A few weeks ago I went to the Faraday Prize Lecture at the Royal Society. The lecture, The secret mathematicians, was given by the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science Marcus du Sautoy. Du Sautoy talked about five artists, how they were inspired by mathematics, and how their art tells us things…
Stem cells for dummies The ability to maintain embryonic stem cell lines—more importantly, to preserve their pluripotence—in culture held out great promise for the treatment of a range of conditions from cancer to Parkinson’s disease. Unfortunately the technology ran into trouble when in 2001 the US Government restricted Federal funding to work done with the…
One of the things I love about scientific knowledge is that it is always in a state of flux. Theories are constantly being amended, rejected or confirmed by the community. In short, there is always room for more research regardless of how well trodden the ground may be. In this vein, I read an interesting…
Couch potatoes beware!, or so says Faculty of 1000 member Paul Pagel in his evaluation of a paper studying links between television viewing time and mortality in Australia. Television is the sedentary activity of choice for many of us in the developed world. And plenty of studies have already demonstrated a relationship between televison viewing…
This week, I have mostly been in Philadelphia. That was to meet The Scientist team, and sit down with Sarah Greene and figure out exactly how we’re going to run this new beast. The bottom line is that F1000 will now be feeding into The Scientist much more directly, and my job suddenly got a…
We have previously discussed the honorable activities of the Americans for Medical Progress (AMP) and its members, including Dario Ringach whose recent paper on animal activism was highly rated by our reviewers. AMP send regular email updates to scientists and this item looked at an extremely important issue, so I am reproducing it here in…
By Steve Pogonowski and Bea Downing Work dramas, late bills, latent childhood trauma: adult life is full of potential for the average person to get stressed and deal with it by ‘comfort eating’. As discussed in a previous post by Callum, labeled ‘Food for thought’ (hence my segued sequel/blatant rip-off title here), there are ongoing…
We all know that given the right conditions, forests are prone to grow, but until now, it has been very difficult to define what can be considered normal re-growth (i.e. as a forest ages), and what might be considered exceptional growth. In a paper appearing in PNAS, a team led by Sean McMahon and Geoffrey…
It’s been a short week for me. As I implied elsewhere, I was off sick on Monday, and I’d already booked leave to be out of town Thursday and Friday (which should be today, if this scheduling thing works). And when I got back into the office on Tuesday, I was told that I should…
I read an article recently in a well-known London newspaper which raised an issue I have been thinking about for a long time. What happens when unregulated medicine actually causes more harm than good? I won’t name names (although the original article does), but in a nutshell, a woman was prescribed pills by a practitioner…
