Let’s move the debate from an earlier thread in a different direction, as I am getting a bit bored by that discussion. By the way, for those keeping score, Dr. Condic’s response to the editorial in question was published in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience, and went live today. Read more
The physics community already has theirs. Now biology has its own site dedicated to the informal discussion of unpublished results. A new site launched this week, Nature Precedings, allows scientists to upload unpublished manuscripts while they are under consideration at a journal, perhaps inciting conversation and feedback regarding the work even before the article is accepted. In this day and age of caution and paranoia surrounding results (go to any scientific meeting these days and count the number of presentations that focus on published results vs. those that highlight unpublished ones), how do you think this will impact the neuroscience and publishing communities? Read more
Enough with the cranes already! Richard Powers’s 2006 novel The Echo Maker, a National Book Award winner, is a great book to take to the beach (or the bench while the PCR machine is running), even if it is about 100 pages too long. Read more
TV’s Mr. Wizard, Don Herbert, died yesterday. He was the first (and favorite) science teacher for several generations of children. He will be greatly missed. Read more
“One is 95 percent certainty, and the other is…50 percent and a feather” … Read more
If you could look into a crystal ball to find out how your life ends, would you? Yesterday, James Watson (yes, that James Watson) decided that he didn’t want to know. His personal genome was sequenced by 454 Life Sciences and the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Watson will make his entire genome publicly available with the exception of one gene: apolipoprotein E, the gene most strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease, which killed his grandmother. Read more
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