Pondering the PhD

This week’s issue of Nature included a special feature on the Seven Ages of the PhD where seven scientists reminisce about their PhDs. To tie in with this theme and continuing our mini-series on science education, we interviewed seven current PhD students from the NPG family of bloggers (who blog on Nature Network, Scitable or SciLogs). We asked each of them the same seven questions about their experiences, hoping to learn more about what a science PhD involves and if it lives up to expectations, as well as some top tips for managing heavy workloads. You can read each student’s answers here: Student 1 (Richard Williams), Student 2 (Paige Brown), Student 3 (MuKa), Student 4 (Rogue), Student 5 (Ian Fyfe), Student 6 and Student 7 (Marcel S. Pawlowski).

Our interviews link nicely with a live Q&A with Maresi Nerad, the author of, Toward a Global PhD?: Changes in Doctoral Education Worldwide. The focus of the online event was the future of the PhD, giving consideration to the problems with the science PhD and whether it needs reinvention. You can read a summary of the Q & A on NPG’s The Great Beyond Blog. Finally, for those who are interested in finding out more, Nature also has a survey of graduate students’ job satisfaction, salary and career intentions, which you can fill out here.

Continuing this theme, blogger Andrew Sun has been revealing his own thoughts on the topic of too many PhDs, as well as considering education in China.

Too many PhD, too many papers, too many journals, and too much money spent on science… these are all heated topics in recent years but just the side effects of too much science.

Super SoNYC

This week saw the inaugural Science Online NYC (SoNYC) event that took place on Wednesday 20th April at Rockefeller University. The event was also streamed live, catering for those who were unable to attend. The aim of SoNYC is to provide an interactive forum for a lively debate, with an expert panel and audience questions. SoNYC will become a regular monthly discussion evening, hosted by nature.com and Ars Technica. This month’s topic focused on how we can communicate controversial scientific topics and seemed to raise an interesting dialogue, percolating into the online world. Everyone had a super SoNYC evening and, for those who were unable to attend or watch online, you can now watch the event here. Pictures from the event can be found here as well as a storify compiling all of the #sonyc tweets. Finally, if you have a burning topic that you feel would work well at a future SoNYC event, or if you would like to be a panel member, do get in touch.

SoNYC, is not the only sciencey event that takes place in New York, so, to keep up to date on other similar events specifically for those interested in science communication and publishing, we have compiled a public calendar of the latest events in New York and the surrounding areas. This calendar will be regularly updated so that the coming month contains the events that we’re aware of. Do let us know if you would like to add one to the calender, or if we are missing any events off, feel free to leave a comment.

UK events

If you are on the other side of the Atlantic in London, you can see a summary of sciencey events in Matt Brown’s London blog. He is encouraging those in the area to go to The Sci-Fi London Festival that launched on Saturday, or to take a trip to the Welcome Trust who are hosting a free event exploring the doctor-patient relationship.

Now, onto another successful event which took place at the beginning of the month: SciBarCamp. Even though it is sadly over for this year, those who attended are still revelling in its success. Blogger, Eva Amsen, who was also one of the organisers, has been giving us a summary of a talk she gave about science unconferences, starting with a bit of history and concluding with some tips on planning your own. In her second post, Organising science unconferences, she has written up some useful tips for anyone interested in arranging an unconference:

There are really only two things you need to organise an unconference:

• Location

• People

The first may be the hardest to find, but the second is the most important.

Morally right or wrong- Have your say

This week’s guest blogger is Simon Laham, PhD, a social psychologist and a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His post considers the psychology of morality, asking whether the following statement morally right or wrong. Have your say in his comment thread, or answer our poll below (results will be revealed on Friday):

Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kitten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten’s body. The kitten purrs and seems to enjoy the contact.

They did a bad thing…..

This week Nature Chemistry’s blog, The Sceptical Chymist has been discussing that when it comes to research misconduct, burying one’s head in the sand and pretending it doesn’t exist is the worst possible plan:

With human nature as it is, the only surprising thing about scientific misconduct should be that it continues to surprise us. Scientists are human, so why should we be more surprised when they behave unethically than, say, those in business or politics? Surprised or not, we should acknowledge that scientific misconduct is happening, will always happen, and probably always has happened.

Onto another debate, kicked off by Deep Thoughts and Silliness blogger, Bob O’Hara. He has revealed in his latest post that the Editors in Chief of Synthese (a philosophy of science journal that usually publishes papers with titles like “Underdetermination, realism and empirical equivalence”, and “The inverse spaceship paradox”) are saying that they published some papers, edited by two guest editors, which they now deem unsuitable.

