Teachers report thinking that if girls do better in math than boys, it is probably because of their innate ability and effort. But they also report that when boys do well in math, it is more likely due to parental support and society’s higher expectations for their success. That’s what we discovered from 400 elementary […] … learn more→

On October 16 1843, the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton had an epiphany during a walk alongside Dublin’s Royal Canal. He was so excited he took out his penknife and carved his discovery right then and there on Broome Bridge. It is the most famous graffiti in mathematical history, but it looks rather unassuming: i […] … learn more→

The deep learning machine AlphaFold, which was created by Google’s AI research lab DeepMind, is already transforming our understanding of the molecular biology that underpins health and disease. One half of the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry went to David Baker from the University of Washington in the US, with the other half jointly awarded to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper, both from […] … learn more→

This post is an edited interview transcript of our discussion with the wonderful Tamika Heiden for the 2024 Research Impact Summit  Tamika Heiden:  People can feel like research engagement is an add-on. I think it should be starting to feel like business-as-usual, but the piece that isn’t business-as-usual would be the fact they have to track it ongoing. […] … learn more→

Critics of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, commonly referred to by the acronym DEI, are increasingly using boycotts and bans to fight against their use. People often argue that this anti-DEI backlash is motivated by race-neutral concerns – for example, that DEI practices are irrelevant to work performance or are too political. But our recent research, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Occupational and […] … learn more→

In a recent post on world.edu , two anonymous authors decry the universities’ rush to wind back work-from-home arrangements that were instituted during the COVID crisis. In particular, the authors argue that return-to-office (RTO) arrangements are counterproductive for introverts. Their post adopts a widely-accepted definition of an introvert as someone who finds social encounters taxing, rather than energising, […] … learn more→

For more than a decade, researchers and journalists have relied on a digital tool called CrowdTangle to track and fight the spread of viral falsehoods online. But earlier this week, the owner of CrowdTangle, Meta, shut the tool down. The tech giant has replaced it with its new Content Library, which it says will serve the […] … learn more→

The World Class University (WCU) status targeted by the government will be achieved, one of the ways is if there are more world-class researchers from Indonesia. In fact, as of October 2023, there were only 92 Indonesian researchers included in the Top 2 Percent World Ranking Scientist list out of a total of 210 thousand top researchers, or […] … learn more→

All research does some things and not others. There are lots of ways in research writing to signal what we do, and don’t do.  Heere’s some of the most important. Problem posing – how we understand the puzzle or problem we are interested in is always a matter of choosing what we think is most important. And […] … learn more→

How do you start off a journal article – well, let’s say a conventional journal article*? I’ve  recently seen the important opening move of a paper described as “ introduce the larger subject, then narrow that larger subject into your topic”, “Write the context for your paper” and “Provide the background to your paper (What have […] … learn more→