Frontiers | Science News

Science News post list

1,227 news posts in Frontiers updates

Frontiers news

19 Jul 2013

Frontiers in the News: Drinking water can boost cognitive performance

Media coverage of research published in Frontiers. Drinking water is good for you. But did you know it can boost cognitive performance? Caroline Edmonds and colleagues from the University of East London and the University of Westminster report that reaction times were up to 14% shorter after drinking water. As part of a study, they tested 34 adults, who had not eaten or drunk anything overnight, for memory, attention, learning, and reaction time. Subjects were tested on two mornings: once after they had consumed a cereal bar and water, and once after eaten a cereal bar only. Reaction times were up to 14% shorter after drinking water, especially for those who felt thirsty. Unexpectedly, performance on a complex-rule-learning task became slightly worse after drinking. Future research will have to determine why drinking water can be beneficial for some cognitive tasks, but not for others, say the authors. The results are published in a paper titled Subjective thirst moderates changes in speed of responding associated with water consumption in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. The research was covered by CTV, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, Yahoo, Medical Dailyand the Huffington Post. Read the open-access paper here.

Frontiers news

12 Jul 2013

Frontiers in the News: Melody modulates choir members’ heart rate

Media coverage of research published in Frontiers. When people sing in a choir their heart beats are synchronised, so that the pulse of choir members tends to increase and decrease in unison. This has been shown by a study from the Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg that examined the health effects for choir members. Researchers at the Academy are studying how music, in purely biological terms, affects our body and our health. The object is to find new forms where music may be used for medical purposes, primarily within rehabilitation and preventive care.In the latest study titled “Music determines heart rate variability of singers” published in theFrontiers in Psychology, the research group is able to show how the musical structure influences the heart rate of choir members. The study received widespread media coverage from BBC, CNN, New Scientist, Scientific American (and there is a podcast here), TIME magazine, CBC, The Times, Der Spiegeland many more. A video of the researchers performing their research live is available below. The paper is available to read here (open-access, of course!).

Frontiers news

10 Jul 2013

Frontiers in the News: How well do you see what you hear?

Media coverage of research published in Frontiers. A device that trains the brain to turn sounds into images could be used as an alternative to invasive treatment for blind and partially-sighted people, researchers at the University of Bath have found. A research team, led by Dr Michael Proulx, from the University’s Department of Psychology, looked at how blindfolded sighted participants responded to an eye test using the vOICe sensory substitution device. Its performance is even better than the current invasive techniques for vision restoration, such as stem cell implants and retinal prostheses, says Dr. Proulx. The findings are reported in the paper “How well do you see what you hear? The acuity of visual-to-auditory sensory substitution,” published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, as part of a Research Topic in Cognitive Science on synaesthesia research. Dr. Proulx appeared on BBC Radio 5, BBC World Tonight and other radio channels to discuss his research. Many leading media outlets also featured the news, including, TIME,CBC, Sky News, Engineering & Techology magazine, Nursing Times and many more. The paper is available to read here (open-access, of course!).

Frontiers news

02 Jul 2013

Frontiers in the News: Largest human cognitive performance dataset reveals insights

Media coverage of research published in Frontiers The largest human cognitive performance dataset reveals insights into the effects of lifestyle factors and aging.    Lumosity, the leading brain training company, announced a new web-based, big data methodology for conducting human cognitive performance research. The Human Cognition Project, Lumosity’s research platform, contains the world’s largest and continuously growing dataset of human cognitive performance, which currently includes more than 40 million people who have been tracked for up to 6 years. The article, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, examined how Lumosity’s dataset can provide insights into the lifestyle correlates of cognitive performance and the impact of age on learning rate. Many leading media outlets covered this exciting news, including, Nature, Arts Technica,The Scientist, Information Week and Mescape. For the full list of media coverage, please click here. The paper is available here (open-access, of course!).

Frontiers news

10 Jun 2013

Frontiers in the News: Gestures of apes and human infants

Media coverage of research published in Frontiers. How similar are the gestures of apes and human infants? More than you might suspect, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Psychology.    Kristen Gillespie-Lynch and Patricia M. Greenfield, authors of a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, analyzed video footage of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant to compare different types of gestures during communicative development. They found remarkable similarities among the three species, providing new evidence for the “gestures first” theory of the evolution of language. The study has received widespread media coverage, including, Slate, NBC, LA Times, Discovery News, Spiegel Online, redOrbit, Yahoo, Daily Mail and many more. For the full list of media coverage, please click here.   Slate : Human and Ape Babies Share Common Gestures http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1 Image courtesy of amalthya and originally published on Flickr.

Frontiers news

27 Feb 2013

Frontiers Peer Review

The Frontiers Review System promotes a mandate that is uniquely focused on the flawlessness and accuracy of research and is based on the unique Frontiers Review Guidelines. Review Editors – appointed to the Frontiers Editorial Boards from the community’s top experts worldwide – constructively collaborate with authors to ensure that studies are conducted in agreement with the standards of the specific community and to improve the quality of the paper where appropriate. The mandate maximizes the publication quality and protects the rights of authors of publishing their work in a fair and unbiased process. Review Editors focus on certifying the accuracy and validity of articles, not on evaluating their significance – the latter is done democratically by the community using the Frontiers Impact Metrics. To ensure a constructive review process and to acknowledge their significant contribution to a better paper, review editors are disclosed on accepted articles. http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=51066493 Frontiers full reviews are made up of two consecutive steps, an independent and an interactive review. In the independent review phase, review editors evaluate independently from each other whether the research is academically sound following a standardized review questionnaire. Then, Frontiers implemented for the first time the real-time Frontiers Interactive Review Forum, in […]

