Chicago, IL, USA. Scientists and scholars must document their sources in professional publications, but can there be an objective standard for their number and diversity? A sociologist implies as much by analyzing how rapid access to increasing numbers of academic journals has narrowed citations to fewer and more recent papers.

James Evans is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, who focuses on the nature of scholarly research. He argues in Science that electronic access, in particular, has restrained diversity, limiting the creation of new ideas and theories.

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Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship. James A. Evans. Science 2008 321(5887) 395-399

Binghamton, NY, USA. Charles Darwin originally envisioned that adaptations can evolve at all levels of the biological hierarchy, from genes to ecosystems. He proposed an evolutionary explanation for morality and pro-social behaviors — individuals behaving for the good of their group, often at their own expense.

This anticipated the future discipline of Sociobiology, an attempted synthesis of scientific disciplines that can explain behavior in all species by considering the evolutionary advantages of social behaviours: the theory of group selection.

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Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology. Wilson, David Sloan and Edward O.Wilson. The Quarterly Review of Biology 82(4):327-48.

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Washington, DC, USA. Research in biology and psychology used to require minimal mathematics. This is quite unlike the situation today: the life sciences and math take their historical exchange and collaboration to entirely new levels of sophistication. Today, mathematics is often a required component of effective interdisciplinary teamwork.

Mathematicians have been challenged by vital new disciplines, such as neuroscience, that explore fundamental questions in very different ways from past practice. This poses the need to describe the underlying mechanisms — and large, complex sets of data — with ever-greater precision and reproducibilty. The exchange and collaboration between mathematics and the life science

Durham, NC, USA. Little things that go awry in the brain can have large consequences. What if we could insert tiny electrodes (nanotubes) into neural cells? And how could we get them there? We may be a step closer to answers with the emergence of maneuverable microrobots measured in the mere billionths-of-a-meter. Scientists at Duke University craft microscopic robots that assemble into self-organized structures to maneuver as separate entities without any obvious guidance.

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