For me, this is a pretty silly way to behave. The papers in the special issue were handled by the two guest editors (one of whom has past experience editing the journal). But the decision to accept a paper must ultimately lie with the editors in chief.

Relationship Madness

Karen Vancampenhout has been entertaining us this week with her post, She blinded me with science, which explores conversations that may arise when two scientists get married:

For instance, my husband Bart and I discussed Mohs scale and volcanogenic mineralogy when deciding on granite for our countertops: can not get scratched by any kitchen utensil known to man and won’t bulge under any amount of kitchen-generated heat.

You can read other entertaining examples in her comment thread. Now onto even stranger animal relationships: Barbara Ferreira has been discussing a penguin enamoured of a rubber boot and a swan that prefers a tractor, in her latest post that examines animal sexual behavior:

Bonaparte, a penguin at Constance’s Sea Life in southern Germany, appears to have fallen for his trainer’s rubber boots. The German newspaper The Local reports that the bird’s interest started with the beginning of the mating season, about four weeks ago.

Animals and science

Boston blogger, Tinker Ready has been revealing in her latest post an event where biologist Theodore Stankowich will answer questions about the realities of certain film scripts such as, ‘do seagulls really go berserk and attack schoolchildren?’ as they do in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. She stresses that the series only runs through the academic year, so if you don’t get to this showing, you’ll have to wait until the fall for your next chance.

From crazy seagulls, to a very Royal Insect. NPG’s The Great Beyond Blog have been revealing what ingredient makes the royal jelly so royal. A new paper published this week in Nature identifies an active component of royal jelly that is important for queen development. It endows female flies with some of the physical traits of queen bees, by acting on the same cellular pathways:

“Finding the active components of royal jelly that are important for queen development has been kind of a holy grail of insect research for decades,” says Gro Admam, an entomologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Fukushima updates

In light of the ongoing concerns at the Fukashima Plant in Japan, this week Nature published a GIS analysis looking at how many people live within certain distances of each of the world’s nuclear power plants. Some 21 plants have populations larger than 1 million within that radius, and six have populations larger than 3 million. One hundred and fifty-two nuclear power plants have more than 1 million people living within 75 kilometres. Many other insights may be obtained from the detailed data and you can see the full results in the form of a map which is best viewed using the desktop version of Google Earth — you can download the map file here. If you have any feedback on the map you can make a comment or contact at d.butler@nature.com.

Following on from this population analysis and to provide some more visual geographical context, you can see here a 3D map of the results of that analysis — with a new very high-resolution global population density Google Earth map. You can see a screenshot of the full 3-D interactive on The Great Beyond Blog.

Pay Attention!

NPG’s Spoonful of Medicine blog have been informing us that Korean scientists have identified a connection between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a small error in a specific gene. The discovery, published online this week in Nature Medicine, could pave the way for new drugs to treat ADHD, a condition that affects an estimated 5% of school-aged children, making it hard for them to learn. Several genome-wide scans had recently pointed to chromosome 17 as a hotspot for candidate genes linked to ADHD, but none of these studies had zeroed in on any specific gene targets in this region. So Eunjoon Kim and his colleagues have turned their sights to one such gene, the G protein-coupled receptor kinase-interacting protein-1 (GIT1). In this blog post you can watch a video as a GIT1 knockout mouse feverishly paces around its cage, with a normal mouse displayed in the cage below for comparison.

Meanwhile Australian blogger MuKa has been looking at the human ability to pay attention and encourages us to take an attention test – interesting results ensue, so give it a go. He also considers how attention can flounder and asks how dangerous it is to use your mobile phone whilst driving and if this also applies to talking to passengers?

I thought that using a hands-free phone whilst driving would be fine. But even these devices take attention away from driving. Does that mean carrying on a conversation with someone in the passenger seat is just as bad as using a hand-free phone?

Answers are revealed in his post.

Happy Earth Day

As well as being Easter this week, did you know it was also Earth Day on the 22nd Arpil, as Scitables Green Science Blog informs us. For those of you who are not familiar with Earth Day, it is an opportunity for people go out of their way to appreciate the earth and environment, as blogger Samantha J reveals. As all of you know, our earth is experiencing severe environmental changes, so on Earth Day millions of people try to do good deeds for the environment, such as conserving electricity and planting trees. You can also find out more about the history of Earth Day in Scitable blogger Whitney Campbell’s post.

Finally, Easter Greetings

In Hungary, the Monday following Easter is “Locsoló Hétfő,” also known as watering Monday; in the morning the boys water the girls to prevent their wilt. In light of this tradition Viktor Poór, in his latest cartoon strip, gives us a taste of this unusual Easter Monday custom in a lab: