Ferdinando Boero is a F1000 Member in Ecology. Here, he presents his impressions from a large biodiversity meeting in Aberdeen.
Bell Labs was a remarkable enterprise which, according to Wikipedia, contributed to the development of cell phones, wlan (wifi), semiconductors, compression algorithms, and many more developments that changed the way people interact with technology. Bell Labs worked well because they brought together innovative thinkers, and let them innovate. People there didn’t have to write grant…
What Bob Dylan sang 47 years ago is still true – especially for the scientific endeavor. We can see many signs of changes occurring on the US side of the pond:
F1000 Member of the moment has to be Paul Riley. Not only has he recently published a stunning piece of research, in which a ‘Smart trick’ was used to kick-start adult heart epicardial cells into an embryonic programme such that they were able to produce fully functional cardiomyocytes, but he’s also been awarded a new…
In that social media-type vibe that’s going on, we’re trying to collate sources of grant funding: a handy one-stop guide to what’s available, and what’s recently been announced. We’re experimenting with two ways of curating and displaying the info we manage to harvest, at Grant funding news on paper.li, and Grant news at scoop.it. They’re…
I work in a downtown area where shops come and go. Some have staying power, and some are just a flash in the pan. A new jewelry shop recently opened up just downstairs from my office. As I walked by the shop, I asked myself, what do they offer that’s of value to me?
A couple of weeks ago we had Liz Allen and Claire Vaughan talking about the way the Wellcome Trust assesses its own funding impacts. We’ve been a bit more directly involved with the Medical Research Council (MRC) and how they’re assessing their own grants; working with them to match papers arising from MRC-funded research to…
The Wellcome Trust gives around £700 million to research each year. Naturally, the Trust wants to know where this money is going, and how well it’s being spent. This involves contextualizing Wellcome-funded research, and they’ve just published a fascinating timeline (see below) of research in (human) genetics, starting with Darwin and Mendel, noting the publication…
“We are all individuals!” chants the group, repeating after Brian. “I’m not!” says a guy, jumping up and down and waving his hands above his head. —the effects of groupthink distilled into a hilarious 30 second scene from Monty Python. We all, to a lesser or greater extent, buy into groupthink. If we didn’t, we’d…
It all started with an email: “My chair flipped out when I told him.” Someone had signed up for an intensive grant writing course, then backed out because his chair didn’t want to make the investment with their “dwindling pool of funds.” Instead the chair said he would spend his own personal time helping the…
