Research

Ashley Mears brings personal experience as a model to her academic work on the gender politics of beauty. For her latest book on mega-rich men’s use of beautiful women as a form of currency, she went on more than 100 glamorous nights out – and sometimes even enjoyed it, she tells Matthew Reisz 

The global race against coronavirus to develop a vaccine cannot be won by principal investigators alone, says John Tregoning

Australian university directs academics to spend up to 80 per cent of their time teaching, despite relatively healthy financial position

Failure to improve predictions compounds concerns over effectiveness, accuracy and racial bias

More than a third of the public now believe scientists are hiding information – confusion over masks and broadsides from a ‘populist’ microbiologist are blamed

Universities warn research allocation is insufficient to brace against potential future pandemic shocks

Analysis of data on publications also shows emerging field of Covid-19 study ‘remains anchored’ to early Chinese research  

Higher education, like many fields in the social sciences, will end up with a wealth of comparative data, scholar says

Using critical comments about a preprint, Bild launched a front-page attack on Christian Drosten. Scientists fear this will chill academic discussion of preliminary results

Making findings open source may enable certain companies and countries to corner the vaccine market, warn Virginia Driver and Tom Woodhouse

US-China research collaborations will continue despite politics, Harvard economist says 

US universities warn against punishment that goes beyond individual visas

Schools of government have traditionally employed a technocratic approach to preparing public officials. But with polarisation straining political systems to breaking point, Paul Basken reports on calls in the US for more aggressive approaches, while Karthik Ramanna sets out how his Oxford programme attempts to repair the fractures

Ocean science’s ‘brute force’ approach is impossible in space. But extraterrestrial necessity may also be the mother of fruitful invention when it comes to probing the alien worlds beneath the terrestrial waves, says Kevin Peter Hand

Activists campaign for less reliance on international education income, as government flags a ‘supervised’ reopening of borders

Victoria’s A$350m lifeline adds to the pressure on Canberra to do more to help embattled sector

Academics recognise need but fear loss of attention on basic science

Social scientists should be more open that their policy advice is usually based on small experiments done in university settings, study recommends

Desire for visibility and political pragmatism help propel archipelago’s institutions up league table

Accusations that China is stealing virus research could harm US vaccine efforts and overseas enrolments, experts warn

After more than a decade of federal spending increases, the country also looks set to overtake Japan on the proportion of GDP spent on innovation

Dutch coronavirologist describes how work put on ice two years ago turned into a major discovery 

Protecting the European research budget offers better long-term hopes of saving the European project

Trade-offs involved in pandemic are ‘bread and butter’ for the discipline and it could be ‘drawn into the broad sciences’, experts suggest

Filling the gaps between disciplines and between science and technology could lead to greater progress than AI, says Jinghai Li 

A renewed European Research Area can be a fresh call to arms for scientific excellence across the continent, says Jan Palmowski

Innovation on the line, as coronavirus unleashes domino effect on research mainstream

Clay feet of cross-subsidy policies exposed by Covid-19 crisis, representative groups say

Academics involved say they also have a responsibility to ensure technology is used ethically in real life, particularly amid Covid-19  

Yes, excess haste can lead to mistakes, but the same is true of natural science, says Sandro Galea

Impact usually originates in discoveries by smart people who could not possibly have dreamed of the application, says Douglas Kell

UK drops to third in development-adjusted ranking of higher education systems

Stanford doctor warns extreme partisanship may taint future research

The coronavirus means that Christiaan De Beukelaer’s research on a sailing cargo ship is lasting a lot longer than he bargained for

Publisher coalition also embracing assessments through preprint formats

Financial incentives for developing new mass-testing methods would be more effective than coordinating research centrally, says economist Paul Romer

Newly funded work to include investigations into how the city brought infections down to nearly zero

The award-winning author and journalist on the essay that changed her life and why academic research revolves around men

About 200 projects contribute to research and aim to engage students during campus shutdowns

If contributing to knowledge is the name of the game, what is wrong with description, asks Michael Marinetto

Global recession may make public and policymakers think more about those ‘at the bottom of society’, says social policy academic

Myths notwithstanding, devolving research agendas to disciplines has a poor record of success, says Steve Fuller

Some types of patient data, crucial for understanding who might be worst hit by the virus, are often inaccessible for researchers. A new portal hopes to change that

Educational economist Miguel Urquiola tells Matthew Reisz about the upsides of inequality and the dangers of ‘unbundling’

Partnership approach during pandemic raises hopes of bursting scientific silos 

Pandemic crisis is chance to consider longer post-study work visas and even route to citizenship for foreign students, Chris Skidmore tells THE event

After rejection of virtual peer review, federal agency halts new awards, prompting concerns for younger researchers

Looking at past crises can help us come to terms with our own, argues scholar of plague that ravaged 18th-century Prague

Katie Metzler would like to see the different disciplines become more than the sum of their parts

Being trapped in Peru as countries went into lockdown showed us just how little support is available to researchers working abroad, a group of biologists writes

Quarantined patients, laboratories in lockdown and huge drop in charity income may cause drug trials to fail, warn research leaders

‘There is a life in science beyond the virus,’ warns German rectors’ head, amid calls for attention to the trade-offs between shutdowns and scientific progress

Several years ago, a few young men who identified as ‘involuntary celibate’ formed a self-help group. However, they went on to embrace vicious and sometimes murderous misogyny. Kaitlyn Regehr tells Ellie Bothwell why she felt impelled to explore their disturbing world

Rebuffed on pricing and open access, universities refuse full-access renewals

With insights from a variety of fields potentially useful in the fight against coronavirus, some French academics are arguing for more research and data to be made publicly available

Let’s bury the fallacy that students favour particular approaches regardless of the topic, says Gavin Moodie

Unexpected numbers are tuning into doctoral and master’s defences, with shutdown likely to lead to longer-term reforms to vivas, says Dutch professor

Whatever the truth around Mauro Ferrari’s resignation from the ERC, the affair raises an important issue, says Luca Magnani

Mauro Ferrari departed after suggesting launch of a coronavirus programme, but critics warn against abandoning blue-skies science, even in a crisis

Data suggest research related to the outbreak already numbers thousands of publications