Who's the daddy?

In all the excitement, you might have missed another paradigm being overthrown. Faculty Member (and Open Access advocate) Etienne Joly of the CNRS writes about the myth of paternity. It’s generally believed that a considerable proportion of children are not the biological offspring of their legal fathers. Estimates range from 10% in the UK to…

A select agent slip up

University of Wisconsin at Madison biologist Gary Splitter won’t be doing much pipetting or centrifuging for the next few years. UW-Madison just pulled Splitter’s laboratory privileges for violating strict rules governing research on “select agents,” or microbes that pose serious dangers to human health and could be used as bioweapons.

Foundation woes settled — for one

One of our most popular stories last week revealed that some scientists applying for foundation funding are getting caught up in legal snags that are delaying — or perhaps even preventing them from accepting — the award. We profiled William Ja, a Scripps molecular biologist who received an award from the Found Animals Foundation to…

Cell phones report data

Once a mere means of mobile communication, cell phones have taken on a suite of other social tasks, including music playing, web surfing, and now data management. Exco InTouch, a UK-based provider of interactive patient communication solutions, suggests that cell phones may be a new way to capture real-time patient data from clinical trials. The…

Money

Sir Paul Nurse got into a bit of bother recently with what appeared to be some ill-considered remarks about science funding. That was, of course, an interview in a newspaper and some context and subtlety was lost. Mark Henderson of the Times blogged Nurse’s comments in fuller form last week, and things have sort of…

There may be trouble ahead…

Just a quick update. You may have seen Kent Anderson’s broadside aimed squarely at PLoS, specifically PLoS ONE. This engendered a huge comment thread, and a robust defence by Cameron Neylon (you should also check out the FriendFeed thread that was spawned by his article, too.). Now, our friends Pete Binfield and Mark Patterson of…

Ain't it fun?

Crystal ball I’m a sucker for pretty things, and structural biology is all about pretty things. And the structure of the entire damn apoptosome at 3.55

Feeling small

I’m pretty sure most of us have seen a version of this already, but it’s worth pointing out another formulation. Take one inch, and let it equal two million years. What you end up with is a history of life on Earth, 135 feet wide. Scroll all the way to the right to see where…