Publish but be damned
The race – a marathon, run with participants having staggered start times – continues to determine who can publish the most scientific research papers during their career.
The Spanish newspaper El Pais last month on an up-and-comer, “one of the world’s most cited scientists, Rafael Luque”, a “prolific chemist” who has been “sanctioned by the University of CÓrdoba over his research work for other institutions in Russia and Saudi Arabia” and “suspended without pay for 13 years”.
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The article explains that Luque, whose full name is Rafael Luque Alvarez de Sotomayor, has already published about 700 papers, and that “so far this year, Luque has published 58 studies at a rate of one every 37 hours”.
Impressive as that is, Luque still has a way to go if he’s going to catch and exceed Russian chemist Yuri Struchkov. Struchkov was “for the 948 scientific papers he is credited with publishing between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days”.
In high-pressure sports, including the competition for academia’s bragging rights (and the swag that becomes available to the most prolific individuals: money, medals, meals with monarchs), impediments are part of the game. Winners manage to overcome many annoyances on the road to triumph and treasure.
Luque’s 13-year suspension might delay him, but if he is built of true champion stuff, and if he stays in good health, it could be a mere pothole, rather than a cliff edge, in his relentless stride, stride, stride to numerical and other glory.
Handy for hanging
1. Animals with hands and arms that make it easy for them to swing from tree branch to tree branch are likely to do a lot of travelling by swinging from tree branch to tree branch.
2. Humans have hands and arms that don’t make it easy for them to swing from tree branch to tree branch. That is why humans aren’t very likely to do a lot of travelling by swinging from tree branch to tree branch.
Those are conclusions reached by researchers at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine. They released a in the journal Animals with a title that invites people to tease out the meaning of unfamiliar words: “How pendular is human brachiation? When form does not follow function”.
Handy for standing
1. Older people swing their arms more than young people, as part of keeping their balance rather than frequently toppling over.
2. If everyone is forced to stand while keeping their hands clasped in front of their body, young people are less prone to toppling than older people.
Those are conclusions reached by researchers at Coventry University and Imperial College London in the UK, the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and the University of New South Wales in Australia. They released a study in Human Movement Science with a title that is fairly easy to understand: .
The study invites people to marvel at the countless subtle ways by which upstanding humans manage to live upright lives: “we were primarily interested in changes in high frequency sway associated with ankle stiffening strategies”.
Punching up data
While brain scientists elsewhere study the accumulated effects of a lifetime of whacks to the head, a quartet have been watching how people respond to the sight of a fist fast approaching their face. An account of their action-adventure experiment jabs out from the midsection of the journal .
The research team is a foursome based at Loughborough University in the UK, Paderborn University in Germany and the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and the University of Utah in the US. Their stated goal: to understand how the delay between a feigned punch and a real punch affects the reaction of the person being targeted. But given the limits of using computer technology as a substitute for an actual, sweating, flesh-and-blood-and-boxing-gloves punch, this involved a feigned simulated punch and a real simulated punch.
Volunteers watched a computer screen display animation images of two bright red boxing gloves, one to the left, one to the right. Sometimes one glove feigned a punch: “The feint was simulated by a glove briefly enlarging by 25% then returning to normal size.” The actual simulated punch “enlarged by 50% and moved closer to the center, creating a rapid looming effect of a punch moving toward the participant’s head”. The reported discovery from this is: “if the timing of the feint is right”, even trained athletes will suffer a pounding.
The researchers express a hope of doing experiments that use “a virtual reality headset that could better simulate a punch coming directly at the participant”. They mention no plans to repeat the experiment using nonvirtual reality and are blunt about a basic problem that may be independent of any technology: “A limitation of this study was that it was difficult to find experts willing to participate.”
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