“Today, all the research councils have committees setting up the ‘grand challenges’ for their disciplines. Personally, I think this is bullshit. Clever people will find grand challenges that other people haven’t even thought of.”

Chemist Graham Richards discuss research and commercializing research with the Guardian.

“My own story was really nothing special. I made $30,000 for the year, which is less than some of these doctors make in a weekend.”

Daniel Carlat, a psychiatry professor at Tufts University in Boston, discusses medicine’s ties to drug money with Reuters.

RIP Xiangzhong ‘Jerry’ Yang.

The man who “was born in poverty to a family of pig farmers in rural China but escaped to become a leading researcher in cloning technology” has died (LA Times).

Papers with good titles: Getting Smashed: The deposition of amphorae and the drinking of wine in Gaul during the late Iron Age.