As you might know, there’s a bit of an ongoing furore over government policy and the role of advisors. In brief, Professor David Nutt has been fired for advising HM Government according to scientific research, rather than (as far as I understand it) according to political dogma. Two other advisors have quit in sympathy, and…
Richard has previously mentioned some of the conferences he attends and speaks at to spread the word about F1000. One of the upcoming events on the calendar that we’re excited about is ScienceOnline2010. If you were one of the 226 people who signed up before registration closed, there’s an amazing program now up on the…
Videos and highlights keep flooding through to me from the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago last week, so it would be remiss of me not to post a few of them. Jon Pierce Shimomura, an assistant professor at the University of Texas (Austin), spoke to F1000 on how nervous systems work together to execute…
We had a lot of love from the media this morning, courtesy of a fascinating article by Lutz Jäncke on brain plasticity and the correlation with musical talent and intelligence. Daily Telegraph, Mail online, Metro and others interviewed Jäncke yesterday and there’s been a flood of requests for more words from the Professor. One strange…
There was a discussion at a recent Skeptics in the Pub night in London about the old stereotype of scientists being crazy old men with beards. While one of our interviewees was not particularly old or crazy, he ticked the third box very nicely. It’s no longer a stereotype worth sticking to, given the vast…
We had a nice mention on the BBC News website today, in a great article by Jason Palmer on science and Web 2.0 and the various methods researchers are using to meet each other, look for relevant information and maybe also meet potential partners (I doubt labs would ban match.com, would they?) Here’s the relevant…
It’s not easy for any large gathering of people to almost completely bypass the interweb these days but the conference I attended last Thursday seemed to have achieved the anonymity MI6 spies could only dream of. Sure, there are thousands of conferences (in the real world and online) that go on daily in this city…
We had a long discussion this morning about beta blockers. Beta blockers are drugs used to treat various heart-related conditions but particular arrhythmias (when your heart, instead of boom boom, goes boomdiddyboomdebopbipbop or something equally alarming), high blood pressure and angina. They work by inhibiting different classes of so-called adrenergic receptors: the trans-membrane collections of…
Our colleagues flew in to the Windy City this week for the Society of Neuroscience annual meeting and spoke to some of the fine graduate students who created poster presentations being displayed at the Chicago event. University of Minnesota’s Aaron Overland was one of the lucky group picked for an interview about his presentation –…
I was at the Internet Librarian International on Thursday and Friday of last week. Not the sort of conference I’m used to attending but as we were sponsoring it we had a speaking slot, and I seemed the obvious choice! Rather than talk about f1000 or give a ‘corporate’ presentation I talked about the Journal…
