Lindau – it’s a wrap

Interviews with Nobel Prize winners can’t fail to be interesting and over the last few weeks we have been bringing to your attention a collection of Nature Videos capturing some of the unique discussions between Nobel Laureates and students. These personal mentoring sessions are at the heart of the Lindau experience, where young scientific minds can question the already accomplished. Nature Video filmed these sessions and has been releasing a new video each week, giving us a glimpse into these exclusive conversations. This week, tying in with a Nature Outlook special, Nature Video released the very last video in their collection. You can watch the video below, but do check out our wrap up post, the multimedia grand finale, where you can find links to Lindau-related content and the official Lindau Blog.

With the Nobel prizes still fresh in everyone’s thoughts, Scitable blogger Eric Sawyer can’t help but wonder when synthetic biology will be called to Stockholm:

Scanning the list of physiology or medicine prizes (presumably the nearest fit for synthetic biology), you find lots of discoveries about basic biology mixed in with practical medical inventions like CAT scanners and in vitro fertilization. Does synthetic biology, which isn’t shy about its fundamentally engineering-centric methods, have what it takes to make it to Stockholm?

Find out Eric’s thoughts and let us know what you think. Leave your opinion in his comment thread.

Peer review

This week, Tom Webb has been discussing the efficiency of the peer review system. In his post, Memory in peer review: déjà vu all over again, he discusses how there are always periodic debates about the efficacy of the current system for ensuring the quality of the published scientific record:

…. two related topics that come up time and again are the lack of repeatability (or consistency), and the lack of memory. Simply put, the opinions of two or three people constitute a very small sample of the sum of expertise on the subject, so the selection of reviewers can become critical in deciding whether or not a paper is accepted. And a piece of work that gets panned (even for serious technical flaws) in review for one journal, can be submitted, unchanged, to another – and (given a new pair of reviewers) may sneak in with the flaw unspotted on this second occasion.

What do you think about the current system? Read on to find out Tom’s personal experience and do feel free to join in his growing comment thread.

Talent?

After 1.5 years of blogging, Eric-Wubbo Lameijer is offering up his high-level view on his current understanding of scientific talent: it must incorporate the following:

Find out more in his post and how you can use this as a check list.

Guest post

Ever wanted to know what it’s like to be a surgeon? You can find out about engineering improvements in surgical technologies in this week’s guest post from Dr Pete Culmer, a Senior Translational Research Fellow in the School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds:

One interesting area we’re looking at is how human tissue can be damaged by surgical tools – and how we can help prevent it. In laparoscopy, organs and tissues are manipulated by grasping them with plier-like tools. However, the tools are on long levers (the chopsticks) which pass through the abdominal wall and their mechanisms are affected by friction – factors which make it extremely difficult for the surgeon to ‘feel’ and regulate the forces that they apply to the tissue. This can result in tissue damage through excessive force, like getting a bruise but with potentially far more serious consequences for the patient. So we need to understand how the damage is caused; how much force is too much and how long a ‘grasp’ is too long.

PODCAST: Medicinephilia

The Spoonful of Medicine have been alerting us to their monthly podcast, where they speak to the Icelandic musician Björk about her new science-themed album Biophilia and explore new treatments for tuberculosis, tumor-induced seizure and MRSA. Listen below or subscribe to the show through iTunes.

Congratulations

Thanks to everyone who participated in Nature Chemistry’s writing competition! Reporting in the Sceptical Chymist blog Anne Pichon reveals that judging the essays was no easy task:

We were delighted to receive so many entries (almost 100 in total). Some elements – copper and nitrogen in particular – proved more popular than others, but all seven elements up for grabs were well represented, we had fun reading the essays, and we learned some quirky anecdotes in the process (I shall share these in future posts). Believe me, the judging was by no means easy.

You can check out a list of the winners here and Nature Chemistry will also publish the winning essays throughout the next few months as part of the regular ‘in your element’ feature, so keep your eyes peeled.

News

Paige Brown has been asking how can we govern science with the News:

Why can’t the media help citizens to make informed decisions on science policy, funding, and where we go next as far as practical scientific innovations? Hold scientists accountable for communicating their work to the public? Help citizens to understand scientific and science policy debates, so that science policy and funding is not at the whim of a few non-scientific politicians with institutional agendas?

Do we need more scientists in the media? What do you think?

Barbara Ferreira is learning a lot in her new job, and in her latest post she discusses what is and what isn’t newsworthy. She wants to know what it is about a news story that can make it sell:

But as with every rule, there are exceptions. Some stories make it to the newspapers simply because they allow journalists and editors to come up with titles like this one: “Comette family home damaged by egg-sized meteorite.” Go ahead, read the Guardian article, you know you are curious. A meteorite fell on the Comette home, what are the odds? There it is: the certain je ne sais quoi that makes this a newsworthy story.

Do you think catchy titles help to sell news? Feel free to leave your thoughts.

Black Death

The News blog have revealed that bones uncovered in a medieval burial pit used to inter victims of the Black Death, have yielded the first genome sequence of an ancient bacterial pathogen, the bubonic plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis:

_The draft genome sequence, published online today in Nature, follows the publication of a short loop of Y. pestis DNA called the PCP1 plasmid from the same remains. That paper as well as a 2010 study that sequenced short stretches of Y. pestis DNA from different Black Death victims confirmed that bubonic plague was involved in one of history’s worst pandemics._

You can find out more in their report.

Angry Birds

Finally Viktor Poor, in his latest cartoon, shows us what it would be like if the Angry Birds (from that addictive iphone game played by almost everyone at some point) were to develop biological warfare: