zlatiah

Postdoctoral training is a career stage often described as a demanding and anxiety-laden time when many promising PhDs see their academic dreams slip away due to circumstances beyond their control. We use a unique dataset of academic publishing and careers to chart the more or less successful postdoctoral paths. We build a measure of academic success on the citation patterns two to five years into a faculty career. Then, we monitor how students’ postdoc positions—in terms of relocation, change of topic, and early well-cited papers—relate to their early-career success.

One key finding is that the postdoc period seems more important than the doctoral training to achieve this form of success. This is especially interesting in light of the many studies of academic faculty hiring that link Ph.D. granting institutions and hires, omitting the postdoc stage. Another group of findings can be summarized as a Goldilocks principle: It seems beneficial to change one’s direction, but not too much.

Paper linked in post, is open access. Citation:

• Y. Duan, S.A. Memon, B. AlShebli, Q. Guan, P. Holme, T. Rahwan, Postdoc publications and citations link to academic retention and faculty success, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (4) e2402053122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402053122 (2025).

Related news article from Nature News (soft paywall): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00142-y

Reference (passed peer review btw):

Muhammad Salman Hameed, Hongxuan Cao, Li Guo, Lei Zeng, Yanliang Ren, Advancements, challenges, and future frontiers in covalent inhibitors and covalent drugs: A review, European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry Reports, Volume 12, 2024, 100217, ISSN 2772-4174, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejmcr.2024.100217

Try this link if the above doesn't work (not that it's worth visiting in the first place...): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277241742400089X?via%3Dihub

Mew discovered the wonder of pillows and insist on sitting on one

Additional context for non-scientists:

Nature is the highest-cited (extremely high impact factor, a.k.a. how many times the average paper in a journal gets cited) basic sciences journal, and is one of the most-cited only behind some clinical study-specific journals like Lancet. Nature is also widely regarded as one of the (if not the) most elite journals to publish in. Lots of scientists' careers hinge on them publishing papers in journals like Nature or Science.

Springer Nature also operates a lot of Nature-branded journals (like Nature Genetics, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Protocols) that are commonly regarded as some of the best field-specific journals. Not to mention Scientific American, a highly rigorous science news source aimed at the general public.

Context is that I had to register for a lot of accounts recently and some of the rules really make no sense.

Not name-and-shaming, but the best one I've seen recently is I might have accidentally performed an XSS attack on a career portal using a 40-digit randomly generated password...

Earth’s temperature has surged in the past two years, and climate scientists will soon announce that it hit a milestone in 2024: rising to more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. But is this sudden spike just a blip in the climate data, or an early indicator that the planet is heating up at a faster pace than researchers thought?

Some scientists argue that the spike can be mostly explained by two factors. One is the El Niño event that began in mid-2023 — a natural weather pattern in which warm water pools in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, often leading to hotter temperatures and more-turbulent weather. The other is a reduction over the past few years in air pollution, which can cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space and seeding low-lying clouds. Yet neither explanation fully accounts for the temperature surge, other researchers say.

Some say that the massive temperature spike might end up being a blip in the climate data, owing in large part to new regulations covering air pollution from ocean-going ships... Not everyone is convinced, however. If the pollution reduction was the primary explanation, warmer temperatures should coincide with the areas most frequented by ships... Nor do the numbers necessarily add up.

Soft paywall so see summary above. The two studies cited in the news:

• Goessling, H. F., Rackow, T. & Jung, T. Science https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq7280 (2024). (about the El Nino effect)
• Gettelman, A. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 51, e2024GL109077 (2024). (about the reduction in ship tracks)

Image description: a black cat sitting on a bathroom scale while looking at the camera.

A study that stoked enthusiasm for the now-disproven idea that a cheap malaria drug can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published.

... Its eventual withdrawal, on the grounds of concerns over ethical approval and doubts about the conduct of the research, marks the 28th retraction for co-author Didier Raoult, a French microbiologist, formerly at Marseille’s Hospital-University Institute Mediterranean Infection (IHU), who shot to global prominence in the pandemic. French investigations found that he and the IHU had violated ethics-approval protocols in numerous studies, and Raoult has now retired.

“Why it took more than four-and-a-half years after the study was initially published for the journal to come to this conclusion is not clear. It is also somewhat surprising that most of the paper’s authors still stand by study’s findings and conclusions despite its obvious inconsistencies, methodological flaws and potential ethical issues as outlined in the retraction note,” says Søgaard.

The paper (now marked as retracted): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.105949

This is a rather detailed investigation by folks at WSJ into the business endeavors of David Sinclair, renowned celebrity scientist at Harvard Medical School (and kind-of a known fraudster among the field)

It's... interesting to say the least. Not strictly science-science per-se, but I hope this is informative to at least some of you. Personally as someone interested in aging research, I find it valuable to see what all the snake oil salesmen are doing so I know what not to get too mentally engaged in...

Link is de-paywalled. Original link at WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/david-sinclair-reverse-aging-failed-business-8bc4a43d

A blog report by scientific misconduct sleuth Leonid Schneider, with references to a lot of other bonkers things Sinclair did: https://forbetterscience.com/2024/12/13/schneider-shorts-13-12-2024-most-lying-deceiving-person-in-the-world/

Google DeepMind has developed the first artificial intelligence (AI) model of its kind to predict the weather more accurately than the best system currently in use... The system, called GenCast, is described today in Nature.

Conventional forecasts, including those from ENS, are based on mathematical models that simulate the laws of physics governing Earth’s atmosphere... GenCast, by contrast, has been trained only on historical weather data...

So yeah DeepMind is fucking going at it again.

Interestingly the model architecture seems to heavily integrate Bayesian maximum likelihood estimation in addition to their usual GNN-based deep learning approaches, which I didn't know is even possible. Their methods section states "[o]ur innovation in this work is an MLWP-based Forecast model, and we adopt a traditional NWP-based State inference approach

I'm not super familiar with Bayesian methods though so if anyone can add some more information I'd appreciate it

References:

• The paper: Price I, Sanchez-Gonzalez A, Alet F et al. Probabilistic weather forecasting with machine learning. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08252-9

• The codebase: google-deepmind/graphcast. GitHub, accessed 2024-12-05. https://github.com/google-deepmind/graphcast

Researchers studying ageing disagree on just about everything — including what ageing is, whether it is a disease and when it starts — according to a survey of about 100 scientists working in the field.

[Gladyshev] decided to survey participants at an international conference on ageing in Newry, Maine, in 2022, to better understand the views of those researching the topic. Respondents included early-career researchers, established scientists and industry professionals. The results are described in PNAS Nexus today.

Most researchers are clear in their own minds about what ageing is — but their perspectives don’t align with those of others, says Gladyshev. “People joke in the field that there are more theories than people.” Despite this, Gladyshev says he was surprised by the scale of the problem.

Particular interesting to me since I've met Dr. Gladyshev in-person and have discussed this very problem with him...

The DOI link is broken, so here is the actual cited paper (open access):

Gladyshev VA et al. Disagreement on foundational principles of biological aging. PNAS Nexus (2024). https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/12/pgae499/7913315

This is definitely a bit of a stupid question... but methinks this happens to a good number of immigrants. Asking because there is a bit of a funny philosophical debate here:

• Technically the second language is not "native" by virtue of you not growing up with it
• But you speak it better than your native language, so skill-wise it is "native"

So do you have "native" language skills, or would you consider yourself simply highly "fluent" at the second language?