Open Access literature databases! There, that’s grabbed your attention, hasn’t it? No? Strangely, talking to most researchers about publication databases and repositories has them either nodding off or suddenly remembering an urgent meeting. In this guest post, Mohammed Tasab, Engagement Officer at UK PubMed Central explains why PIs should care about UK PubMed Central, the…
Bruce Cronstein is a Section Head in Immunopharmacology & Hematologic Pharmacology, in our Pharmacology and Drug Discovery faculty. Here he’s talking to Sarah Greene about his work on adenosine receptors. Like many things in science, it’s taken us off in odd directions Bruce is known for showing that anti-inflammatory drugs such as methotrexate work by…
The NSF just announced a new initiative to help women tackle obstacles in their science careers. It’s focused on providing PhD students with inspiration and motivation, based on success stories of other women that have done it. Good stuff, right? But that’s only my own interpretation. I’m not actually sure if this is what the…
Genes not patent-able The US government announced on Friday (October 29) that researchers should not be able to patent genes because they are “products of nature.” This decision, which overturns the long-standing policy that genes are eligible for patents, could have a “huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry,” according to the New…
Biochemist Nick Lane has taken home this year’s Royal Society Prize for Science Books, it was announced at an event held last Thursday (21st October) in London. Lane’s 2009 book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, explores the key gifts bestowed upon biology over the sweep of evolutionary time. These crucial inventions include…
In this three minute video, Gordon Fishell at the New York University School of Medicine tells us how for the past ten years his lab has been trying to understand interneuron diversity in the cortex: how brains can expand from ten or so cardinal cell types to the >100 types that populate the mature cortex,…
Here’s a handy list of all the free evaluations this week: Odorant reception in the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae Light pollution in the sea Evaluation of antineoplastic drug exposure of health care workers at three university-based US cancer centers From Disclosure to Transparency: The Use of Company Payment Data And some bonus links for you:…
Put away the DEET. A big Nature paper back in March attracted a further evaluation this week. David Triggle of SUNY at Buffalo, asks Have you ever wondered how that pesky mosquito finds you in the middle of the night? The answer lies in the ‘chemical space’ mapped out by insects, revealed by the characterization…
Robie Macdonald of the Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences points out that when it comes to ocean pollution, most of us have been blind to night-time contamination by light. The (very short) paper touches on the potential and real effects of light pollution on wildlife, and points out that a comparable (chemical) pollutant would not…
Who is your grant reviewer, and what the heck do they really want from you?
