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…

What was that? I think it was the sound of a week flashing past. I keep saying things like “We’ve got a brand new website… but you can’t see it yet.” This must be quite frustrating. Truth is, the dev team are working very hard (and specs have changed and changed again—but let’s not go…

I took my daughters round the new Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum last year. Because we happen to be friends, I managed to persuade the incomparable Karen James, of The Beagle Project fame, to show us behind the scenes. After that I took the girls into the ‘Cocoon‘, a huge butterfly egg-type structure…

Vitek quotes a Polish proverb, If you’re going to fall off a horse, make it a big one. In that vein, take a look at this graph (don’t look too closely; it’s deliberately a tiny bit obscure): What I’ve been doing this week is mostly hacking away in Perl at some of the information in…

One of the more interesting speakers at the recent Science Online conference in North Carolina was the author of Denialism and lover of controversy, Michael Specter. The New Yorker staff writer gave an impassioned speech at the conference’s opening gala on the current blight of denialism, which he defines as what happens, “when an entire…

Back when I was an acolyte in the service of science, I worked on an interesting little big protein by the name of talin. This 270 kDa sucker is involved in focal adhesions: the ‘ankle’ of the cell, joining the actin cytoskeleton to the outside world. Focal adhesions are fascinating and complex, and if I…

Last week I met up with a Certain Editor from a Certain Journal. We had a nice chat about, among other things, the policy of Certain Journals as regards the wind direction in the publishing industry. From the research side of the fence it’s easy to assume that publishing houses are monolithic edifices intent on…

The distribution and uptake of antivirals and vaccination was in the news quite a bit before Christmas. H1N1 swine flu didn’t turn out to be the Armageddon some commentators were forecasting, but I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that we dodged a bullet there. In cases like this we might expect the…

One of the really great things about science is its potential for self-correction. If you have an hypothesis, a result (strange or otherwise), a set of data, it can be tested by anyone. This is encouraged, in fact: when you publish you’re not just saying ‘look how clever I am’ but also ‘here’s something new!…

CAM is a group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not generally considered to be part of conventional medicine. While scientific evidence exists regarding some CAM therapies, for most there are key questions that are yet to be answered through well-designed scientific studies—questions such as whether these therapies are…