Making movies

Take one science curriculum, some cameras and a couple of thousand school-kids, and what do you get? Over two hundred short films about science, entered into the Planet SciCast competition, the winners of which were announced last Friday in the hallowed halls of the Royal Institution in London. Photo by Laura Mtungwazi / SciCast SciCast…

Buzz off

If we could eliminate mosquitoes, those suckers that give you the itchy bites, and carry malaria (which kills just shy of a million people every year), should we? An article in today’s Nature considers the possibility of a world without mosquitoes. Tell us what you think using the poll up there on the right, and…

Sean Carroll awarded 2010 Stephen Jay Gould Prize

Congratulations to Sean Carroll, Section Head of Developmental Evolution for Faculty of 1000 Biology who has been awarded the 2010 Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE). SSE President H. Allen Orr and Gould Prize Committee Chair Sam Scheiner presented the award to Carroll at the 2010 Evolution meeting…

Weekly roundup

You are what you eat. Or maybe, the way you behave depends on what’s happening in your gut. These goes beyond chocolate, or bananas, making you feel happy: chronic gastric inflammation makes mice anxious, through measurable biochemical changes. An interesting implication is that clinical treatment of intestinal disorders could improve behavioural abnormalities (Bercik et al.…

Changing faces

Over on the main site, we have an Immunology Top 7. To accompany this, here’s the immunologist Avrion Mitchison talking about the ‘World Holiday Organization’, and ‘the best scientists I’ve ever known’. Avrion Mitchison, the British zoologist, is currently Professor Emeritus at University College London and is best known for his work demonstrating the role…

News in a nutshell

NIH: It’s all about significance, approach Under the revised peer review system, significance and approach are the two most important core review factors used to determine the overall impact score of a NIH grant application, according to an analysis by National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) director Jeremy Berg at the Institute’s blog on…

In the Microscope

Here too are the dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses, tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters who lay down their lives for a song. Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear the murmuring, the revolt of immense estates.

Funny honey

It all started with a little tweet, asking you to tell me your favourite science joke. Dozens of comments later, I’m going to have to ask you to stop… please. There were a lot of jokes, some funnier than others, some apparently from a site on the internet (yes, I recognize them) and a few…

Same is lame

This is a condensed excerpt from my upcoming book, The Golden Ticket In Science: Funding and Recognition Through The Power of Marketing. How are you like a laundry detergent? I

Great things

The contemporary arts curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist once said that the most important things at a conference happen in the coffee breaks. He famously took this observation to its logical conclusion by running a science/arts event, “Art & Brain” that was essentially an extended coffee break.