Frontiers news

27 Feb 2013

Article Impact in Frontiers

Democratic evaluation of the most outstanding research at Frontiers Frontiers has introduced a truly innovative feature to democratically judge its readers’ interests in academic publishing called Frontiers Impact Metrics. Following article acceptance by the Frontiers Review System and publication in one of the journals in the Frontiers Journal Series, advanced internet analytics automatically track down every article’s views and downloads. Every three months, the Frontiers platform analyzes the reading activity based on the inputs of the entire Frontiers Community. The Frontiers Evaluation System enables both the scholarly community and the general public to directly participate in scoring the academic excellence and social relevance of published research. Readers’ interests are then translated into new powerful bibliometric indicators and applied to select academically excellent and socially relevant articles, resulting in the most objective, unbiased and democratic assessment of research. At Frontiers, it is not the opinion of only 2-3 reviewers, however qualified, that determines the importance of a research work, but the entire academic community. Likewise, it is not the ranking of the journal in which an article is published to determine its impact, but the article itself. This assessment also provides the basis for the distillation of published articles in what […]

Frontiers news

27 Feb 2013

How can I host my own Frontiers Research Topic?

Here is a step by step guide on how to submit and host a Research Topic to drive scholarly communication in your research field For your online proposal, everything you need is listed below: 1. The Topic Editors: You can host a Research Topic on your own, but many of our most successful Topics were co-hosted by a senior researcher and one or two early-career scientists. 2. A Title:  A compelling and concise title. 3. A Description: Set up the scope of your Research Topic with a maximum of 500 words. Strive for encyclopedic coverage, considering a range of questions, theories, methods, areas of impact, historical perspectives, etc. 4. Deadlines: 6-8 months is often the best time frame, but this is flexible. Consider 2 months for abstract submissions and 4-6 for manuscript submissions. 5. A List of candidate contributors:  Compile a list of researchers that cover as many nuances of your Research Topic as you can think of. Ideally a Topic should receive at least 10-15 manuscripts. http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=52089266 All Frontiers publications are free to access (under a Creative Commons license). Like other high-quality open access journals, this means that accepted manuscripts for certain article types are subject to a publishing fee. In […]

Frontiers news

27 Feb 2013

Tier Climbing Publication in Frontiers

The Frontiers Tiering System is an efficient and transparent method to select outstanding research articles and make them more accessible to the wider research communities up to the general public When articles are first accepted for publication in Frontiers, they are published in the appropriate online Specialty Section or Specialty Journal, as tier 1 articles. Based on automatic Frontiers Impact Metrics, the top 10% articles in a tier are democratically selected for review as prestigious higher tier articles. At tier 2 level, they are referred to as either Focused Reviews or Frontiers Commentaries. The authors of the selected articles are therefore invited to revise their research article in a review style focused on the original discovery and with the support of the Frontiers peer review. Focused Reviews and Frontiers Commentaries aim at the broader audience of a field community and are published quarterly in the prestigious tier 2 sections of Field Journals. The system is designed to gradually distill the most outstanding research through the succession of the Frontiers tiers, evaluated democratically for its academic excellence and social relevance. While climbing up the tier journal system, the research gains more and more visibility and addresses an increasingly broader public.

Frontiers news

27 Feb 2013

How can I contribute a manuscript to a Frontiers Research Topic?

If you have received a message asking you to contribute a manuscript to a Frontiers research topic, the next step is easy. Simply submit your manuscript through the standard Frontiers manuscript submission, but be sure to note that your submission is part of a Research Topic. Select the Research Topic to which you would like to contribute and proceed through the next steps of the manuscript submission process. Even if you have not received a formal call for participation, your submission is still welcome. You should first submit an abstract (maximum one page) to the topic editor. You may do this through the relevant Research Topic homepage by clicking  “submit abstract.”  Following approval by the topic editor, you are welcome to submit the full manuscript. For author guidelines and manuscript instructions, click here. If you have any questions, please contact the Frontiers Editorial Office at: researchtopics@frontiersin.org FRONTIERS RESEARCH TOPICS JOURNAL PAGES Frontiers in Endocrinology Frontiers in Genetics Frontiers in Microbiology Frontiers in Immunology Frontiers in Neurology Frontiers in Neurosciences Frontiers in Oncology Frontiers in Pharmacology Frontiers in Physiology Frontiers in Plant Science Frontiers in Psychiatry Frontiers in Psychology Frontiers in Pediatrics (coming soon) Frontiers in Chemistry (coming soon)

Frontiers news

09 Feb 2012

Frontiers launches social networking for scientists

Today is quite a monumental and exciting day in the short history of Frontiers. The social networking platform for researchers was launched. So far Frontiers has been publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific research articles freely accessible to anybody in the world. In the 4 years of existence, Frontiers became the fastest-growing open-access  publisher world-wide, with over 3 million monthly page views and over 5 millions article views and downloads. This tremendous success is due to the strong rooting in the scientific communities. Frontiers was founded by scientists and is run by scientists. With over 25,000 world-renowned scientists on the Frontiers editorial boards and almost 50,000 high-profile academic users, Frontiers is deeply rooted in the scientific community. The Frontiers users are mainly successful and famous scientists, are opinionated, they publish articles, participate in the peer-review and provide constant and enthusiastic feedback about what features should be improved or added. Frontiers has always been and will always remain a grass-roots initiative, serving the scientific communities.Thus, it only came naturally to expand the Frontiers platform from open-access publishing toscientific social networking. Today we launched the Frontiers Research Network, a social networking platform for scientists, researchers, academics and anybody whose mind is eager to know […]