A fascinating little paper came out in PNAS last week, Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans10.1073/pnas.1105456108 (open access). Selected for F1000 by FM in Ecology Karl Sigmund, the authors took pre-existing communities–1,543 Ugandan farmers in 50 producer cooperatives–and got them to play a variant of a public goods game (PGG). In these…
Something I was involved with a long time ago, and then promptly forgot about, was working out how authors of F1000-evaluated papers might like to advertise the fact. Buried deep within our About pages is a little badge you can put on your own website, or your CV, or whatever: If you’ve had a paper…
The world is going to collapse into chaos (and the scientific establishment with it). It’s a fairly common belief, based on a simple premise: People are bad and they will ruin the planet. We’ll destroy all the ecosystems, use up all the oil, and then we’ll be done. Game over.
The 20th World Congress for Sexual Health took place in Glasgow last month. We’re pleased to be hosting posters from the conference. There are currently 19 posters available, covering a broad range of interests from how the “hidden observer” technique can overcome shyness in response to sexual questionnaires (especially among the erotophobic), to an holistic…
Over at The Scientist we’ve got a Culture Friday piece on the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition. On Monday I bumped into Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, and asked what, for him, would make a successful exhibition. It’s already successful… science is exciting
Following on from last week’s top 10 music (which I’m going to run for a little longer, by the way), Nando sent me his top 10 species. Here they are, with a little bit about why he likes them so much. We hope to bring you more guest posts from Nando very soon! Phialella zappai…
What’s in a name? At the BioMed Central awards in spring I had the pleasure of meeting Ravi Murugesan, AuthorAID Training Coordinator at the Oxford-based International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). Because his work may interest some of our readers, I asked him to write a guest post for us. Here it…
Oil gets everywhere. At a quick guess, about fifty percent by mass of what’s on my desk is derived from petroleum products. Yours is probably similar–and just think of all the plastics you get through in a lab. These all start out as crude oil or natural gas, and more often than not end up…
Once upon a time, I hated the very thought of living in London. since moving here, that attitude has changed completely. It’s not hard to see why: at some point, it seems, just about everyone and everything comes to this great city, either just passing through or to stay.
Ever wondered just what the heck is going on? Elly Strammer had one of those moments reading the comments on an article first evaluated by Yehezkel Ben-Ari at the Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée, France. The article, Spontaneous network events driven by depolarizing GABA action in neonatal hippocampal slices are not attributable to deficient…
