No one's suggesting they 'stay silent'. Not endorsing a specific candidate when it appears to actually undermine trust/interest in their research and in science as a whole isn't staying silent. Ignoring their own research while asking others to 'listen to the science' seems an odd position for a journal to take.

"When shown one photo each of a gay and straight man, both chosen at random, the model distinguished between them correctly 81% of the time. When shown five photos of each man, it attributed sexuality correctly 91% of the time. The model performed worse with women, telling gay and straight apart with 71% accuracy after looking at one photo, and 83% accuracy after five. In both cases the level of performance far outstrips human ability to make this distinction. Using the same images, people could tell gay from straight 61% of the time for men, and 54% of the time for women. This aligns with research which suggests humans can determine sexuality from faces at only just better than chance."

BMC Psychology is trying out "results free" peer review - reviewers judge only the method then decide whether to publish http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/47081/...

That would be great if it were a form of pre-registration, but since nobody puts p-hacking in the method section, it's a little pointless.

I'm no expert but the guy who was the author is a medical doctor who knows very little about programming. So I'm sure you're right -- but he just wanted to use pre-existing tech.

Got to agree with the points made about phys.org I'm afraid. The Economist article at least links to the research article and the researchers' website.

I think their point is that you can gain some fascinating insights about science in history when different disciplines work together. Hardly a radical insight though I agree. But that's not why I posted the article, which is mostly describing the cool research rather well.

Fascinating effort to formalize a medieval treatise - De Luce (“On Light”, written around 1225) - about the origins of the universe into modern mathematics. What the researchers discovered and why they did this is explained at The Ordered Universe Project. http://ordered-universe.com/ Their paper on this was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society but can be found on arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.0769

Yes - the article is using the word 'rich' to mean 'wealthier than average/median' - which, for the moment at least, graduates are!

Pity that Science article got it wrong. 'Invented'!?

I think the key part of this research is that this adds significantly to the evidence that there's liquid water deep in the crust of Mars. We know that there is water in the form of ice in lots of places on Mars but the idea of subsurface liquid water is exciting because there might be life in there! If it's gushing up to the surface periodically, we might even be able to sample it and see if there's signs of life! There's been previous evidence of these streaks before - but researchers had generally thought that was due to ice melting during the planet's warm season. Now they've found "streaks near the equator, including in the gargantuan Valles Marineris canyon". Any subsurface ice here would likely have sublimated. So it's looking pretty likely that this is subsurface liquid water that is leaking out from time to time. An alternative explanation - dust avalanches - was offered when the same scientists unveiled their initial results back in 2011. With the observation of so many streaks at the equator now the simplest explanation appears to be groundwater welling up to the surface. Similar streaks on Antarctica are known to be caused by water.