Thanks to everyone who voted in our first roundup of the top blogs from NN, the very best of 2007’s posts. Please do go and add your vote if you haven’t already. Picking the choice cuts for 2008 was even harder, with many new writers and a surge of brilliance from the established bloggers. As with the 2007 selection, our picks are highly subjective, so feel free to add links to your own favourite posts in the comments.
The best of 2008 picks:
If only I’d had a magic results machine in 1836…
Charles Darwin’s blog
Nature Network’s first ‘celebrity blogger’ came in the form of Mr Charles Darwin, miraculously recalled to life and introduced to the internet. Darwin’s posts offer a 19th Century perspective on modern science and technology, as here where he laments the lack of factual programming on the telebox:
Contrary to what some ill-informed people think I am no eugenicist, but I do wish the parents of the scriptwriters for The Big Bang Theory had been hosed down with cold water when they got jiggy, as one would do with dogs mating in one’s garden, to avoid the children asking embarrassing questions. (My grasp of modern idiom is coming along well, I feel.)
Expression Patterns – Eva Amsen
Over the years, we’ve seen many posts from NN bloggers in the midst of a change in career direction. Such a defining moment in life was recounted by Eva, who blogged about her final day in the lab before pinning up her white coat for good. Despite the slings and arrows of bench work, Eva will miss some of the oft-forgotten perks:
But where else do you get so much freedom in making your own schedule? Where else is the work ethic so high that everybody accepts that there is no overpay for inevitable weekends and late hours? Where else do you get paid to learn? Where else do you share a workplace with people of such a wide variety of nationalities and backgrounds?
In which work follows me on holiday
Mind the Gap – Jennifer Rohn
For Jenny, science never sleeps – not even when she’s sitting on a Colorado riverbank trying to catch trout. Her reverie wanders between the river and the lab bench, leading her to question whether there are as many variables in an organised row of Eppendorfs as in the flux of an ‘icy, milky-green stream’:
I considered a hypothetical row of twenty-four Eppendorf tubes, each filled with the same substance and treated in batch. Could these tests really be considered to be exactly comparable? I might have pipetted more carefully into the first few tubes but grown more lax and cavalier by the end of the row, or a 37-degree heat block might not provide the exact incubation temperature in each of its wells, or there might be variability in the composition of the mass-produced plastic tubes. We might think we are being careful, but it is probably impossible to treat a control in the same way as an experimental sample.
rENNISance woman – Cath Ennis
Jenny isn’t the only one who mixes science and recreation. In this post, Cath presents her horticultural travails in the form of a brief communication to the (alas) hypothetical journal Nature Gardening.
The Solanum lycopersicum plants naturally selected by subjection to gravity/impact and Darwinian gardening stresses not only survived the two periods of drought, but produced ripe fruit (Figure 1). Fruit was semi-quantitatively assayed for tastiness and pronounced “pretty good, actually” and “are you kidding, it’s bloody delicious” (n=1, assay performed simultaneously by two independent investigators). Score was found to show a positive correlation with the amount of effort expended by each investigator.
Nothing’s Shocking – Noah Gray
Noah relates an experience familiar to anyone who has presented a poster at a scientific conference: the paparazzi. It’s increasingly common for interested parties to take a cheeky photo of a poster. Should the author be flattered at the attention, or worried?
What if scientists start taking matters into their own hands…and began to post data collected through camera-based espionage on public servers, just to get the information out into the public, providing them with a source to cite when analyzing the data on their own? …Researchers may begin to conduct their own analysis of others’ data, providing their own spin and interpretation. Currently, a server like Nature Precedings does not allow such third-party submissions of data, but if an individual wanted to make data harvested from a meeting public, there are plenty of options.