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…
Three’s a crowd Who would have thought that plants could teach us about deafness? Or single-celled yeast about blood vessel development? Orthologous genes in different species can have totally different effects, and a statistical data-mining technique has thrown up not a few surprising models for human disease. The paper is free at PNAS and reviewed…
Whenever Richard Lipton releases a new migraine study I always receive it with interest. Partly because his work is pretty cutting edge and and he leads an excellent team, but partly because migraine science can sometimes sound like an encounter of the third kind in a science fiction novel. Migraines are typically defined as one…
Last week we talked a little bit about science as art; or at least, I claimed that the certain scientific imagery could be classed as art, and it is in any event very pretty. A commenter reminded me of the DNA 11 (‘From life comes art’) website, which is actually set up to commercialize scientific…
by Brian Mossop Ever since the size of our brains outgrew our closest animal relatives, we humans have declared ourselves far smarter than any other creatures in the animal kingdom. But our big brains, and bigger egos, may underestimate the intelligence of other critters, simply because we’ve been asking the wrong questions. A study published in…
Everybody loves a good structure. Here’s one of the prototype foamy virus (PFV) integrase in complex with DNA ends. The integrase is the complex that binds the termini of viral DNA and catalyses its insertion into the host genome. Nasty piece of work, and incidentally one that has ‘nasty biophysical properties‘—at least the one from…
A couple of interesting evaluations have made their way past my desk this week, both from Faculty of 1000 Medicine. The first evaluation is of a very interesting paper, originally published in German, which reports results of a questionnaire. The title of the paper is Uncontrolled placebo experimentation in a university hospital, and the results…
Ever blown up the lab with dry ice? Run protein into blotting buffer or DNA into TBE? Have no fear, just about every practicing scientist in the world has done something equally daft. But for a mistake that possibly, just possibly, says more about the supervisor than the victim, here’s a tweet from Alejandro Montenegro:…
Lord Lichfield One of the great things about doing science, especially if you’re lucky enough to be a cell or structural biologist, is just how gosh-darned pretty it can be. Sometimes, crouched over a microscope or synchrotron hutch late at night (or very early in the morning, with the latter), the sheer prettiness of what…
Richard has previously mentioned my imminent departure from f1000 and it’s come to the day where I pack up my desk, hand back the security pass and read my last free copy of The Scientist. It’s been a great experience being involved in a forward-thinking project like f1000 and getting stuck into the social media…
6
