ON THE GRAPEVINE
More pi, patents for women, and open-access publications
A competition among mathematicians, racism in the medical sciences, and open-access publications. We look at some numbers from the world of science.
Illustration: Bodara
16%
of US biomedical patents in the year 2010 were registered for inventions by women – 10 percent more than in 1976, according to a study published in the journal Science. These patents were also 35 percent more likely to focus on women’s issues.
62.8
billion digits of the number pi have been calculated by researchers at the Chur University of Applied Sciences – a new world record. According to mathematicians, hardly anyone ever needs more than 39 decimal digits, even in cosmology. But this result shows new dimensions in the computing power of computers, according to the mathematician Jan de Gier in The Guardian.
5,000
biomedical journal articles have used the word ‘Caucasian’ since 2010 in order to denote people of European origin. But this involved mixing genetic and socio-cultural categories in a manner that was either negligent or even racist, complained the US geneticist Alice B. Popejoy in the journal Nature.
81%
of publications from the EU funding programme Horizon 2020 have been published on open access, as was required of them. According to Science Business News, a publication cost EUR 2,200 on average, and researchers found the processes involved to be cumbersome.
