No, not something to do with fruit. We’ve been thinking a bit about open data recently, talking to Peter Murray-Rust and Cameron Neylon, and generally kicking around ideas about how we might like to change the world. Again.
There was a rather wonderful paper in Cell in the middle of last year from Deepak Srivastava’s lab at UCSF: Direct Reprogramming of Fibroblasts into Functional Cardiomyocytes by Defined Factors1. It was picked up by two of our Faculty teams and has already garned more than 40 citations.
This week’s news includes postdoc protests, evidence that cell phones affect the brain, Japanese university unrest, thoughts on the limited half-life of scientific findings, questionable Novartis promotions, and microworms that monitor blood sugar.
After comforting myself that I was using it merely as a reference, and was not in fact the dummy, I have been known to invest my money in one of the For Dummies series of books. From Divorce for Dummies to Building Chicken Coops for Dummies these books are instantly recognizable by their bright yellow…
Here’s the concluding part of the interview with Peter Murray-Rust at the University of Cambridge. We talked a bit about publishing data, and indeed science as a whole: where open data started for Peter was when he suggested all science should be published as supplemental data. Taking such a suggestion forward, the problem then becomes…
If you can’t afford to go to the badlands of Arizona to discover a new dinosaur, you could always do it from the comfort of your own home–or local museum. Bones from two dinosaurs were recovered from a quarry in Utah in 1994, and taken to the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. This is fortunate…
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…
This week’s news includes the suspension of a researcher working to make petri dish-grown meat a reality, an early end to Japan’s research whaling season due to anti-whaling activists, a study showing the brain’s visual reading centers lighting up when blind people read Braille, statistics suggesting the success rate for experimental drugs is plummeting, and…
It’s no big secret that we’re not fans of the journal impact factor. So it’s possibly justified to feel a little smug that overstating conclusions of research is positively correlated with impact factor.
Development of the vasculature of solid cancers (tumour angiogenesis) is a promising target for therapy, leading to interest in proteins such as angiostatin, endostatin and tumstatin. These generally act to inhibit tumor angiogenesis, but there’s also been a fair amount of recent interest in renormalizing the somewhat strange vasculature of cancers to increase the supply…
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