Watching a pollen-covered bumblebee assaulting one of my sunflowers at the weekend, I was reminded of a remarkable paper in July’s J Exp Biol, which has attracted three evaluations. Tien Luu and colleagues in Queensland, Australia, built what is essentially a fully immersive flight simulator for bees, and discovered something very interesting about their flight.…
More reaction to the Select Committee’s report on peer review, released last week. The Royal Society of Chemistry uses the occasion to trump its “subject repository style journal”, RSC Advances. Their press release also reminds me that they have a freely available chemical database, ChemSpider–which appears to have come on in leaps and bounds since…
In that social media-type vibe that’s going on, we’re trying to collate sources of grant funding: a handy one-stop guide to what’s available, and what’s recently been announced. We’re experimenting with two ways of curating and displaying the info we manage to harvest, at Grant funding news on paper.li, and Grant news at scoop.it. They’re…
Dorothy Hodgkin, who died 17 years ago today, was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for “her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances“. Here she is at Web of Stories, talking about starting to work on vitamin B12:
You might have seen that the UK government has released its Select Committee’s report on peer review in science. The chair of the committee, Andrew Miller MP, says that the “general oversight of research integrity in the UK [is] unsatisfactory and complacent.” Note that he doesn’t say that the research is unsatisfactory–simply the oversight. I…
Cell biologists are a grumblesome lot. They always want more–more fluorophores, more microscopes, more photon yield… A technical advance in Nature Methods uses Bessel beam illumination to provide rapid three-dimensional imaging, creating what F1000 Member Bob Goldstein at UNC Chapel Hill calls “truly stunning” films of live cells. Do check out Bob’s evaluation, and the…
Mendeley today released version 1.0 of their desktop client. Hard to believe, I know, that this milestone isn’t long past. Mendeley is a free reference manager, integrated with an article-centric social network. You can see a short video about what it can do here: What is Mendeley? from Mendeley. It’s not escaped our notice that…
There was a fascinating-looking evaluation yesterday from James Duffin, Toronto, on a J Appl Phys article: Point: Counterpoint “High Altitude is / is not for the Birds!”. Unfortunately there’s no abstract, and I can’t get access to the article (despite the journal site telling me the PDF is free). It looks like some kind of…
Dystrophin is the largest known human gene, covering about 2.4 million basepairs. The gene has 79 exons, which when spliced together yield a relatively modest relatively modest 425 kDa protein–still huge, but perhaps less than one might expect given its genomic sequence. It connects the actin-based cytoskeleton of muscle fibres, through the cell membrane, to…
Apparently the Periodic Table of Rockin’ has been around since 1987, which must be before some of you were born. How come I’ve never seen it before? Be sure to click round and read the comments on each one. Number (it goes up to) 11, for example, is Iron Maiden: My friend, if you claim…
