Literature at Large

It makes much more sense in fact to publish everything and filter after the fact so says our friend Cameron Neylon, a senior scientist at the Science & Technology Facilities Council. I’m not going to get into that argument here, but I am going to archly raise my eyebrow at the piece in Nature whence…

One of the less well-known things about F1000 is that we partner with HINARI, the Programme for Access to Health Research, to provide access to F1000 to institutions and researchers in developing countries. Institutions can apply for free or discounted access (depending on their gross national income—GNI), and regularly active Faculty Members are invited to…

There are some interesting parallels between today’s Nobel Prize-winning technology (in vitro fertilization) and embryonic stem cell research. In the early days, Robert Geoffrey Edwards experienced some pushback from people who had ethical concerns about the technique. And IVF provides a potential source of new embryonic stem cell lines, in the form of unused embryos.…

Martin Fenner at PLoS Blogs wrote an open letter in response to Christian Specht’s analysis of “mutations” in citations of the famous paper describing SDS-PAGE by Uli Laemmli. Specht has now responded at The Scientist, with a thought-provoking conclusion: However, the fact that citation variants can be inherited may be an indication for a much…

One of the things I love about the iPhone is its ability to render any website as if on a desk/lap top computer. When I was responsible for the F1000 website, I was terribly pleased that the new designs just worked (and they still do. I’ll soon be able to give you some good news…

Look what arrived in the post when I was on vacation: Thanks to the boys and girls and Testudines at BioMed Central.

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,

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…