This topic emerged through a screening of emerging issues in science, technology and society in the context of the FET CSA OBSERVE.

http://www.horizon-observatory.eu/radar-en/index.php

The big picture

The OBSERVE screening revealed debates around changes in research practices. Some are driven by societal demands such as gender equality, transparency, citizen participation and animal rights others stem from shifts in scientific approaches such as increasing use of computational methods.

Distributed collaboration platforms

Around the world citizens self-organize to research and address certain challenges such as energy-supply, waste-disposal, water, weather- and threat-monitoring or bee dying. These "peer2peer" initiatives need platforms to safely collect, manage and process data and resources in a distributed and collaborative way. At the same time technical solutions that allow orchestrating large numbers of distributed specialists at short notice and thereby enable new collaboration and service models such as Application Program Interfaces (API) and blockchain technology are receiving a lot of attention. Source: Aggregation of several;

Scientists share their embarrassing #fieldworkfail stories

When scientists step out of the lab, things don’t always go to plan. Researchers share their most embarrassing #fieldworkfail stories on Twitter. Source: the guardian;

Gendering in research innovation

The awareness for the need for gender specific approaches in research and innovation in domains like health and communication is growing. Source: Aggregation of several;

Human animal relationship

The relationship between animals and human beings is changing. Firstly, there is a kind of technical domestication apparent in developments like remotely controlled bugs (biodrones), fish-guiding robots or genetically altered pets. With science increasingly pointing to animal culture and self awareness there is debate on (human) rights for animals and ever more people adopt vegetarism and veganism. Activists increasingly challenge the use of animals in research. Source: Aggregation of several;

Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially in genetics and genomics. Common uses of bioinformatics include the identification of candidate genes and nucleotides which aims at a better understanding of the genetic basis of disease, unique adaptations, desirable properties (esp. in agricultural species), or differences between populations. Bioinformatics contributes to advances in synthetic biology biomimetics, supramolecular chemistry and other subfields. As such, researchers expect bioinformatics to provide major tools and methods to solve basic questions of biology and genetics. Using bioinformatics for prediction of protein structure and nucleosome positioning is emerging as a re-search front in the biological sciences. Source: Aggregation of several;

Research front: Human disease analysis using Genome Wide Association studies

Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) apply genetic statistics to analyze human diseases. Further developing these methods including analytic tools and software has become an important research front in the biological sciences. Source: Thomson Reuters Research Fronts 2014;

Digital humanities

New collaborations and interactions between social sciences and humanities on the one hand and computer sciences on the other are fast emerging. One of many examples is the use of sensory postcards in ethnography. Source: Aggregation of several;

Multi-disciplinary simulation research

There is a call for better modelling, simulation and visualization of complex multi-disciplinary systems such as turbulent aerodynamics. At the same time philosophers and social scientists point to the societal transformations associated with simulation based technology. Source: FastCoexist and several;