by Brian Mossop Ever since the size of our brains outgrew our closest animal relatives, we humans have declared ourselves far smarter than any other creatures in the animal kingdom.  But our big brains, and bigger egos, may underestimate the intelligence of other critters, simply because we’ve been asking the wrong questions. A study published in…

Everybody loves a good structure. Here’s one of the prototype foamy virus (PFV) integrase in complex with DNA ends. The integrase is the complex that binds the termini of viral DNA and catalyses its insertion into the host genome. Nasty piece of work, and incidentally one that has ‘nasty biophysical properties‘—at least the one from…

Everybody loves a good structure. Here’s one of the prototype foamy virus (PFV) integrase in complex with DNA ends. The integrase is the complex that binds the termini of viral DNA and catalyses its insertion into the host genome. Nasty piece of work, and incidentally one that has ‘nasty biophysical properties‘—at least the one from…

A couple of interesting evaluations have made their way past my desk this week, both from Faculty of 1000 Medicine. The first evaluation is of a very interesting paper, originally published in German, which reports results of a questionnaire. The title of the paper is Uncontrolled placebo experimentation in a university hospital, and the results…

Ever blown up the lab with dry ice? Run protein into blotting buffer or DNA into TBE? Have no fear, just about every practicing scientist in the world has done something equally daft. But for a mistake that possibly, just possibly, says more about the supervisor than the victim, here’s a tweet from Alejandro Montenegro:…

Lord Lichfield One of the great things about doing science, especially if you’re lucky enough to be a cell or structural biologist, is just how gosh-darned pretty it can be. Sometimes, crouched over a microscope or synchrotron hutch late at night (or very early in the morning, with the latter), the sheer prettiness of what…

Richard has previously mentioned my imminent departure from f1000 and it’s come to the day where I pack up my desk, hand back the security pass and read my last free copy of The Scientist. It’s been a great experience being involved in a forward-thinking project like f1000 and getting stuck into the social media…

Lord Lichfield One of the great things about doing science, especially if you’re lucky enough to be a cell or structural biologist, is just how gosh-darned pretty it can be. Sometimes, crouched over a microscope or synchrotron hutch late at night (or very early in the morning, with the latter), the sheer prettiness of what…

Just a reminder that I’ve extended the deadline for our twitter #scifubar competition until Monday. Post your most embarrassing scientific error or egregious lab-based manipulation to Twitter with the #scifubar hashtag. If you’re too shy to ‘fess up, pretend it was your labmate… The winner gets a bag of F1000 swag, including the much-coveted laser-stylus-pen-torch…

You turn me right round As an undergraduate, I remember being fascinated by the family of rotary motors that is the proton-translocating ATPase. This is the protein complex, resembling something from the imagination of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith rather than anything merely biological, that either pumps protons from one side of a membrane to another,…