Is conference Twitter a good thing?
Attending a large conference is often accompanied by a flurry of excitement – daily news releases, early access to abstracts, lanyards and conference bags suddenly becoming ubiquitous citywide. Read more
Attending a large conference is often accompanied by a flurry of excitement – daily news releases, early access to abstracts, lanyards and conference bags suddenly becoming ubiquitous citywide. Read more
The image was taken at 05:11 on the 10 February 2016, exposure time four seconds. Jupiter is in greyscale but it is beautiful nevertheless. Although the picture is static, everything about it suggests movement. Pale and dark bands run across the planet’s surface and merge; swirling like oil on water, like the grain in wood. To the bottom left, Ganymede – Jupiter’s largest moon – is visible. Read more
The 2017 Better Science through Better Data conference, held in October, was revealing and eye-opening in more ways than one. Lightning talks and keynote speeches by speakers from the global scientific community highlighted the mosaic of data sharing protocols, policies and success stories. Even more interesting than the talks were the people giving them – spirited contributions by researchers, programmers, publishers, law experts and data managers highlighted how different professionals occupy their own niches in the open data world and help the community to grow. Read more
The 2017 Better Science through Better Data event in London, UK, hosted by Springer Nature and Wellcome, was a full day exposé of emerging open data practices, tools, strategies, and policies. Among the potential benefits of open data are replicability, reproducibility, and reusability. While open data is a relatively new hype, some evidence suggests that open data does indeed increase reproducibility. Read more
It is becoming increasingly clear that the current method of publishing scientific findings does not make the most of the vast amounts of data generated during scientific investigation. The message from the #SciData17 conference, held in London on the 25th of October, was that making data, code and detailed methods openly available will increase reproducibility, decrease redundancy and allow scientific discovery to advance at a faster pace. Funding bodies and journals are taking steps to encourage this kind of open research policy, and the decision to release datasets usually sits with lab heads or PIs, but there is a place for bottom-up change from students and postdocs too. Read more
Today, the Protein Data Bank houses over 130,000 structures of proteins and nucleic acids — the molecules that constitute life. In this carefully curated and indexed database, users can browse entries and examine the three-dimensional arrangement of the atoms that make up life’s molecular machines. The shapes can help scientists from various fields to make informed guesses about their functions, formulate hypotheses and research questions, and explain and connect observations. Read more
In today’s cut-throat world of grants and publications, being an early career researcher (ECR) can feel more than a little daunting. As an ECR myself, I can’t guarantee that this will help you make it to the other side unscathed. But I’m still here, and if you’re reading this, you probably are too. Outlined below are the things I’ve learnt during the ups and downs of post-PhD life. Read more
As a global population we are generating more data than ever before. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that by 2020 over 80 million gigabytes of data will be produced every minute. Each second, the world will generate enough data for a 50-year-long Netflix binge. Scientific investigation is a big part of that: every day huge amounts of data are generated on everything from the behaviour of supernovae to the 3D structure of proteins in the brain. When the world’s largest radio telescope comes online in 2020, it alone will produce 180,000 gigabytes of data a minute. Read more
Better Science through Better Data writing competition winner Anastasia Greenberg … Read more