Why is science so darned difficult? It’s not simply that it takes a lot of hard work and concentrated brain power to really understand even basic scientific principles, but–for experimental scientists, at least–experiments have a tendency to fail in a way that doesn’t provide any useful information.
The BBC reports that life expectancy is on the rise in the UK–despite all those pies, chips and beer. It cites a paper by David Leon of the London School of hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the International Journal of Epidemiology, Trends in European life expectancy: a salutary view (open access: 10.1093/ije/dyr061). While I’m not…
We Brits tend to be a reserved lot. At least, that’s the reputation we have. But boy, we can talk. Just how much is shown by this analysis from researchers at MIT, Cornell University and University College London, with help from the BT Group in a little town you’ve probably never even heard of (Ipswich).…
Where should we concentrate conservation efforts? Back in January, Kevin Gaston at the University of Sheffield argued in Science that conservation efforts should be directed towards common species as well as the ‘obvious’, rare and ‘threatened’ ones1. The argument is beguilingly simple. In the absence of a detailed understanding of what each species does in…
It was such an interesting week at F1000 that I didn’t have space on Wednesday to mention a couple of tidbits of Faculty news. So here we go. First, this poster on the DNA damage response from a group in Spain has a somewhat quirky design. I think the link to Star Wars comes from…
We all love prizes. As promised, I’m giving away an awesomely awesome Naturally Selected sweatshirt, modelled here by Eva, for the best comment this month (in my opinion). And the winner is
I get to see some strange papers while trolling the F1000 website for the Faculty Dailies. Today I read about a teenager who spontaneously recovered from rabies, and more than I ever wanted to know about bile acids. And I quote,
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…
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…
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…
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