THING ONE
For undergraduate science majors, the next step if one wishes to remain in science, is to go to graduate school and get a PhD. A raging debate in recent times, however, calls this process into question. As the number of PhD students increases every year due to an upsurge in funding by most countries of doctoral and postdoctoral education, many find that the labor market is not able to keep up. As a result, many PhD students may have to "leave science altogether". A recent Editorial in Nature addressed exactly this conundrum - read more here.
This calls for a rethink of the entire process such that graduate students are not taught in a restrictive manner but are exposed to academic prospects of many kinds. Find out more about this appeal for restructuring here.
Many of us have heard cloud computing referred to as the next big thing in the dissemination of information and services. A recent Scientific American report expounds on just why this is so revolutionary. According to the report, "the idea of cloud computing is to make all the information and services run in data centers around the world available via the Web. The reality of this is daunting. Data centers built by different businesses, government entities and research institutions are not inherently designed for sharing, and not all information can (or should) be available to anyone with access to a Web browser." Read more here.
As Amazon, Google and Apple with their recently-announced iCloud all jump on the bandwagon, cloud computing may just end up changing the game. And this announcement that Microsoft is teaming up with the National Science Foundation means that the process of scientific research is about to get changed as well.