2026-10-23
The papers behind the three studies in this issue were published between June and September 2026, and ScienceDaily republished coverage of all three on October 22. A two-year trial at the University of Southern California got DHA into cerebrospinal fluid but did not improve cognition; the German Primate Center used brain organoids to explain why the marmoset brain is nearly smooth; and the University of Oxford weighed virus-like particles one at a time to record their assembly steps.
Read article ↗2026-10-22
The theme of Open Access Week 2026 is “the cost of knowledge.” On October 21, academic book editor Jen McCall published a post on the LSE Impact Blog reviewing how the costs of academic monographs have changed from print to e-books to open access: a title often sells only one or two hundred copies, so publishers put out more titles and raise unit prices. This article checks the two studies she cites.
Read article ↗2026-10-22
The three studies in this issue were formally published between October 14 and 15, 2026, and coverage of them clustered on October 21. The US National Cancer Institute used a cohort of 460,000 people to test the association between ultra-processed foods and colorectal cancer; the University of Warwick inferred from spectra the colours white dwarfs would show to the human eye; and a team from Microsoft Research and other institutions used machine learning to correct weather forecasts 3 to 4 weeks ahead.
Read article ↗2026-10-21
On October 20, 2026, the metascience organization Research on Research Institute (RoRI) released a working paper evaluating the Volkswagen Foundation's two-year “distributed peer review” pilot in Germany. In the pilot, applicants reviewed one another's proposals in the same round while an expert panel reviewed them independently at the same time. The evaluation shows fairly high acceptance among applicants and a lighter burden for each reviewer.
Read article ↗2026-10-21
This week ScienceDaily ran a cluster of three university press releases: why statins can harm muscle, how much helium formed in the first few minutes after the birth of the Universe, and an unusually stout belemnite from Jurassic seas. Checking the original papers shows that all three studies were published before the press releases, the earliest in November 2025. Below, each item explains what was measured, what was found, and where the conclusions stop.
Read article ↗