🍎your Scholarly Digest 19th February, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the informed scholar

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Image Credits: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;Edward Holbrook Collection, Gift of Mrs. Edward Holbrook and John S. Holbrook, 1921

Hi Scholar, here's what we have for you this week:

• PhD, Postdoctoral, and Research Positions 🇬🇧 🇺🇸 🇳🇴 🇩🇪;

• Junk in Scientific Literature;

• A Game of Physics;

• The scientifically proven way to cook an egg;

plus a few academic oddities you didn’t know you needed.

OPPORTUNITIES

💼Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• PhD studentships @ University of Cambridge, UK: click here

• Research, Postdoc, and Faculty Positions @ University of Virginia, USA: click here

• PhD, Postdoc, and Academic Positions @ University of Oslo, Norway: click here

• Research, Postdoc, and Academic Positions @ Technical University of Berlin, Germany: click here

• PhD Placement @ The British Library, UK: click here 

RESOURCES

🎨Creativity for Time-Starved Researchers

Research is, despite how we treat it, a fundamentally creative endeavor. This article has somehow managed to provide actionable guidance on fostering creativity—a process that is famously fickle in when it chooses to grace us with its presence. Perhaps the most interesting point in the article is that there are no unique ideas and that’s okay: being creative is all about combining ideas from different places to build something unqiue. It’s a thoughtful, yet fun (much like our writing, we hope) read for time-starved researchers looking to reach peak performance and creativity.   

🔓172 Open Access Databases

For readers, writers, and (over-)thinkers: UC Santa Barbara has curated a list of 172 free, open-access databases spanning a wide range of subjects and disciplines. You might not need them yourself, but if you know someone whose research is suffering due to paywalls, consider forwarding this their way. Access to knowledge should never be a privilege.

If you’ve stumbled across a resource that’s been super helpful to you as a scholar, reply to this email and send it to us so we can share it with 3000+ scholars! We don’t believe in gatekeeping around here. 

BRAIN FOOD

🚮Junk in Scientific Literature 

Millions of articles are published every year under the banner of ‘peer-reviewed science’. That label should mean something—that the research is robust, the methods sound, and the conclusions reliable. But the reality is far murkier. As The Atlantic recently pointed out, “while the scientific literature is an essential ocean of knowledge, there is an alarming amount of junk which floats in this ocean”. Poor science, predatory journals, retracted studies, and research that exists only to pad CVs rather than advance understanding pollute our scholarly oceans, making it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between rigorous research and academic waste.

For the general public—and even for figures like America’s new health secretary—discerning credible research from pseudoscientific noise is understandably difficult. But what about those within the scientific community? Are we getting any better at filtering out the junk? Are we receiving adequate and appropriate training in critical thinking to look past the stamp of legitimacy that peer review claims to provide? This also forces us to reflect on our own practices of knowledge production. Publishing is essential for an academic career, and from the moment doctoral training begins, the pressure to publish is constant. But in participating in the publish or perish game, we might ask ourselves: are we contributing to the very problem we critique? Are we adding to the ocean of knowledge—or to the floating debris? 

💭Thinking for Two Pages a Day

If you are pursuing a scholarly life in search of meaning, fulfillment, and intellectual challenge—but find yourself sometimes losing sight of these things—this piece is for you. It curates reflections from a 19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir’s diary, capturing the depth of intellectual curiosity and the discipline of thought that shape a life of the mind. Her words serve as both inspiration and a reminder of the devotion scholarship demands.
 

One of our favorite resolutions from her entries:

This is more than brain food—it’s soul food. But then again, is there really any difference between the two?

NEWS

⚛️A Game of Physics

Instead of working on his upcoming book, author George RR Martin (whose novels were adapted into Game of Thrones) has spent his time publishing a paper in the American Journal of Physics. Co-authored with a physicist, Ian Tregellis, the paper proposes a fictional scenario about a virus spreading throughout the world (causing sometimes superhuman mutations) as a tool for teaching physics undergraduates to stay awake during lectures about open ended problem solving. They argue thought-experiments such as this are more useful to prepare students for dealing with the uncertainty of real world research than having them solve equations from a textbook with known solutions. 

🔝Taking ‘Life's Work’ to a Whole New Level

PhD holders, on average, retire later than their non-PhD counterparts, lending statistical weight to the idea that academics have an unusual tolerance for prolonged professional struggle. In fact, 40% of PhD holders continue working into their 70s, most often to maintain their identity as researchers—or, put it another way, to continue their life’s work. Being a scholar really is a lifelong journey, and in a way, that’s a rather beautiful thing. 

KEEPING IT REAL

🥚Boiling an Egg with Math 

A recently published article used mathematical modeling to perfect the process of boiling an egg. The method takes 32 minutes and requires moving eggs between boiling water and cooler water at 2 minute intervals. Despite sounding like an experiment for 5th graders, this research isn’t really about eggs—it’s about understanding heat transfer and phase transitions, using an egg’s white and yolk as a model system. Controlled heat cycles are already applied to processes in fields like biomedical engineering, polymer processing and materials science. There’s something deliciously exciting about the thought that the next breakthrough in tissue engineering could be traced back to a boiled egg. 

P.S. If you can’t be bothered to spend 32 minutes boiling eggs, the Tatler’s recipe is probably just as good (and takes only 7 minutes, 10 seconds): eggs from the fridge into boiling water for 6 mins 45 seconds then immediately submerge into cold water for 25 seconds.     

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