The 54,070 research doctorate degrees awarded by U.S. institutions in 2014 represent the highest total ever recorded in the 58-year history of the Survey of Earned Doctorates, (SED) an annual census of research degree recipients.
The report, published by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) at the National Science Foundation (NSF), supplies data and analysis for a vital U.S. economic interest: the American system of doctoral education.
Researchers at the University of Rochester have overcome experimental challenges to demonstrate a new way for getting a full picture of twisted light: characterizing the Wigner distribution.
Agricultural expansion in Brazil's Cerrado is quickly chewing up rainforests and savannas - even altering the region's water cycle, a new study finds.
The study shows that dramatic deforestation, previously prevalent in the Amazon, has shifted to the neighboring Cerrado, where cropland is rapidly replacing native vegetation.
TORONTO, April 1, 2016 - A new study by researchers from Denmark and Canada's York University, published in Geophysical Research Letters, has found that the climate models commonly used to simulate melting of the Greenland ice sheet tend to underestimate the impact of exceptionally warm weather episodes on the ice sheet.
Boston, MA-- Many ultraviolet (UV)-filtering chemicals commonly used in sunscreens interfere with the function of human sperm cells, and some mimic the effect of the female hormone progesterone, a new study finds. Results of the Danish study will be presented Friday at the Endocrine Society's 98th annual meeting in Boston.
Not all raindrops are created equal. The size of falling raindrops depends on several factors, including where the cloud producing the drops is located on the globe and where the drops originate in the cloud. For the first time, scientists have three-dimensional snapshots of raindrops and snowflakes around the world from space, thanks to the joint NASA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT researchers have developed a compact, portable pharmaceutical manufacturing system that can be reconfigured to produce a variety of drugs on demand.
Just as an emergency generator supplies electricity to handle a power outage, this system could be rapidly deployed to produce drugs needed to handle an unexpected disease outbreak, or to prevent a drug shortage caused by a manufacturing plant shutdown, the researchers say.
Peering deep into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Except for a few blue foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy. So packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed between us and our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.
Researchers have developed a system the size of a household fridge that can synthesize a variety of pharmaceuticals in short periods of time, including an antihistamine, an antidepressant, a common local anesthetic, and a central nervous system depressant. Pharmaceutical manufacturing often requires multiple compounds and steps of synthesis at different sites, making the production process slow, inefficient and cumbersome. This disjointed process means that pharmaceuticals are often produced in batches, a main contributing factor to drug shortages.
Researchers have discovered a white dwarf star with an atmosphere dominated by oxygen, a type of white dwarf that has been theorized to exist but not identified to date. The finding could challenge the textbook wisdom of single stellar evolution, and provide a critical link to some types of supernovae discovered over the past decade. As relatively small stars (those less than ten times the mass of our sun) near the end of their lives, they throw off their outer layers and become white dwarf stars, which are very dense.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Agricultural expansion is quickly chewing up native vegetation in the vast wooded savannas of Brazil's Cerrado biome, and a new study shows that those changes in land use are altering the region's water cycle.
Peering deep into the heart of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Apart from a few, blue, foreground stars, almost all of the stars pictured in the image are members of the Milky Way nuclear star cluster, the densest and most massive star cluster in the galaxy. Hidden in the centre of this cluster is the Milky Way's resident supermassive black hole.
The star TW Hydrae is a popular target of study for astronomers because of its proximity to Earth (only about 175 light-years away) and its status as an infant star (about 10 million years old). It also has a face-on orientation as seen from Earth. This gives astronomers a rare, undistorted view of the complete protoplanetary disc around the star.
In January 2014, a group of researchers conducted an unusual, some might say paradoxical, experiment in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard: Their goal was to encase small plants growing out on the tundra in a thick layer of ice.
While this might seem odd -- nature does a pretty good job of encasing plants in Svalbard with ice and snow--the researchers were trying to use their experiment as a kind of biological crystal ball.
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- It's not laziness or lack of initiative that's keeping African-Americans from starting their own businesses, but instead a centuries-old racial disadvantage that's not experienced by other minority groups, a Michigan State University scholar argues in a new paper.
Only 5 percent of blacks are self-employed, compared with 11 percent of whites, and black-owned companies tend to be smaller, have fewer employees and make less money than white-owned businesses.