Issues
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Cover Image
Cover Image
cover: Our fifth annual careers issue focuses on the road to tenure. On page 26, Eugenia Etkina presents a new way to train future physicists. On page 36, Rachel Ivie and Susan White analyze factors that can affect the time to tenure. On page 44, Toni Feder explores the impact of not getting tenure. Additional stories report on changing ways to assess researchers’ job and grant applications (page 22) and on the state of the US radiation workforce (page 18). (Image by Abigail Malate.) (Photo by Cynthia B. Cummings.)
Readers' Forum
A lost detail in D–T fusion history
Plutonium pits and moral principles
Shorten the solar-geoengineering timeline?
Search and Discovery
A journey to Earth’s center, courtesy of an exotic iron crystal
Laboratory experiments are helping researchers get closer to solving some of the mysteries of the solid inner core.
An unexplained, long-period radio-transient discovery
For 30 years the periodic radio emission from the mysterious object was being observed while remaining undiscovered.
Issues and Events
Alarm sounded over declining US radiation professional workforce
As retirements surge, shortages threaten to slow advances in cancer therapy, diagnostics, and improved understanding of the physiological impacts of radiation.
Global movement to reform researcher assessment gains traction
One aim is to recognize a wider range of research contributions.
Articles
When learning physics mirrors doing physics
The Investigative Science Learning Environment approach replaces traditional teaching with active-learning methods that emulate scientific processes.
When your academic ladder is longer
Race and ethnicity can affect how quickly a faculty member receives tenure.
When tenure fails
The prospect of losing out on tenure can be frightening. But many who have been denied tenure have gone on to build successful careers in education or elsewhere.
Books
History of a publishing colossus
A History of Scientific Journals: Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665–2015, Aileen Fyfe, Noah Moxham, Julie McDougall-Waters, and Camilla Mørk Røstvik
The standard model for beginners
Quantum Field Theory, as Simply as Possible, A. Zee
New Products
Focus on test, measurement, quantum metrology, spectroscopy, and spectrometry
Obituaries
John Bannister Goodenough
Benjamin Breneman Snavely
Quick Study
Small lakes could destabilize Earth’s ice sheets
In Greenland and Antarctica, pools of meltwater are one of many threats to the ice sheets’ longevity.
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