A t Science, we tend to get excited about new discoveries that lift the veil a little on how things work, from cells to the universe. That puts our focus firmly on what has been added to our stock of knowledge. For this anniversary issue, we decided to shift our frame of reference, to look instead at what we don't know: the scientific puzzles that are driving basic scientific research.We began by asking Science's Senior Editorial Board, our Board of Reviewing Editors, and our own editors and writers to suggest questions that point to critical knowledge gaps. The ground rules: Scientists should have a good shot at answering the questions over the next 25 years, or they should at least know how to go about answering them. We intended simply to choose 25 of these suggestions and turn them into a survey of the big questions facing science. But when a group of editors and writers sat down to select those big questions, we quickly realized that 25 simply wouldn't convey the grand sweep of cutting-edge research that lies behind the responses we received. So we have ended up with 125 questions, a fitting number for Science's 125th anniversary.First, a note on what this special issue is not: It is not a survey of the big societal challenges that science can help solve, nor is it a forecast of what science might achieve. Think of it instead as a survey of our scientific ignorance, a broad swath of questions that scientists themselves are asking. As Tom Siegfried puts it in his introductory essay, they are "opportunities to be exploited."We selected 25 of the 125 questions to highlight based on several criteria: how fundamental they are, how broad-ranging, and whether their solutions will impact other scientific disciplines. Some have few immediate practical implications-the composition of the universe, for example. Others we chose because the answers will have enormous societal impact-whether an effective HIV vaccine is feasible, or how much the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere will warm our planet, for example. Some, such as the nature of dark energy, have come to prominence only recently; others, such as the mechanism behind limb regeneration in amphibians, have intrigued scientists for more than a century. We listed the 25 highlighted questions in no special order, but we did group the 100 additional questions roughly by discipline.Our sister online publications are also devoting special issues to Science's 125th anniversary.
Crayfish motor axons remain excitable for over 100 days after severance from their central cell bodies, and continue to store and release normal amounts of transmitter substance. Evidence indicates that regeneration occurs by fusion of the central process with its surviving peripheral segment.
T he average number of authors on scientific papers is skyrocketing. That's partly because labs are bigger, problems are more complicated, and more different subspecialties are needed. But it's also because U.S. government agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have started to promote "team science." As physics developed in the post-World War II era, federal funds built expensive national facilities, and these served as surfaces on which collaborations could crystallize naturally. That has produced some splendid results. Multidisciplinary teams have been slower to develop in biology, but now the rush is on. NIH recently sponsored a meeting entitled "Catalyzing Team Science"-something new for an agency traditionally wedded to the investigator-initiated small-project kind of science. Increasingly complex problems, NIH seems to be saying, will require larger and more diversely specialized groups of investigators. So team science is part of its road map: a "Good Thing." That may be right. Multiple authorship though-however good it may be in other ways-presents problems for journals and for the institutions in which these authors work. For the journals, long lists of authors are hard to deal with in themselves. But those long lists give rise to more serious questions when something goes wrong with the paper. If there is research misconduct, should the liability be joint and several, accruing to all authors? If not, then how should it be allocated among them? If there is an honest mistake in one part of the work but not in others, how should an evaluator aim his or her critique? Such questions plagued the committee that examined the recent high-profile case of fraud in the physics community, the Schön affair, and surely will trouble others. When penalties for research misconduct are considered, it is often argued that an identification of each author's role in the research should be required, in order to help us fix blame. Critics of the notion that authors should share the blame ask, for example, "how can the molecular biologist be expected to certify the honesty and quality of the crystallographer's work?" Some would answer "by knowing that person well enough to rely on him or her." I rather like that response, so with respect to assigning blame for research misconduct, I take the "joint and several" position, knowing that it puts me in a quirky minority. Various practical or impractical suggestions have emerged during the longstanding debate on this issue. One is that each author should provide, and the journal should then publish, an account of that author's particular contribution to the work. Although Science will make it possible for authors to do that, we cannot monitor the authors' designations or negotiate possible disputes over which author actually did what (there's enough of that already, thank you). And listing the individual contributions of each of a couple of dozen authors will, even if it appears only electronically, add some length and complexity to the communication. But a different v...
The neuronal circuit underlying rapid abdominal flexion in response to phasic tactile stimulation comprises identified afferents, interneurons of two orders, a decision unit, and several motor neurons. The circuit is organized hierarchically as a " cascade" in which electrical synapses predominate at higher levels. Behavioral habituation results from lability at chemical junctions early in the pathway.
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