Couch potatoes beware!, or so says Faculty of 1000 member Paul Pagel in his evaluation of a paper studying links between television viewing time and mortality in Australia. Television is the sedentary activity of choice for many of us in the developed world. And plenty of studies have already demonstrated a relationship between televison viewing…

This week, I have mostly been in Philadelphia. That was to meet The Scientist team, and sit down with Sarah Greene and figure out exactly how we’re going to run this new beast. The bottom line is that F1000 will now be feeding into The Scientist much more directly, and my job suddenly got a…

We have previously discussed the honorable activities of the Americans for Medical Progress (AMP) and its members, including Dario Ringach whose recent paper on animal activism was highly rated by our reviewers. AMP send regular email updates to scientists and this item looked at an extremely important issue, so I am reproducing it here in…

By Steve Pogonowski and Bea Downing Work dramas, late bills, latent childhood trauma: adult life is full of potential for the average person to get stressed and deal with it by ‘comfort eating’. As discussed in a previous post by Callum, labeled ‘Food for thought’ (hence my segued sequel/blatant rip-off title here), there are ongoing…

We all know that given the right conditions, forests are prone to grow, but until now, it has been very difficult to define what can be considered normal re-growth (i.e. as a forest ages), and what might be considered exceptional growth. In a paper appearing in PNAS, a team led by Sean McMahon and Geoffrey…

It’s been a short week for me. As I implied elsewhere, I was off sick on Monday, and I’d already booked leave to be out of town Thursday and Friday (which should be today, if this scheduling thing works). And when I got back into the office on Tuesday, I was told that I should…

I read an article recently in a well-known London newspaper which raised an issue I have been thinking about for a long time. What happens when unregulated medicine actually causes more harm than good? I won’t name names (although the original article does), but in a nutshell, a woman was prescribed pills by a practitioner…

A recent evaluation on Faculty of 1000 Biology highlights a novel advance in the fight against adolescent obesity.  In what could be considered the first behavioural trial to treat obesity (i.e. not based on a drug treatment), a team led by Anna L Ford at The Bristol Care of Childhood Obesity Clinic found that by retraining the eating habits…

As you might know, Steve is leaving F1000 next month. I’m going to be ever more busy with The Scientist, and so that we can continue to entertain, amuse and inform on a reasonably frequent basis, I’ve recruited my very young apprentice onto the blog team. Callum came to us from Cases Network last year…

Ladles and gentlespoons, the results are in. We had an amazing response, and after sifting through a mass of #sci140-tagged tweets, discarding all the retweets and publicity (and a huge thank-you to everyone who spread the word), we had 197 unique entries (grep saved my life). Many of you posted very witty ‘historical’ paper summaries,…