Those who follow life sciences won’t have failed to pick up on the impact and controversy of two particular papers appearing in Nature at the end of January. The STAP (stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency) studies by Obokata et al. at the Japanese RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology suggested that a lowering of environmental pH, from…
Following yesterday’s UK budget announcement by Chancellor George Osborne, we look at the implications for UK life scientists and those thinking of embarking on a PhD.
To mark World Malaria Day, Phil Fischer highlights the problems faced by those fighting the disease around the world.
It makes much more sense in fact to publish everything and filter after the fact so says our friend Cameron Neylon, a senior scientist at the Science & Technology Facilities Council. I’m not going to get into that argument here, but I am going to archly raise my eyebrow at the piece in Nature whence…
I had the pleasure of talking with Doug Erwin a little while back. Doug is Curator of Paleozoic Invertebrates at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and a Faculty Member in Developmental Evolution. We were discussing a paper on the genome of a marine sponge, evaluated in F1000 and selected for our ‘Literature’ section…
Is orange juice a new superfood? Perhaps in some situations it can benefit the body. But the term ‘superfood’ often belies negligible effects in vivo. A paper by Husam Ghanim, Chang Ling Sia, Mannish Upadhyay, Kelly Korzeniewski, Prabhakar Viswanathan, Sanaa Abuaysheh, Priya Mohanty and Paresh Dandona at the State University of New York at Buffalo…
I got a very strong sense of deja vu when leafing through PLoS Biol recently. I was sure I had seen something very similar to Jeffrey Shaman’s paper Absolute Humidity and the Seasonal Onset of Influenza in the Continental United States before. A quick check on PubMed proved me right. I found the following, published…
Sometimes there’s a real life-changing thrust to blog posts, that drives at the heart of a pivotal issue in modern society and make people question their motives, passions, opinions or even educational goals. But seeing as we’re all coming down off a post-Oscars high, let me preempt your own judgement by rating this one as…
I’m on record as defending PR in the scientific sphere (and featured in Nature’s From the Blogosphere, so it must have touched a nerve somewhere). I maintain that we will continue to require good public relations, perhaps even more so with the looming spectre of swingeing cuts in publicly-funded science. (I’m a little less enamoured…
Science Online 2010 wrapped up on Sunday and, despite its brilliant format, great networking opportunities and overall general coolness of fun and quirky participants, I was left with a dilemma. If anyone can possibly tell me how to wrap up a conference about science, the web, technology and journalism to fit into a Twitter post,…
