Argument about a lemon- or orange-shaped planet highlights importance of international competition in science, curator says
It was a row that split scientists, launched globe-trotting expeditions and for one man, ended in murder: was the Earth shaped like an orange or a lemon?
The 18th-century debate – and the endeavours that settled it –can now be relived by visitors to this year’s Royal Society summer science exhibition, in a display called “Figuring the Earth”.
Continue reading...Frustration growing at delays that leave some unable to take up prestigious posts for up to seven months
The best international scientists are being deterred from heading to the UK due to a Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) vetting scheme that is leaving researchers in limbo for months, the Royal Society has warned.
The government’s Academic Technology Approval Scheme (Atas) is designed to prevent the export of technology with potential military applications and was significantly expanded last year amid a national security crackdown. But lengthy delays are leaving some unable to take up prestigious posts for up to seven months and frustration is growing that the issue is harming the UK’s reputation abroad.
Continue reading...There have been many reports but little action: UK university science departments need to do more to fix their serious diversity problem
The Nobel laureate poet Sir Derek Walcott once said that the English language is nobody’s special property: “It is the property of the imagination.” Much the same could be said for science. It should be said. Except this isn’t quite so. Not yet.
Data on who is doing science has recently been released by the Royal Society, the UK’s premier scientific academy, using figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, whose data is by far the most systematic. The numbers show that in 2018-19, 19.2% of science, technology, engineering and maths academic staff aged 34 and under are Asian and 1.8% are black. In physics and chemistry, the proportion of black researchers stands at a sobering zero, rounded down, as these calculations do for ease of presentation, from literally one or two individuals. What’s interesting is that these small figures decrease further as a scientist’s age increases – as they travel through the hallowed halls of academia to become senior scientists. So while the UK has 10,560 science professors who are white, only 960 are Asian, 310 mixed and “other” and 65 black. This says that minorities who enter science are less likely to get promoted. Fewer of them go on to become those experts who evaluate which next-generation scientists should then get the training, the money and the jobs. “Unless this changes,” the Royal Society says, “there will be unbalanced representation of academic staff between ethnic groups working in higher education in comparison to the ethnic breakdown of the general population.”
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