The Earth, the Sun, Andromeda galaxy, they have all been around for as long as you can remember and as long as humanity has been around. So when a new light suddenly shows up in the distance, it's a weird occurrence. But a newly-detected explosion could be one of the weirdest - and it isn't the only one.

An international team of scientists is reporting a new kind of explosion that they can't quite explain, billions of light years away. Maybe it's a supernova. Or maybe it's a star being eaten by a black hole. Or maybe it's something entirely different.

"I'm a supernova person to start with so I got really thrilled that this could be the most energetic supernova ever," Peter Lundqvist from Stockholm University in Sweden told Gizmodo. "But I had second thoughts."

A new supersonic airliner faster than Concorde is boasted to revolutionise air travel when it is rolled out by the mid 2020s.

The Boom Supersonic will be able to take passengers from New York to London in little over two hours as she hurtles at 1,687mph across the Atlantic.

Flight firm Boom has promised the plane will make its first test flight new year - with a mini proof-of-concept jet called the XB-1.

Boom Supersonic is boasted to be nearly three times as fast as regular airliners, but seats will cost the same as normal flights.

This is unlike now-retired luxury airliner Concorde that charged a small fortune for seats.

Company founder Blake Scholl, who is also a pilot, claimed the plane will be both faster and quieter than its legendary predecessor.

For years, China has claimed the top spot on a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers. Now it dominates the overall list, too, pushing the United States into second place.

For the first time, China has the most systems on the Top500 list, 202, up from 159 six months ago. The US dropped from 169 to 144. And in terms of the total performance of those machines, China also overtook the US, the Top500 supercomputer list organizers said.

The news underscores the relentless ascent of China's supercomputing trajectory in recent years. It also marks a notable shift in the international balance of high-end computing power that's closely tied to industrial, academic and military abilities.

The movie portrays a brutal future. A military firm unveils a tiny drone that hunts and kills with ruthless efficiency. But when the technology falls into the wrong hands, no one is safe. Politicians are cut down in broad daylight. The machines descend on a lecture hall and spot activists, who are swiftly dispatched with an explosive to the head.

The short, disturbing film is the latest attempt by campaigners and concerned scientists to highlight the dangers of developing autonomous weapons that can find, track and fire on targets without human supervision. They warn that a preemptive ban on the technology is urgently needed to prevent terrible new weapons of mass destruction.


Stuart Russell, a leading AI scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, and others will show the film on Monday during an event at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons hosted by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. The manufacture and use of autonomous weapons, such as drones, tanks and automated machine guns, would be devastating for human security and freedom, and the window to halt their development is closing fast, Russell warned.

Geoengineering to cool the Earth's climate by imitating volcanic eruptions is a 'highly risky strategy' that may increase the frequency of cyclones and droughts in some parts of the world

A California man suffering from a rare disease has become the first person ever to undergo an attempt to edit genes inside the body - however it's not clear what side-effects could result from the groundbreaking procedure.

The experiment was carried out on Brian Madeux, a 44 year old with Hunter Syndrome, a metabolic disease that affects fewer than 10,000 people around the world.

Madeux receives expensive weekly treatment to replace missing enzymes essential for breaking down certain carbohydrates. While the experiment will not eradicate the disease, it's hoped that a successful test will mean he will no longer have to undergo these regular treatments which can cost between $100,000 to $400,000 a year.

You would be forgiven for thinking that your private conversations were just that, but Google's Voice Assistant could be recording everything you say.

The feature is designed to allow users to talk to enabled gadgets to search the web, launch apps and use other interactive functions.

As part of this process, Google keeps copies of clips made each time you activate it, but it has emerged that background chatter could be enough to trigger recording.

Living specimens of stromatolites - the oldest evidence of life on Earth - have been found deep within a remote, protected World Heritage Area in Tasmania, Australia.

Stromatolites date back some 3.7 billion years and are regarded as a crucial piece of the puzzle that make up Earth's geological history - thanks to their layers of cyanobacteria, which comprise biofilm. These trap sediment and minerals from the water and cement them in place. The stromatolite layers then painstakingly build up overtime to form rock structures.

Being an experimental scientist can sometimes seem like a thankless task. You may be used to reading headlines about experiments that end up making great discoveries, but less is heard about the (often heroic) efforts of experimentalists that have yet to detect or observe what they set out to.

Some of these efforts have spanned decades in time and generations of manpower and expertise. However, the absence of a result is often just as scientifically meaningful as any popularized discovery: We learn more about what the natural world isn't, or doesn't have. Getting a positive signal from any of these, though, would have far reaching consequences for our understanding of the universe, or our place in it.

Below is a list of seven ongoing experiments that have yet to find what they're looking for. All of them are remarkable for their ingenuity and ambition. It's no wonder where the perseverance to push on with these experiments comes from.

Abstract

Over the last 50 years, we argue that incentives for academic scientists have become increasingly perverse in terms of competition for research funding, development of quantitative metrics to measure performance, and a changing business model for higher education itself. Furthermore, decreased discretionary funding at the federal and state level is creating a hypercompetitive environment between government agencies (e.g., EPA, NIH, CDC), for scientists in these agencies, and for academics seeking funding from all sources-the combination of perverse incentives and decreased funding increases pressures that can lead to unethical behavior. If a critical mass of scientists become untrustworthy, a tipping point is possible in which the scientific enterprise itself becomes inherently corrupt and public trust is lost, risking a new dark age with devastating consequences to humanity. Academia and federal agencies should better support science as a public good, and incentivize altruistic and ethical outcomes, while de-emphasizing output.


Introduction

The incentives and reward structure of academia have undergone a dramatic change in the last half century. Competition has increased for tenure-track positions, and most U.S. PhD graduates are selecting careers in industry, government, or elsewhere partly because the current supply of PhDs far exceeds available academic positions (Cyranoski et al., 2011; Stephan, 2012a; Aitkenhead, 2013; Ladner et al., 2013; Dzeng, 2014; Kolata, 2016). Universities are also increasingly "balance<ing> their budgets on the backs of adjuncts" given that part-time or adjunct professor jobs make up 76% of the academic labor force, while getting paid on average $2,700 per class, without benefits or job security (Curtis and Thornton, 2013; U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, 2014). There are other concerns about the culture of modern academia, as reflected by studies showing that the attractiveness of academic research careers decreases over the course of students' PhD program at Tier-1 institutions relative to other careers (Sauermann and Roach, 2012; Schneider et al., 2014), reflecting the overemphasis on quantitative metrics, competition for limited funding, and difficulties pursuing science as a public good.

In this article, we will

1. describe how perverse incentives and hypercompetition are altering academic behavior of researchers and universities, reducing scientific progress and increasing unethical actions,
2. propose a conceptual model that describes how emphasis on quantity versus quality can adversely affect true scientific progress,
3. consider ramifications of this environment on the next generation of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) researchers, public perception, and the future of science itself, and finally,
4. offer recommendations that could help our scientific institutions increase productivity and maintain public trust. We hope to begin a conversation among all stakeholders who acknowledge perverse incentives throughout academia, consider changes to increase scientific progress, and uphold "high ethical standards" in the profession (NAE, 2004).