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Women are currently underrepresented among speakers at scientific meetings, both in absolute terms and relative to their representation among attendees, but a new study suggests one way to address this deficit. An analysis of 460 scientific symposia to be published in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology reveals that the inclusion of at least one woman on a convening committee increases the proportion of female speakers by as much as 86% and significantly reduces the likelihood the session would have an all-male list of speakers.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a unique stellar system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense neutron star, all packed within a space smaller than Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The closeness of the stars, combined with their nature, has allowed the scientists to make the best measurements yet of the complex gravitational interactions in such a system.

A team of researchers in the Czech Republic has found that dogs can now be added to the list of animals that are able to sense and respond to the Earth’s magnetic field. In their paper published in Frontiers in Zooology, the researchers describe field experiments they conducted that indicated that dogs prefer to defecate while in a North-South stance relative to the Earth’s axis, during times when the magnetic field is calm.

The species historically cited as the most abundant of coral algae that forms rodoliths at the Gulf of California in Mexico is in reality a compound of five different species. This finding was made by Jazmín Hernández Kantun, marine biologist at the Autonomous University of South Baja California (UABCS), resulting in a change of paradigm in the study of the species known as Lithophyllum margaritae.

(Phys.org) —In a maze of blindingly complex reactions that snap oxygen atoms off cellulose or other bio-sources to create energy-dense fuel, the starting molecule’s size has a curious effect. If the oxygen-rich molecule is too short to comfortably stretch to a catalyst’s active site, oxygen atoms are split from its hydrocarbon chain instead of staying together as happens when the molecule can reach across, according to scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Baylor University.

A group of researchers led by Hendrik Bolink of the Institut de Ciència Molecular (ICMol) of the Scientific Park of the University of Valencia has developed a thin film low cost photovoltaic device with high power conversion efficiency. The results of this work, done in collaboration with researchers of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, were published in the scientific magazine Nature Photonics.

(Phys.org) —3M has announced a joint venture with Cambrios Technologies, a nanotechnology company, to produce a new line of touch sensitive screens based on silver nanowire ink developed by Cambrios. The announcement marks a move by 3M into nanowire based technology for touchscreen displays and away from the traditional indium tin oxide design.

(Phys.org) —Graphene has become an all-purpose wonder material, spurring armies of researchers to explore new possibilities for this two-dimensional lattice of pure carbon. But new research at MIT has found additional potential for the material by uncovering unexpected features that show up under some extreme conditions—features that could render graphene suitable for exotic uses such as quantum computing.

(Phys.org) —A colloidal suspension is a mixture in which microscopic particles of one substance are dispersed in another and because of its properties does not “settle” in the way that one might expect a stirred mixture of sand in water to do; nor do the particles dissolve in the fluid as one might expect grains of salt to dissolve in water. Colloidal suspensions and the related gels (solid colloidal systems) are of interest because many of them have fundamentally useful properties.

An international collaboration including Russian physicists from Moscow, Chernogolovka and Yekaterinburg have studied one member of the recently discovered family of superconductors based on iron compounds and find this exotic form of superconductivity to have complex, multi-gap character. A fact of principal importance for understanding the mechanisms of superconductivity is that the superconducting gap width never becomes zero around the constant-energy Fermi surface.