Chronicle of Higher Education: “Scientists are wasting much of the data they are creating.” Thus begins Josh Fischman’s Chronicle news story about a recent and paradoxical trend. As computers become more powerful and disk drives become more capacious, researchers are finding that they cannot easily make use of the troves of data that they and their colleagues are creating. Besides the shear volume of data being produced by the world’s labs, another big problem is the incompatibility of data across studies and disciplines. Standardizing formats and tagging would help, as would central, easy-to-use data depositories.
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
Get PT in your inbox
PT The Week in Physics
A collection of PT's content from the previous week delivered every Monday.
One email per week
PT New Issue Alert
Be notified about the new issue with links to highlights and the full TOC.
One email per month
PT Webinars & White Papers
The latest webinars, white papers and other informational resources.