Money

One of the things I did as a student to supplement the meagre maintenance grant involved driving tractors around and tying up clematis. Not a wholly unpleasant time, to be honest, although it was the overtime that really made it worthwhile. Then came the summer when I couldn’t get the gig at the plant nursery,…

Think you knew librarians?

Librarians can sometimes suffer unfairly from stereotypes. But footage like that below suggests there could be much more to your average librarian than might initially meet the eye. I certainly wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of a late fine from any of these warrior librarians! [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2HJDGudAnU] See how long you can stifle…

Everybody's Talkin'

It’s been a while since I’ve said anything about the F1000 website. You might remember that’s what I was working on when I first arrived at SNG (much to my surprise, it has to be said); since about February I’ve been increasingly full time on The Scientist. I still maintain a professional interest in what’s…

Everybody's Talkin'

It’s been a while since I’ve said anything about the F1000 website. You might remember that’s what I was working on when I first arrived at SNG (much to my surprise, it has to be said); since about February I’ve been increasingly full time on The Scientist. I still maintain a professional interest in what’s…

Flattery to deceive

Is orange juice a new superfood? Perhaps in some situations it can benefit the body. But the term ‘superfood’ often belies negligible effects in vivo. A paper by Husam Ghanim, Chang Ling Sia, Mannish Upadhyay, Kelly Korzeniewski, Prabhakar Viswanathan, Sanaa Abuaysheh, Priya Mohanty and Paresh Dandona at the State University of New York at Buffalo…

Watching you watching us

I was nosing around Google Analytics yesterday, seeing if our Faculty Daily section is attracting any interest to the F1000 main site. [Update: that’s the F1000 Biology site. Medicine is different, but not interestingly so.] And I saw a very strange thing. First, look at the browsers hitting https://f1000biology.com. Firefox has 3% more share than…

Watching you watching us

I was nosing around Google Analytics yesterday, seeing if our Faculty Daily section is attracting any interest to the F1000 main site. [Update: that’s the F1000 Biology site. Medicine is different, but not interestingly so.] And I saw a very strange thing. First, look at the browsers hitting https://f1000biology.com. Firefox has 3% more share than…

At the movies

Busman’s Holiday Faculty of 1000 published 1472 evaluations last month. This is a world record! And it should help you predict when we’re going to hit 90,000. Remember, we’re running a competition: simply twitter the date and time you think we’ll make 90,000 evaluations with the hashtag #F90K for a chance to win some F1000…

Faculty of a Million?

Apparently, the two self-proclaimed ‘top’ scientific journals, Nature and Science, have ended their hundreds of years-old feud and teamed up to launch a new journal, to be called either Scientific Nature or Natural Science, depending on the result of a text-message vote by the scientific community. Sounds good? Well, not really. We’re a bit upset…