Pavlov’s cockroach: classical conditioning of salivation in an insect is a paper from 2007, in PLoS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.0000529. And, yes: it describes the classical Pavlovian response, but not with dogs (or cats), but in everybody’s favourite Blattidae, Periplaneta americana. The authors conditioned cockroaches to salivate in response to an odour associated with a reward. This, they…
Probing the behaviour of anything inside a cell can be a bit tricky. Jaideep Mathur, at the University of Guelph, Ontario, has come up with a series of photoconvertible fluorescent probes that can be used inside plant cells. Mathur uses them to study the insides of plant cells. One of these probes is an F-actin…
April’s issue of The Scientist magazine will be out in ten days, and it’s a cancer special. You’re in for a treat, and there’s a super article by Keith Flaherty on melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. While prepping some material for the issue I came across an intriguing evaluation in F1000: Reduced Melanoma…
A long time ago, when the world was young, I had a polio vaccination. It came as a purply liquid, soaked into a sugar cube. Being of a very tender age, I extrapolated from this and it came as a great shock when I had a booster for something else and got a hypodermic needle…
It might seem strange to run a series called ‘The Art of Oncology‘, especially if you’re the Journal of Clinical Oncology. But this is what they have: fairly short articles, written by oncologists, talking about the experiences and the humanity of cancer specialists.
Our good friend Nando Boero, to whom thanks are due for introducing us to Ray Troll, has evaluated another paper. This one is four years old and hidden away in Oikos, and has the intriguing title How to write consistently boring scientific literature1. Kaj Sand-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen has ten key tips for…
My Culture Friday article on the Blackawton Bees paper attracted a fair amount of interest, and some comments. Such as
All I wanted from F1000 for Christmas was a dissent on an evaluation. And it looks like I’ve got it. Ben Busby and Michael Galperin at the NCBI have taken issue with the claim that Halomonas sp. strain GFAJ-1 “can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus”. They give a nice little list of links…
A paper in the Indian Journal of Pathology and Microbiology describes a simple screening tool (evaluated by Samuel Kariuki) for detecting a mutation in Salmonella enterica that confers resistance to standard treatment options. The point mutation Ser 83–>Tyr or Ser 83–>Phe (TCC–>TAC or TTC, respectively) can be identified using the restriction enzyme SSiI, which recognizes…
I had the pleasure of talking with Doug Erwin a little while back. Doug is Curator of Paleozoic Invertebrates at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and a Faculty Member in Developmental Evolution. We were discussing a paper on the genome of a marine sponge, evaluated in F1000 and selected for our ‘Literature’ section…
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