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As lithium ion batteries

I’m writing this during England and the USA’s last chance to make it out of the group round of the World Cup. Those matches will soon be forgotten, but here’s some papers that (hopefully) will linger longer in the memory.

It’s another beautiful June day in London. The BT Tower is glinting against an unbroken cerulean sky, and the F1000 staff are busily publishing evaluation after evaluation (92,388 evaluations published at the time of writing). Here’s the latest batch that have caught my eye.

Only skin deep. The aptly named Max Gassmann from the University of Zurich has evaluated an interesting paper which points at mammalian skin playing an important role in systemic responses to environmental oxygen.

Scientists get lonely too, you know. And with all those late nights in the coldroom, time-points at oh dark hundred, and skipped lunches and dinners because you have to get this PCR on before the seminar starts, it’s difficult to meet that special him or her. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of…

All that’s new and approved from the Faculty of 1000 this week. Sex and the single cell A question that had never really occurred to me was answered in PLoS Biology the other day: what sex are cells? Now, it’s true that every somatic cell of mine has both X and Y chromosomes, I never…

Brains Shine light on electrons

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…

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

How long have we been looking at coding sequences? And how long have we known that certain codons get used more than others? Back in Cambridge I even wrote a script to optimize codon usage to maximize yield of expressed proteins in bacteria. Turns out