All I wanted from F1000 for Christmas was a dissent on an evaluation. And it looks like I’ve got it. Ben Busby and Michael Galperin at the NCBI have taken issue with the claim that Halomonas sp. strain GFAJ-1 “can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus”. They give a nice little list of links…

Scientists were right: Sand berms fail Sand berms have proven to be an ineffective strategy for protecting the coast from last April’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to a new report from the presidential commission investigating the spill. Scientists (such as Len Bahr, who penned an article for The Scientist) had warned the berms were…

Ajit Varki, distinguished professor in the departments of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine at the UCSD, was one of the first researchers to recognize the importance of glycans—the sugar molecules that decorate the surface of cells. He is profiled in the December issue of ASBMB Today, with a focus on the larger context of…

You might remember I wrote about Nando Boero, who named a jellyfish after Frank Zappa. Turns out that there’s a freshwater fish named after Led Zeppelin, Lepidocephalichthys zeppelini.

Critical differences between the human immune system and that of other primates, such as chimpanzees and rhesus macaques, lead to humans being more susceptible to a number of infectious agents including HIV and malaria. Now, the first genome-wide functional comparison in chimps, macaques and humans reveals changes in immune system gene expression that could explain…

A comment thread on one of The Scientist articles gives me the opportunity to mention F1000 Factors. Hidden away in our about pages there’s an explanation of how we calculate the F1000 Factor for evaluated articles. As it says there, Faculty Members rate each article ‘Recommended’, ‘Must Read’ or ‘Exceptional’. These correspond to a number,…

Imagine you’re a hungry restaurant patron, and when you walk in the door, the waiter hands you a stack of recipes, instead of a menu, to choose your food from. The recipes don’t do anything to describe how the food will look or taste, they only tell you how the chef will make that particular…

Mass spec Laureate dies Chemist John Fenn, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for vastly improving the ability of mass spectrometry to identify large proteins, passed away on Friday at the age of 93. As a Yale professor, Fenn developed a technique called electrospray ionization, in which a strong electric field is used…

It’s been a busy couple of months over here at the desks of F1000 Posters, Faculty of 1000’s online poster repository. There have been hours of hard work, a lot of determination and copious volumes of tea consumed, but I can announce that F1000 Posters—which has grown rapidly since its launch in June 2010—now includes…