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  • Qualitative psychological principles are commonly utilized to influence the choices that people make. Can this goal be achieved more efficiently by using quantitative models of choice? Here, we launch an academic competition to compare the effectiveness of these two approaches.

    • Ohad Dan
    • Yonatan Loewenstein
    CommentOpen Access
  • Insufficient purification and incomplete characterization pose a serious problem for attributing photoluminescence properties to carbogenic nanodots, especially those synthesized by bottom-up approaches. Here, we provide a roadmap for the successful future of these nanodots.

    • Navneet C. Verma
    • Aditya Yadav
    • Chayan K. Nandi
    CommentOpen Access
  • Biofoundries provide an integrated infrastructure to enable the rapid design, construction, and testing of genetically reprogrammed organisms for biotechnology applications and research. Many biofoundries are being built and a Global Biofoundry Alliance has recently been established to coordinate activities worldwide.

    • Nathan Hillson
    • Mark Caddick
    • Paul S. Freemont
    CommentOpen Access
  • In research studies, the need for additional samples to obtain sufficient statistical power has often to be balanced with the experimental costs. One approach to this end is to sequentially collect data until you have sufficient measurements, e.g., when the p-value drops below 0.05. I outline that this approach is common, yet that unadjusted sequential sampling leads to severe statistical issues, such as an inflated rate of false positive findings. As a consequence, the results of such studies are untrustworthy. I identify the statistical methods that can be implemented in order to account for sequential sampling.

    • Casper Albers
    CommentOpen Access
  • Diluting a base element with small amounts of another has served as the basis for developing alloys for thousands of years since the advent of bronze. Today, a fundamentally new idea where alloys have no single dominant element is giving new traction to materials discovery.

    • D. B. Miracle
    CommentOpen Access
  • Recent publications have raised concerns regarding the actual feasibility Negative Emission Technologies (NETs). Here the authors commented on the financial viability of large-scale late century NETs and suggested that expenditure peak will occur in the end of the century, which would require massive global subsidy program.

    • Johannes Bednar
    • Michael Obersteiner
    • Fabian Wagner
    CommentOpen Access
  • Sharing activities are under wide debate regarding the environmental impacts. Here the authors reviewed their benefits and problems and suggested that a simultaneous improvement of both ecological and economic efficiency is necessary to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

    • Zhifu Mi
    • D’Maris Coffman
    CommentOpen Access
  • Are scale-free networks rare or universal? Important or not? We present the recent research about degree distributions of networks. This is a controversial topic, but, we argue, with some adjustments of the terminology, it does not have to be.

    • Petter Holme
    CommentOpen Access