Here’s a handy list of all the free evaluations this week: Odorant reception in the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae Light pollution in the sea Evaluation of antineoplastic drug exposure of health care workers at three university-based US cancer centers From Disclosure to Transparency: The Use of Company Payment Data And some bonus links for you:…

Put away the DEET. A big Nature paper back in March attracted a further evaluation this week. David Triggle of SUNY at Buffalo, asks Have you ever wondered how that pesky mosquito finds you in the middle of the night? The answer lies in the ‘chemical space’ mapped out by insects, revealed by the characterization…

Robie Macdonald of the Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences points out that when it comes to ocean pollution, most of us have been blind to night-time contamination by light. The (very short) paper touches on the potential and real effects of light pollution on wildlife, and points out that a comparable (chemical) pollutant would not…

Who is your grant reviewer, and what the heck do they really want from you?

Cholera spreads in Haiti Five cases of cholera have been documented in Port-au-Prince, raising fears that a rural outbreak of the disease could spread into the post-earthquake slums in the capital city, according to the Boston Globe. Cholera in rural areas of Haiti has already killed 250 people and sickened more than 3,000. If measures…

Cameron Neylon is a Senior Scientist in Biomolecular Sciences at the ISIS Neutron Scattering facility at the Science and Technology Facilities Council. He has more than a passing interest in “Open Research” and is well-known for advocating the benefits for science of open access, both in terms of data and publications. Download ‘Reusing data’ (5.7MB)…

Healthcare workers face a number of occupational hazards, including physical injuries from lifting heavy items (patients!) and infectious diseases from needleprick injuries and the like. But the tools of the trade also carry a risk—and a report from J Occup Environ Med highlights the danger of anti-cancer agents to nurses, pharmacists, and people not directly…

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…

It started, as many good ideas do, in a pub. Unlike most such ideas, this one went somewhere, culminating in a launch party at the Free Word Centre in Faringdon last night. I mentioned the Geek Calendar three weeks ago—but that was before I knew I was getting an invite to rub shoulders with the…

Do you receive more than a million dollars in consulting fees? Did you declare it when you published that paper? Probably not, according to a paper in Arch Intern Med, From Disclosure to Transparency: The Use of Company Payment Data1. The study is the first to definitively document under-reporting of author financial relationships in the…