The British Heart Foundation funds basic research into coronary and circulatory diseases. They’ve recently launched a campaign to “Mend Broken Hearts“, with the aim of raising £50 million over the next ten years. This money, which is in addition to the ~£70 million the BHF spends on research each year, is going to be devoted…
I’m going to do something a little more serious for this week’s Culture Friday. There’s been a bit of discussion recently about the stigma associated with mental illness. Which is crazy, when you think about it; being mentally sick shouldn’t be make any more difference to those around you than if you’d broken a leg,…
Here’s the concluding part of the interview with Peter Murray-Rust at the University of Cambridge. We talked a bit about publishing data, and indeed science as a whole: where open data started for Peter was when he suggested all science should be published as supplemental data. Taking such a suggestion forward, the problem then becomes…
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 Valentine’s Day on Monday, and Darwin’s Birthday on Saturday. What better way to celebrate these two events than a sandwich of art and music? Ray Troll is an artist and musician in Alaska. He’s kindly provided this artwork in celebration of the great man:
Via the University of Lincoln research office blog, I came across a report from a study tour of the Wellcome Trust. The Trust is well known for its prestigious (and generous) awards—programme grants, project grants, and various fellowships—in biomedical research, giving over £600 million annually, but it also has quite an extensive interest in the…
In this second of three videos featuring Peter Murray-Rust, from the Chemistry Department of the University of Cambridge, recorded at the Panton Arms, I ask him if he has faced any opposition to the concept of open data. Peter is more concerned about the dangers of partial publication, where in his words people want the…
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.
If you’re following the right people on Twitter you might notice a peculiar hashtag: #beyondthePDF. This refers to a workshop at UCSD, which has the goal to identify a set of requirements, and a group of willing participants to develop open source code to accelerate scientific knowledge sharing (H/T Martin Fenner).
Professor Sophie Scott is at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. She is interested in the neurobiology of speech perception, including the evolution of speech and recovery from aphasia (see all evaluations related to aphasia on the F1000 website). She works on on dyslexia and processing of emotional information in the voice, and…
