All I want from Santa…

One year in high school I was a ‘secret Santa’, where I was anonymously responsible for getting presents for another person. Last year in the NPG office we had a gift exchange where people randomly got silly things and then we played an elaborate game to decide who got what. There are many kinds of these little holiday adventures, yet none to do with science. Why not?  Read more

The Sceptical Twitterer?

One of the most frequent questions I am asked at conferences is ‘what do you do all day?’ It’s always hard to envision what someone else’s job is like; this is probably particularly true with me because I’m outside of the ‘normal’ scientific careers of academia and industry. I thought one simple way to try to tell you all what my day is like would be to give you a blow-by-blow account. So, here goes! Hope it’s not too boring…  … Read more

Sugar Daddy: Like sleeping with an elephant

Posted on behalf of Sugar Daddy, with a nod to Andy’s recent post As a fifth-year chemical biology graduate student, I sometimes wonder if I’ll know when I’ve been in grad school too long. Maybe I’ll want to finish that last project, or start something anew to pass along to a new student. Maybe a personal life decision is playing a factor in my wanting to leave now or stay longer. Maybe I look around at group meeting and realize that free pizza once per week isn’t as great as it used to be, partially because I know what everyone  … Read more

Explain it to me

As we finish up our 4th volume over at Nature Chemical Biology, we’ve been thinking about new ideas for the journal and new ways to follow up on some old ideas. We’ve also been getting some feedback recently that our decision letters (the ‘reject’, ‘accept’, or ‘somewhere in between’ emails) aren’t as clear as they could be. Our editorial this month tries to shed some light on this issue, but I also thought I would ask you guys a few questions:  … Read more

System requirements

Our November issue is out, and it’s a focus on chemical systems biology. My colleague Joanne points out that, from cell phones to social networking and even to Nature Network, life is increasingly interconnected. Thus, this focus issue highlights how networks are coming to chemical biology – and chemists to systems biology.  Read more

The science scoop

I was just over reading this blog + comments at Nature Network which was discussing whether science could ever achieve the kind of coverage and interest that sports do. About halfway through the comments, I ran into this statement from Stephen Curry about why sports are more compelling than science:  … Read more

Look my way

I’ve been chatting with some friends these last couple of days, and we’ve developed a new* theory that could generally be applied to chemistry/chemists, so I thought I’d share. The idea is that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who know things and those who look things up. The first category also includes the subgroup ‘people who don’t know anything but pretend that they do’ (which is a topic for another day).  Read more

You put your left hand in…

For those of you who don’t know, today is International Lefthanders Day. Hooray! A celebration of chirality if there ever was one. I wonder: if we were made with D-amino acids instead of L, would left-handers be righties and vice versa? If we met aliens, would it blow our minds more if they looked just like us or if we figured out that they were just like us except made of D-amino acids? What if you found your alien doppelgänger and you measured your optical rotation and it was exactly opposite? Even worse, what if it wasn’t opposite?! Would it mean that one of you had some crystallographic impurities??  Read more