It might be on the edge of Biology, but hey, we have an Ecology Faculty and climate change is going to affect us all. Are you a climate scientist? Parental advisory–some ‘strong’ language
O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. –William Blake Peter Lawrence has weighed into the debate on the state of research in an article for Lab Times, boldly…
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?
Open source, open access, open posters even–but open science? Is that a step too far? The arguments over whether open data–publishing experimental results on the web, making datasets available, etc.–is a good thing, for science as a whole or individual careers, are likely to rage for quite a long time to come. That hasn’t stopped…
One of the highlights, if you can call it that, of working in Cambridge was the not infrequent chance to visit the now-defunct Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury. Although I spent many hours in one or other of the experimental hutches, coaxing diffraction patterns from reluctant crystals, I never got to see inside any of…
There was a rather wonderful paper in Cell in the middle of last year from Deepak Srivastava’s lab at UCSF: Direct Reprogramming of Fibroblasts into Functional Cardiomyocytes by Defined Factors1. It was picked up by two of our Faculty teams and has already garned more than 40 citations.
If you can’t afford to go to the badlands of Arizona to discover a new dinosaur, you could always do it from the comfort of your own home–or local museum. Bones from two dinosaurs were recovered from a quarry in Utah in 1994, and taken to the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. This is fortunate…
It’s all too easy to call someone stupid when they disagree with you. Understandable, but wrong nonetheless. Some of these people, who don’t seem to understand science or reason, may be politically motivated. Others may be genuinely confused, uncertain, or scared and vulnerable. This does not mean they’re stupid.
Perhaps the most distinctive and powerful thing about Science is its tendency, or rather proclivity to ask searching, even uncomfortable questions. And unlike belief systems, or ideological and political and movements, or pseudoscience, it asks those questions of itself. There’s been a fair bit of that going on recently.
From the Department of Hot Damn, But That’s Cool: Primitive agriculture in a social amoeba, DOI: 10.1038/nature09668. We humans think we’re so clever, with our hunting, gathering and intensive farming of potatoes for vodka. But the cell biologist’s favourite model, the slime mould Dictyostelium discoideum, has got us beat. This little critter (which, in case…
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