Science in society

Each Autumn, just before the announcement in Stockholm of the genuine Nobel Prize laureates, a band of merry men at Harvard University distribute the ‘Ig Nobel Prizes’. These awards recognise real research work that make people laugh… and then think.

Denmark’s best-preserved 17^th century wreck may have gone completely unnoticed if it hadn’t been lying close to the path of a construction project.

The Ottoman mansion of Hassan Bey in the seismically active medieval centre of Rhodes, Greece, does not worry civil engineers – even though the building is faulty because its floor isn’t very well connected to the wall.

For scientists, packing up their lab coats and microscopes and heading to foreign laboratories can really pay dividends. Thanks to initiatives like Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships, women are benefiting more and more from making a move abroad.

Across the Atlantic, scientists are also making use of open access journals. In Canada, the national medical association started publishing a totally new, fully ‘open’ journal in January.

When Tim Gowers, a maths professor at the University of Cambridge in the UK, wrote a blog post criticising the high price charged by academic journals to access research, he did not expect to start a revolution.