Author: admin

It’s funny how nature can conceal giants for a surprising amount of time. We humans are constantly searching for things, so how is it that Australia didn’t find its heaviest insect (a stick insect that’s really more of a log insect) until just this year? You might also be surprised to learn that it wasn’t until 2020 that they discovered their first new reef in 120 years, one that just happened to be taller than the Empire State Building.

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Yes, this was the story that unfolded in the waters surrounding the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia. The reef is made up of almost 3,000 individual reefs and gained its first extra member in over a century back in 2020.

It was happy news as the coral appeared to be in good health, despite most of the GBR having been devastated by a series of mass bleaching events. On top of that, it was also absolutely eye-wateringly enormous.

The coral reef was discovered by a team with the Schmidt Ocean Institute who were conducting underwater mapping of the northern GBR seafloor. The team were then able to dive down and explore the reef with the help of their remote operated vehicle, SuBastian (who recently discovered Barbie lobsters and sea pigs in a previously unexplored offshore canyon).

Mapping revealed the detached reef to be over 500 meters (1,640 feet) tall, making it taller than the Empire State Building, the Sydney Tower, and the Petronas Twin Towers. At its base, the reef is 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) long, but quite narrow. From there it rises 500 meters to support a small reef 300 meters (984 feet) long and only 15 meters (49 feet) wide lying just 40 meters (130 feet) below the surface. An ocean giant hiding just out of sight.

“To find a new half-a-kilometer tall reef in the offshore Cape York area of the well-recognized Great Barrier Reef shows how mysterious the world is just beyond our coastline,” said Dr Jyotika Virmani, executive director of Schmidt Ocean Institute, in a release. “This powerful combination of mapping data and underwater imagery will be used to understand this new reef and its role within the incredible Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.” 

Dr Robin Beaman of James Cook University told IFLScience the reef supports all the main ingredients of a thriving tropical reef, with “hard corals, soft corals, fish, and sharks.” So many sharks, in fact, that team member Mardi McNeil of Queensland University of Technology referred to a “blizzard of fish and sharks.” The staggering biodiversity is a contrast to the shallow water reefs nearby in the GBR’s northern zone, most of which have been hit hard by mass bleaching event.

The discovery of the new, skyscraper-sized reef brought the total number of detached reefs in the area to eight, reefs we’ve been mapping since the late 1800s. Other reefs like it include the Raine Island reef, which is the world’s most important green sea turtle nesting area.

“This unexpected discovery affirms that we continue to find unknown structures and new species in our Ocean,” added Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Ocean Institute. “The state of our knowledge about what’s in the Ocean has long been so limited. Thanks to new technologies that work as our eyes, ears and hands in the deep ocean, we have the capacity to explore like never before. New oceanscapes are opening to us, revealing the ecosystems and diverse life forms that share the planet with us.”

(Yicai) Aug. 21 — Despite a recent flurry of launches, progress in China’s commercial space sector is being held back by bottlenecks in capacity and technology, industry insiders have told Yicai.

There have been nine rocket launches in China in the past 25 days, more than a quarter of the total in the first half of the year. But there have also been problems that pointed to ongoing issues in the sector.

Last week, startup Landspace experienced a failure following an anomaly during the launch of its Zhuque-2E Y3 carrier rocket. The specific reason for the failure has not yet been made public.

Launch costs are a growing concern. Satellites prices have come down, thanks to manufacturing maturity in China, but the cost of putting them into orbit can be more than the satellite itself, a senior executive at a satellite manufacturer told Yicai.

A single launch costs around CNY150,000 (USD20,900) per kilogram, the person said, meaning that putting a 500-kilogram satellite into space can cost as much as CNY75 million (USD10.4 million).

“It’s pricey, very pricey,” said Jiang Luye, chief technology officer at Xingsuo Technology, a maker of reusable liquid-fuelled rockets. If carrying capacity can be improved, more satellites can be put into orbit in just one launch, Jiang said, noting that this capacity depends on the performance of the engines and their potential for recycling.

But there are technical problems in the most common rocket technology used in China, which uses kerelox, a mixture of kerosene and liquid oxygen. It creates deposits that are hard to clean, Jiang said, which adds to the costs. By comparison, the famed Raptor engine in US-based SpaceX’s rockets uses liquid oxygen and methane, which is more suitable for reuse.

Jiang said his company is researching a new generation of rockets that will have much greater liftoff weight. “The greater the single-time carrying capacity is, the lower the general launching costs will be,” he said, adding that costs could be cut by 50 percent or more.

The company is now 60-strong, with staff drawn from various prestigious Chinese universities and it will expand to around 200 people by the end of this year, Jiang said. Research efforts will focus on rocket recycling and engine technology, he noted.

Editor: Tom Litting

Reviewers are more likely to approve a manuscript if their own work is cited in subsequent versions than reviewers who are not cited, according to an analysis of 18,400 articles from four open access publications. The study, which is yet to be peer reviewed, was posted online as a preprint earlier this month.

The study was inspired by anecdotes from authors who cited articles only because reviewers asked them to, says study author Adrian Barnett, who researches peer review and metaresearch at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Sometimes, these requests are fine, he says. But if reviewers ask for too many citations or the reason to cite their work is not justified, the peer-review process can become transactional, says Barnett. Citations increase a researcher’s h-index, a metric reflecting the impact of their publications.

Requesting unnecessary or unjustified requests for citations, sometimes called coercive citation, is generally considered poor practice. Balazs Aczel, a psychologist who studies metascience at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, says that the latest work isn’t the first to investigate reviewers asking for citations, but that the number of peer reviews included and level of analysis is novel. A barrier to studying the practice is a lack of data sharing from publishers, he says.

Approve, reject, reservations

The preprint considered articles from four publishing platforms — F1000Research, Wellcome Open Research, Gates Open Research and Open Research Europe — that make all versions of their articles publicly available, as well as reviewer comments. The publishers ask reviewers to approve articles, reject or approve them with reservations. Reviewers are also asked to explain why they ask authors to cite their own work. Of 37,000 reviews — at least two people reviewed each article — 54% of reviewers approved articles with no changes and rejected 8%. Almost 5,000 reviewed articles cited a reviewer and roughly 2,300 reviews requested a citation from a reviewer.

The analysis found that reviewers who were cited were more likely to approve the article after the first review than reviewers who were not cited.

But reviewers who suggested that their own research be cited were about half as likely to approve the article than reject it or express reservations. In more than 400 reviews in which the reviewer was not cited in version 1 of the article and requested a citation in their review, 92% of reviewers who were cited in version 2 recommended approval compared with 76% for reviewers who were not cited.

When a reviewer rejects a paper, they and the authors know that the reviewer is probably going to evaluate any revised versions of the article, says Barnett, so authors might opt for the path of least resistance and include the citation to get their paper accepted.

Reviewer comments

Barnett also analysed 2,700 reviewer comments and identified the 100 most frequently used words. He found that reviewers who requested citation were more likely to use words such as ‘need’ or ‘please’ in their comments when they rejected an article, which he says suggests that coercive language was used.

Jan Feld, a metascience researcher at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, is not convinced that such language is a sign of coercion. “That seems like a bit of a stretch,” he says. There are other explanations for reviewers rejecting an article than the author refusing to cite their work. He doesn’t doubt that reviewers request citations that are not warranted, but they can recommend citations, including of their own work, to address issues they’ve identified. But even after those recommendations, “if the paper has not improved or I still have concerns, I cannot recommend publication”, he adds.