Faculty meetings can be a fun crucible in which to observe people’s attitudes about almost anything. Today, let’s look at the attitude that some people have about grant writing (and how that attitude may thwart them from accomplishing what they want). Some time ago at a faculty meeting, the subject of having students do an exercise…

We’re pleased to welcome Stephen Brimijoin to the Faculty. Steve is at the Mayo Clinic and has come up with a method of—hopefully—preventing former drug users from relapsing. He’s now received a ‘substantial’ grant to transfer the method from a rat model into humans. Cocaine-destroying engines

It’s not all fun and games in science, you know. There’s serious stuff too. Like this report from Professor Saeed Thabet in Cairo, “Reality of the G-spot and its relation to female circumcision and vaginal surgery”1: The G-spot is functional reality in 82.3% of women, an anatomical reality in 54.3% and a histological reality in…

Greek scientists accused of stealing funds A group of Greek scientists are under investigation for misuse of government funds — no less than 150-200 million euros, in fact.

Last week I raised the issue of a retraction epidemic, pointing to an editorial in Nature and wondering about the question of publicity for retractions, an issue brought to my attention by Ivan Oransky.

To a cell biologist, they’re everywhere, an integral part of lab life. Used willy-nilly for all sorts of experiments. Poked, prodded, manipulated—and eventually autoclaved, incinerated or bleached. [pullquote]HeLa cells are the ‘anti-cell'[/pullquote]

Something strange seemed to be in the air on Thursday. First news came in over the transom about a California gentleman who bought an animal skin at a garage sale for the lowly sum of USD $5. So what, you say? Well, consider the possibility that the skin may have at one time belonged to…

Professor David Nutt was famously sacked from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs by the UK’s Labour Government at the time, apparently for being rational about scientific evidence. He now chairs the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, and is head of the Department of Neuropsychopharmacology and Molecular Imaging, Imperial College London. He is…

Is your life like a stuck emergency brake in your car, slowing you down and generating useless heat in the process? Many of our lives are like that, because we lack awareness of something going on in our minds: friction. Friction is caused by a battle between what we want and what we expect.  Unfortunately,…

Last week we published an evaluation by Gabriele Sorci of the Université de Bourgogne, on a paper in The American Naturalist titled “Hidden consequences of living in a wormy world: nematode-induced immune suppression facilitates tuberculosis invasion in African buffalo.” African buffalo can be infected by nematodes and tuberculosis. The nematodes suppress the host Th1-type immune…