The first study of payments to Chinese scientists for publishing in high-impact journals has serious implications for the future of research

Some work by DeepMind on applying reinforcement learning to teach a computer to navigate complex environments. Come for the science - stay for the video: https://goo.gl/8rTx2F

The rules for a stellar death seem pretty simple. If the star isn't that massive, it burns out into a carbon-rich remnant called a white dwarf. If it's big enough, the star ends in a bang, exploding in a supernova that can leave behind a neutron star or a black hole.

"We examine the possibility that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) originate from the activity of extragalactic civilizations"

Quantum mechanics PSA

"The Atomki group has produced three previous papers on their beryllium-8 experiments - conference proceedings in 2008, 2012 and 2015. The first paper claimed evidence of a new boson of mass 12 MeV, and the second described an anomaly corresponding to a 13.45-MeV boson. (The third was a preliminary version of the Physical Review Letters paper.) The first two bumps have disappeared in the latest data, collected with an improved experimental setup. "The new claim now is [a] boson with a mass of 16.7 MeV," Naviliat-Cuncic said. "But they don't say anything about what went wrong in their previous claims and why we should not take those claims seriously." One naturally wonders, he said, "Is this value that they quote now going to change in the next four years?""

Here, we show that fluorescent materials can be used to increase the active area of a photodiode by orders of magnitude while maintaining its short response time and increasing its field of view