Chronicle of Higher Education: In a move with implications for inventors and industrialists, the US Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill on Tuesday to reform the US patent system. If enacted, the bill would replace the current “first to invent” criterion for awarding patents with a “first inventor to file” criterion. The new criterion could affect how academics publish potentially patentable research. That’s because the first person to invent a new device could lose out on a patent if the second person to invent a similar device published his or her work first.
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
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