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At their meeting last week at the SKA Organisation Headquarters near Manchester, UK, the SKA Board of Directors unanimously agreed to move the world’s largest radio telescope forward to its final pre-construction phase. The design of the €650M first phase of the SKA (SKA1) is now defined, consisting of two complementary world-class instruments – one in Australia and one in South Africa – both expecting to deliver exciting and transformational science.

With policymakers looking for hard evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of federal programs, a new study of federal patent output by the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice (TPP) provides some new insight into certain federal research programs and their substantial role in generating growth-enhancing innovations.

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers working at Northwest A&F University in China has found that introducing a particular mouse gene into cattle can give them better protection against tuberculosis. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes how they moved the gene and then their tests to see how well the cattle with the new gene were able to ward off a TB infection.

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology has found that unlike western cuisine, ingredients in Indian food are less likely to have flavors in common. In their paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the team describes how they applied network science to cuisine and found curious differences between food recipes from the two cultures.

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with ties to several different institutions in Australia has published a paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B refuting claims made by other researchers that the advent of “big gods” characteristic of such religions as Islam and Christianity, were one of the driving forces that led to large civilized societies.

A team of space researchers working with data from the VLT in Chile has found via measuring the spectrum of a distant quasar by analyzing absorption lines in a galaxy in front of it, that there was no measurable change in the mass ratio of protons and electrons over a span of 12 billion years.

The world’s national parks and nature reserves receive around eight billion visits every year, according to the first study into the global scale of nature-based tourism in protected areas. The paper, by researchers in Cambridge, UK, Princeton, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, published in the open access journal PLOS Biology, is the first global-scale attempt to answer the question of how many visits protected areas receive, and what they might be worth in terms of tourist dollars.

Deep public divisions over climate change are unrelated to differences in how well ordinary citizens understand scientific evidence on global warming. Indeed, members of the public who score the highest on a climate-science literacy test are the most politically polarized on whether human activity is causing global temperatures to rise.

Small wireless computing devices, ranging from the size of a matchbox to the size of a dime are going to change the way Florida monitors its water quality, sea level rise, hurricanes, agriculture, aquaculture, and even its aging senior population. The types of sensing devices developed by computer scientist Jason Hallstrom, Ph.D., who recently joined Florida Atlantic University, can collect information about the surrounding environment and transmit that information to cloud-based computing systems that store, analyze and present that information to educators, researchers and decision-makers.

Commercially available hydrocarbons were used as templates to synthesize uniform nanographene sheets using a series of sheet extending agents and a new transition metal catalyst, which were developed by Kyohei Ozaki, Katsuaki Kawasumi, Mari Shibata, Hideto Ito, and Professor Kenichiro Itami at Nagoya University’s Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (ITbM) and of the JST-ERATO Itami Molecular Nanocarbon Project. Nanographenes, which are nanometer-sized graphenes, possess good semiconducting properties making them highly promising materials for the next generation of organic electronic devices.