How could you resist Scarlett Johansson? Let me rephrase that: how could you resist an evaluation featuring Scarlett Johansson?
Oil gets everywhere. At a quick guess, about fifty percent by mass of what’s on my desk is derived from petroleum products. Yours is probably similar–and just think of all the plastics you get through in a lab. These all start out as crude oil or natural gas, and more often than not end up…
When you want to know how a protein works (and sometimes, if other avenues have been exhausted, what it does), the usual approach is to solve its atomic structure. You can do this by X-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, but whichever you choose (rather, whichever actually works for you) you’re going to need…
Morgan‘s posts about careers, science and science funding seem to strike nerves with some of our readers. One thing Morgan hasn’t addressed, although I’m sure it’s on her list, is leadership. We’ve just published an evaluation of an article in the Harvard Business Review, The Wise Leader, in their ‘The Big Idea’ series. The two…
Last night I had the pleasure and privilege to be at the London Zoo for BioMed Central’s Fifth Annual Research Awards, hobnobbing with Strix uralensis and watching wallabies.
Being happy seems to be important to a lot of people. The pursuit of happiness (if not its attainment) is stated to be an ‘unalienable Right’ in the American Declaration of Independence. But what makes us happy? According to a report in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry getting older doesn’t necessarily make you curmudegeonly,…
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. –William Blake Peter Lawrence has weighed into the debate on the state of research in an article for Lab Times, boldly…
If you’ve been keeping up with us on Facebook and Twitter, you might have seen a discussion on the concept of ecosystem-based fishery management, which includes a dissent from Nando Boero and response from the original evaluator, Chris Kennedy.
Few would dispute that good communication is essential to a happy and successful relationship. Even arguments might not necessarily be a bad thing–an air-clearing argument need not be destructive, and is probably more healthy than sullen silences. But recent work reported in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy now suggests that what partners discuss,…
What can a clam-like creature tell us about eye evolution? Quite a bit, as it turns out. We ran a news article at the beginning of the month, on the finding that brachiopod, or lamp shell, embryos have eyes that are more closely related to those of vertebrates, than of their spineless cousins. I caught…
