Nature ran an editorial last week on what might to appear to be a retraction epidemic. There do seem to be more retractions recently, due to a number of potential reasons: More awareness of misconduct by journals and the community, an increased ability to create and to detect unduly manipulated images, and greater willingness by…
Following the success (of a sort) of the Science is Vital campaign I have been co-organizing the last few weeks, I’m wondering what the response is in other countries. Specifically, are you pleased that the UK science budget has been ring-fenced, or are you (secretly, maybe) disappointed that we’re still competing with everyone else? In…
After this morning’s post on the lack of full disclosure of financial interests I quite coincidentally came across this intriguing list of health providers who earned more than US$100,000 from pharma last year. There are some interesting questions surrounding this sort of list. For example, should the amount a practitioner can receive be capped? Should…
Last Wednesday, in celebration of Stem Cell Awareness Day, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) announced the winners of its annual poetry contest. The poems were not all well received, however. One poem in particular, titled Stem C., contains liturgical language used during the Christian sacrament of Eucharist, causing the Life Legal Defense Foundation…
Skip the postdoc? The National Institutes of Health has begun a new program that allows PhDs and MDs to become Principal Investigators — without doing a postdoc. The Early Independence Awards (DP5) offer up to $250,000 in annual direct costs for five years for the “pool of talented young scientists who have the intellect, scientific…
There are some interesting parallels between today’s Nobel Prize-winning technology (in vitro fertilization) and embryonic stem cell research. In the early days, Robert Geoffrey Edwards experienced some pushback from people who had ethical concerns about the technique. And IVF provides a potential source of new embryonic stem cell lines, in the form of unused embryos.…
Just before the fascinating article on Francis Crick’s correspondence in today’s Nature, there’s a feature by Brendan Maher on sabotage in the laboratory. Vipul Bhrigu, erstwhile postdoc at the University of Michigan, narrowly escaped a jail sentence after pleading guilty to sabotaging a PhD student’s experiments.
Martin Fenner at PLoS Blogs wrote an open letter in response to Christian Specht’s analysis of “mutations” in citations of the famous paper describing SDS-PAGE by Uli Laemmli. Specht has now responded at The Scientist, with a thought-provoking conclusion: However, the fact that citation variants can be inherited may be an indication for a much…
Following on from saying how great Flickr is for when your hard drive fails, we’re wondering how you use social media. Please check all that you use ‘frequently’, say more than a few times a month. [poll id=”8″]
How would you define ‘evolution’ in just a few words? In the competition inspired by the genegeek blog, about fifty of you had a go at this on twitter, with another 30 or so entries in the comments here on Naturally Selected. Whittling that down to a short list you could vote on wasn’t easy,…
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