathematicians have iterated a new upper-bound limit on a famously elusive math concept: the Ramsey Number The Ramsey number’s upper bound hasn’t changed since Paul Erdős calculated it in 1935 The Ramsey number involves “cliques” and “anti-cliques,” but this new research used related “books” to make the breakthrough. In  new research  that has not yet been peer reviewed, mathematicians have made tiny but important progress on one of math’s thorniest problems: the Ramsey number. The Ramsey number is part of the field of combinatorics, which studies the “counting numbers” and the different ways to arrange them in groups and other problems. One major example of a combinatorics subfield is graph theory. Aspects of combinatorics also touch many mathematical and other fields, from advanced  algebra  and  geometry  to  biology  and  programming . So why do all these people have their eyes on the prize of the Ramsey number, and what does this new bre...