When you think about science leadership, you don't often think about United Arab Emirates. Dictatorships don't lend themselves to quality basic research but when they put their minds to applied research and development, and a lot of money, good things can happen.

While environmental activists wish we were a little more dictatorship-oriented when it comes to banning cars, like the Chinese did before the Olympics (for everyone but elites, anyway), plenty of scientists might like to have a more dictatorial, mission-based approach to research in the US, like we had with the Manhattan Project and the NASA Moon landing.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 was awarded jointly to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".

While today, chemical modeling is carried out in computers, in the early 1970s that was far more difficult. Chemical reactions occur at lightning speed. In a fraction of a millisecond, electrons jump from one atomic nucleus to the other. Classical chemistry has a hard time keeping up; it is virtually impossible to experimentally map every little step in a chemical process using physical models.

Grey literature in medicine has some valuable insight, according to a new paper. The authors say that clinical trial outcomes are more complete in unpublished reports than in publicly available information.

The results found that publicly available information contained less information about both the benefits and potential harms of an intervention than unpublished data. These findings highlight the importance of recent initiatives, such as the AllTrials initiative, that aim to make clinical trial outcome data publicly available, in order to provide complete and transparent information to help patients and clinicians reach decisions about clinical care.

Unusual impact craters formed on Mars feature a thin outer deposit that extends many times beyond the typical range of ejecta.

Nadine Barlow, professor of physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona University, calls these craters Low-Aspect-Ratio Layered Ejecta (LARLE) craters, since the ratio of the thickness to the length of the deposit (the aspect ratio) is so small. 

Barlow found the LARLE craters while poring over high-resolution images to update her highly popular catalog of Martian craters. These craters stood out since they displayed this extensive outer deposit beyond the normal ejecta blanket of the crater. "I had to ask, 'What is going on here?' " Barlow said.

Scientists should be good at judging the importance of the scientific work of others - it's a peer review culture - but a new paper instead says that scientists are unreliable judges of the importance of fellow researchers' published papers.

They're better at it than you. But still pretty bad at it, according to the authors.

Prof. Eyre-Walker and Dr. Nina Stoletzki analyzed three methods of assessing published studies, using two sets of peer-reviewed articles. The three assessment methods the researchers looked at were:

A study to see whether narrowing of the veins from the brain to the heart could be a cause of multiple sclerosis has found that the condition is just as prevalent in people without the disease.

The results call into question a controversial theory that MS is associated with a disorder proponents call chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI).

America and the UK are sarcastic nations. Maybe they care too much. Children learn early to recognize sarcasm, especially if they have greater empathy, according to a new study.

For children, sarcastic language can be difficult to understand, but they generally begin to recognize sarcasm between ages 6 and 8, especially familiar sarcastic praise such as "Thanks a lot!" and "Nice going!" Some children take much longer to begin to understand sarcasm and the authors of the paper investigated whether differences in the ability of children to empathize with others might help to explain why.

A new paper analyzed organizational change in state health-related departments from 1990 to 2009. The researchers discovered that in many cases states kept the same organizational structure in place during the 20-year period, even though consolidating public health departments with Medicaid departments did occur with some frequency.

27 states had housed the two functions together at one point in the 20-year period. And when they did so, the funding allocated to the public health department remained unchanged. The authors conclude that the results help allay concerns that when such mergers occur they automatically lead to cutbacks in jobs.

If you visit the outside of a meeting regarding biology and policy today, you are sure to see protesters who all insist that they should be voting on the science.  

They have reached their own consensus and their consensus is that biologists are just tinkerers who are out to create a scientocracy not bound by morality or ethics or anything beyond the cold pursuit of violating nature.

A transgenerational study with female rats suggests that exposure to social stress not only impairs a mother's ability to care for her children but can also negatively impact her daughter's ability to provide maternal care to future offspring. 

Researchers at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University conducted examined the behavioral and physiological changes in mothers exposed to chronic social stress early in life as a model for postpartum depression and anxiety.