Nature's 2026 job satisfaction survey, run with Thinks Insight & Strategy, gathered responses from 3,882 scientists across 133 countries and found widespread dissatisfaction with salaries. Respondents described pay that fails to keep pace with inflation or living costs, including a Nigerian academic who has had only one raise in over a decade and a US physicist earning less in real terms than her non-degree-holding father did two decades ago.
nature.com
· 2026-10-26
A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that nearly 30% of STEM PhD dissertation abstracts submitted in the US this year contained AI-generated text, up from under 2% in 2023. The study, which analyzed over 226,000 dissertations using the detection tool Pangram, also found that graduates whose dissertations showed AI-generated text were more likely to go into industry jobs and less likely to pursue academic careers.
nature.com
· 2026-10-16
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, mathematics professor Álvaro Lozano-Robledo responds to a distressed undergraduate who questioned whether a career in math academia is still viable given rapid progress in large language models. The student, who described feeling at a loss about career trajectory and even the meaning of life, asked whether academia would remain open to passionate but not exceptionally gifted students. Lozano-Robledo frames his post as advice to reassure students making near-term decisions about their futures.
terrytao.wordpress.com
· 2026-10-09
Kohei Horikoshi, known for creating 'My Hero Academia,' has released a standalone manga one-shot titled 'Quit Laughing, Shijima.' The story departs from his signature superhero genre, instead centering on a boy-meets-girl narrative steeped in ritualistic horror elements.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-10-01
A multi-institution research team reports achieving wafer-scale epitaxial growth of p-type boron carbon nitride (BCN) that exhibits high carrier mobility. The work involved collaborators from Japanese and Taiwanese institutions, including support from JSPS, JST, Academia Sinica and Taiwan's NSTC, with computational resources provided by Taiwan's National Center for High-performance Computing.
nature.com
· 2026-09-30
A university research lab is publishing a week-long series of open-source releases instead of a traditional paper, arguing that AI agents have made individual research projects fast and cheap, which undermines the value of isolated publications. The author challenges both student pessimism about job prospects and PhD students' rush to join frontier AI labs, claiming academia is positioned for a resurgence precisely because of its resource constraints.
timdettmers.com
· 2026-09-21
Chinese authorities have imposed disciplinary measures on several prominent academics after investigations into research-integrity violations flagged by an online research sleuth known as 'Student Geng.' The sanctions form part of a broader crackdown covering 31 research teams accused of misconduct.
nature.com
· 2026-09-21
A new essay contends that computational science and open source software are effectively the same activity, since scientific claims can only be tested and systematized if the underlying code is open, inspectable, and reproducible. The author argues that treating software as a mere afterthought to publishing papers undermines the scientific method itself, and calls for academia to prioritize open, reproducible code as core scientific output rather than a side task.
jepedersen.dk
· 2026-09-19
A National Bureau of Economic Research analysis compared AI researchers with similar expertise working in academia versus industry, finding that the highest-earning 1% of industry-based authors make $1.5 million more per year than their academic peers. Nature interviewed 14 university researchers across the US and Europe about why they stay in academia despite the pay gap, with many citing intellectual freedom and mentoring students as key motivators, while some are opting for hybrid roles that combine university work with industry ties.
nature.com
· 2026-09-10
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