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Material World

Factual: Science & Nature

Science programme reporting on developments across the disciplines

Science programme reporting on developments across the disciplines. Each week, scientists describe their work, conveying the excitement they feel for their research projects

Material World: Publishing, Turbulence, Evolution

Publishing, Turbulence, Evolution

11/04/2013

BBC Radio 4 - Material World, Publishing, Turbulence, Evolution

The future of open science? Fewer dusty journals, more research in the cloud.

The future of open science? Fewer dusty journals, more research in the cloud. Plus climate change and its effect of increasing turbulence and much quicker evolution.

What's it like being a research academic these days? Not so many piles of dusty books and journal articles lying around, many more hundreds or even thousands of files sitting on your computer. But how to connect them, sort them and cross reference them? This was a problem felt by Victor Henning, co-founder of a London tech startup called Mendeley, who aimed to build a tool for researchers around the world to use to smooth their work flow and to increase collaboration by revealing the people who are reading the same articles. Mendeley were bought outright this week by Reed Elsevier, the Dutch publishing house who publish more than 2000 scientific journals, including the Lancet. Victor Henning is joined by Jason Priem of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of a recent horizon scanning feature in Nature, to discuss the future of science publication and how this wealth of research will be managed in the future.

Flights across the North Atlantic could get a lot bumpier in the future because of climate change. New research, published in Nature Climate Change, suggests that turbulence could double by 2050. Dr. Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientists from the University of Reading, explains to Gareth Mitchell the implications of his findings.

Changes to our environment are effecting evolution much quicker than we thought. A new study shows that even if we were to return a habitat to its former state, the population may not recover to its former state as it could have already evolved significantly away from that. This has big implications for fisheries management, crop pest resistance and even for emerging diseases like bird flu. Professor Tim Benton of Leeds University explains why this new work should challenge current conservation methods.

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