THE STATE OF SCIENCE SALARIES

[...]at the Federal University of Technology in Paraná, Haas says her tenure-track position offers some security but she has little opportunity for advancement. Fewer than half of respondents to Nature's 2021 salary and satisfaction survey reported feeling positively about their career prospects, a clear sign of pessimism at a time of widespread funding shortages, intense competition for jobs and the disruptions of a global pandemic. Andie Hall, a research assistant at the Natural History Museum in London, is unsure about her long-term prospects. A biomedical postdoc in the United States stated: "I'm hopeful that [the pandemic] will result in more funding opportunities in biomedical sciences, but I also think it has significantly slowed down any research that is not related to SARS-CoV-2."

Silk Road becomes the one less travelled as talent is lured home

Tensions with the United States along with the COVID-19 pandemic look set to accelerate a drive towards research self-sufficiency and talent repatriation. Since 2014, China has enjoyed a net inflow of scientific talent, reversing the trend of the previous four decades, which saw more researchers leaving than arriving, an analysis of half a million scholars at the 100 leading institutions in the Nature Index reveals. "Many members of this diaspora are returning, often with advanced degrees and research experience," says van der Wende, who co-edited a book on China's higher-education globalization strategy (China and Europe on the New Silk Road: Connecting Universities Across Eurasia Oxford Univ. The study also found that returning Chinese researchers publish in top journals (defined as Nature, Science, Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) about half as often as those who remain overseas.

LEARNING TO LOVE VIRTUAL CONFERENCES

Lynn Cominsky, an astrophysicist at Sonoma State University in California, had planned to spend part of late March and early April in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the Ninth Fermi International Symposium, an event that would have gathered hundreds of astronomers and astrophysicists with an interest in Y-ray surveys conducted by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. Online meetings might lack many of the benefits of an in-person conference: conversations over dinner;face-to-face networking;fresh perspectives that can come from simply leaving one's home ground. Prompted by Nature s coverage of the virtual conference of the American Physical Society (APS) in April, researchers shared their personal, and generally positive, experiences of online conferences in a Nature online poll.