Talent-search participants (286 males, 94 females) scoring in the top 0.01% on cognitive-ability measures were identified before age 13 and tracked over 20 years. Their creative, occupational, and life accomplishments are compared with those of graduate students (299 males, 287 females) enrolled in top-ranked U.S. mathematics, engineering, and physical science programs in 1992 and tracked over ...

Helping students understand "chemical energy" is notoriously difficult. Many hold inconsistent ideas about what energy is, how and why it changes during the course of a chemical reaction, and how these changes are related to bond energies and reaction dynamics. There are (at least) three major sources for this problem: 1) the way biologists talk about chemical energy (which is also the way we t...

The effect of surface stress on the stiffness of cantilever beams remains an outstanding problem in the physical sciences. While numerous experimental studies report significant stiffness change due to surface stress, theoretical predictions are unable to rigorously and quantitatively reconcile these observations. In this Letter, we present the first controlled measurements of stress-induced ch...

Biology has changed. Research frontiers increasingly lie on the interfaces with other disciplines. Many of these are the more quantitative sciences. The biological researcher of the future will need to integrate multiple disciplines in order to make the important connections. How can undergraduate biology students acquire stronger backgrounds in chemistry, mathematics, engineering, physics, and...

The importance of mathematics in biology is a matter of perennial debate. The squabbles of early 20th century geneticists on the value of mathematics to the study of evolution have recently been revisited in Journal of Biology [1], and the 21st century has seen an explosion of information from various -omics and imaging techniques that has provided fresh impetus to the arguments urging the need...

Because of the current high proportion of novice high-school teachers, many students' mastery of science and mathematics depends on the effectiveness of early-career teachers. In this study, which used value-added models to analyze high-school teachers' effectiveness in raising test scores on 1.05 million end-of-course exams, we found that the effectiveness of high-school science and mathematic...

The articles in this special issue arise from a workshop and symposium held in January 2012 (Semantic Physical Science'). We invited people who shared our vision for the potential of the web to support chemical and related subjects. Other than the initial invitations, we have not exercised any control over the content of the contributed articles.

Contemporary physical science studies rely on the effective analyses of geographically dispersed spatial data and simulations of physical phenomena. Single computers and generic high-end computing are not sufficient to process the data for complex physical science analysis and simulations, which can be successfully supported only through distributed computing, best optimized through the applica...

The NSF ADVANCE program was begun in response to MIT’s 1999 report “A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT.” The program’s stated goals are to increase the recruitment, retention, and promotion into leadership positions of women in engineering and the sciences, and to institutionalize best practices, policies and programs across colleges as they pertain to women faculty . This...

Scholars and professionals committed to fostering sustainable development have urged a reexamination of the curriculum and the restructuring of research in engineering-focused institutions of higher learning. The focus is on engineering, more than on the natural and physical sciences or on social science, because the activities that drive the industrial state – the activities that implement sci...