I had the pleasure of talking with Doug Erwin a little while back. Doug is Curator of Paleozoic Invertebrates at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and a Faculty Member in Developmental Evolution. We were discussing a paper on the genome of a marine sponge, evaluated in F1000 and selected for our ‘Literature’ section…
Biochemist Nick Lane has taken home this year’s Royal Society Prize for Science Books, it was announced at an event held last Thursday (21st October) in London. Lane’s 2009 book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, explores the key gifts bestowed upon biology over the sweep of evolutionary time. These crucial inventions include…
Nikon has announced the winners of this year’s International Small World Competition — the 36-year-old contest that pits the world’s research laboratories against each other to crown the rulers of microscopy — and the results are stunning. Jonas King, a graduate student in the Vanderbilt University lab of biologist Julián Hillyer, took home the prize…
Post-publication review: The monologue Don’t expect a reply from the authors of that study you just publicly criticized by leaving a comment on the journal web page where it was published. A study conducted by BMJ found that of more than 100 studies published on the journal’s website that attracted substantive criticism, fewer than half…
Natural history painting have always had a singular effect on me. I find them at once relaxing and exhilarating. There’s something special about viewing scenes rendered by people who may have been among the first to record them with life-like fidelity. Feels like a special privilege. As you gear up (or wind down) for the…
Embattled Harvard biologist Marc Hauser issued a brief mea culpa that ran in the Boston Globe on Friday (20th August). In it, Hauser admits making “some significant mistakes” and urges the scientific community to wait for the conclusion of a federal investigation by the Office of Research Integrity before passing judgment. “I have learned a…
A bombshell revelation in The Chronicle of Higher Education today pertaining to the somewhat mysterious case of Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser and his alleged academic wrongdoing: junior researchers in Hauser’s lab are accusing the well-known scientist and book author of intentionally doctoring his data on monkey behavior to fit with his theories about the…
Over on the main site, we have an Immunology Top 7. To accompany this, here’s the immunologist Avrion Mitchison talking about the ‘World Holiday Organization’, and ‘the best scientists I’ve ever known’. Avrion Mitchison, the British zoologist, is currently Professor Emeritus at University College London and is best known for his work demonstrating the role…
As oil and sludge continue to surge onto the Gulf Coast from BP’s blown out Deepwater Horizon well, more and more animals are suffering. But one company sees a way to profit from the calamity. And if you’re the betting type, you could pad your pockets along with it.
The UK has prohibited Andrew Wakefield from practicing medicine — you’ll remember him as the first to publish a peer-reviewed report linking autism to the MMR vaccine, in The Lancet in 1998 (which has since been retracted). Additional research has failed to find a connection between autism and any vaccine.
