Should I bother with a promotion?

In the latest Nature Jobs “Ask the Expert” post, one reader asks resident career strategist Deb Koen whether seeking a promotion should be a priority:

Question: I’m a senior research scientist in industry. I am well respected for my research contributions, but am under increasing pressure to seek opportunities for promotion — which requires vast amounts of complicated paperwork. I have always focused totally on my lab work and, when I am the team leader, on my team. The lab is where I thrive and where I most help the company. I could stay on the same track with a promotion, but I don’t want to take the time to seek one, and I have never been one to boast shamelessly about my accomplishments. Must I attend to these diversions?

Deb’s answer will be published later today and a full list of past ask the expert Q&As can be found here in their careers toolkit.

Tuberculosis prevention may speed drug resistance

A study published this week in Science Translational Medicine illustrates the perverse choice that public-health experts must sometimes make between preventing a disease and preserving the effectiveness of a treatment. Amy Maxmen explains in the News Blog that when it comes to tuberculosis, the report finds that prophylaxis comes with a higher cost than previously recognized:

The main ingredient in the drug cocktail to cure tuberculosis (TB), isoniazid, can also protect people from contracting the disease in the first place. This second function is particularly important for those with fragile immune systems who frequently acquire and die from tuberculosis. In sub-Saharan Africa, tuberculosis  is the leading cause of death among HIV-infected individuals. To curb this fate, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends isoniazid as a preventive therapy for patients with HIV that don’t already show signs of active tuberculosis.

However, according to the new study, led by Harriet Mills at the University of Bristol, in communities that implement isoniazid preventive therapy (IPT), the incidence of new isoniazid-resistant cases per year will double in the next 40 years.

Further details can be found in Amy’s post. 

Indigenous shrimp brood stock to boost exports

Subhra Priyadarshini explains in the Indigenus Blog how India released a specific pathogen free variety of shrimp for commercial aquaculture this week. This promises to help marginal shrimp farmers and boost seafood exports from India:

The brood stock of  the shrimp in question – Litopenaeus vannamei –  have been developed for the first time in India by the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Aquaculture (RGCA) in Tamil Nadu. These can now be supplied to hatchery operators at competitive prices, according to a government release. These selectively bred mother shrimps can produce high quality shrimp seed that grow fast and survive well in commercial shrimp farms in India.

Find out how this project will help Indian farmers in Subhra’s post.

How multidisciplinary work was made meaningful for me

In this week’s Soapbox Science post, Cambridge scientist Dr Gianni Lo Iacono gives his personal perspective on interdisciplinary research:

Now, I am a strong advocate of the old-fashioned, reductionist approach. Accordingly, any complex scientific problem should be broken down into its basic building blocks.  Of course nature doesn’t care about our traditional compartmental division of science and therefore there is no reason to think that the building blocks must belong to one and only one discipline.

Working on a multidisciplinary research programme has reinforced such a view.  The programme, theDynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium, is considering the links between disease, ecosystems and wellbeing, and doing this by exploring the drivers behind four zoonotic diseases in five African countries, involving research by both natural and social scientists from various disciplines.

Learn more about Dr Gianni Lo Iacono’s research in his guest post. 

Exoplanet satellite gets the nod from NASA

Alexandra Witze reveals in the News Blog how a suite of cameras that will scan the skies for exoplanets moved closer to reality on 5 April, when NASA chose it for launch in 2017 under the agency’s Astrophysics Explorer programme:

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for small planets passing in front of, and temporarily blocking the light of, nearby bright stars. It will be the first space-based mission that hunts such planetary transits over most of the sky; earlier satellites such as CoRoT and Kepler had more limited fields of view.

“On average, TESS target stars will be about ten times closer than are the Kepler target stars,” says the mission’s principal investigator, George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. That means the TESS stars will be brighter than Kepler stars, and easier to follow up on any tantalizing hints.

More information about TESS can be found in Alexandra’s post.

What’s Your Science Maturity Level?

Guest blogger Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, suggests a numerical scale that we can use to describe scientific talks:

This scale is not meant to weigh the overall quality of a talk, only to resolve some of the tension between those who prefer solid conclusions and those who enjoy more nebulous forecasting.  The first steps are about development of an idea by an individual scientist or research group; the last steps are about the acceptance of the idea by the community.

You can find this scale in Marc’s post and feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment thread.

3D-printed material has tissue-like properties

Elie Dolgin details in the Spoonful of Medicine Blog, a rubbery material made using a three-dimensional printer can transmit electrical signals and mechanically fold like biological tissue in predictable ways:

The work, published in this week’s issue of Science by researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, could pave the way for tissue engineering, controlled drug release technologies or other medical applications.

The rise of autism awareness in the Arab world

For decades children in many rural -and sometimes urban – areas across the Arab world were thought to have been touched by black magic or the ‘evil eye’ when they started to exhibit poor social skills or impaired communication. In recent years, these symptoms are being recognized as those of autism and autistic spectrum disorders, as Mohammed Yahia explains in the House of Wisdom Blog:

 Thousands of cases that would have gone unreported are now being diagnosed early enough for successful intervention. Many physicians have also set up organizations to increase awareness among doctors and parents to aid in early diagnosis. One of the earliest such efforts is The Egyptian Autistic Society – which has for over a decade been a place parents can turn to if they suspect their child may be autistic.

More recent efforts sprung up in the Gulf States, such as the Doha-based Shafallah Centre which won first place in the European Union’s Chaillot Award in 2011. Dubai is home to the Dubai Autism Center and in 2007 neighbouring Abu Dhabi signed an agreement with the New England Center for Children (NECC) in Massachusetts, United States, to bring autism research and cutting edge treatments to the United Arab Emirates. The Autism Research and Treatment (ART) Center at the King Saud University in Saudi Arabia is also offering basic research in autism – a first in the region.

It will take a consorted effort to address autism in the Arab world, just like anywhere else in the world.

Can we raise woolly mammoths from their Pleistocene graves?

Thousands of years after the last woolly mammoth died, some bioengineers dream of resurrecting the species – but is it possible? Freelance science writer Sharon Levy investigates in a special Soapbox Science post cross-posted from the OUP blog:

Still, it’s now theoretically possible to create a pseudo-mammoth. This could be done by taking the genome of an Asian elephant, the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth, and splicing some sequences of mammoth DNA into it. This hybrid DNA could be inserted into an elephant sperm cell, which could then be used to artificially inseminate a female elephant. If the embryo developed and was carried to term, a mammoth-like animal would be born. This is a big ‘if’, because elephant reproduction is slow and complex. Even in efforts to clone living animals, there are often multiple abortions before a live infant is born. And those babies often don’t live long.

Why we need to do so much paperwork 

Good news! SciLogs blogger Viktor Poór is back after being struck with the bloggers blues. His latest cartoon is inspired by his life:

…nowadays we have spend more and more time with paperwork. So I started my little investigation: