Blogs: A bumper crop

Choosing the best blog posts of the week is always a difficult task, but this week’s selection was so outstanding that we’ve worked through several cups of tea in the process. Martin Fenner has to be up there with his excellent analysis of the relationship between scientists and librarians, and ways that the latter might better serve the former.

Stephen Curry writes eloquently (as ever) about his new fitness regime. His daily jog leads to musings about Victorian photographer (and murderer) Eadward Muybridge, who famously captured images of a galloping horse to ascertain whether it ever completely left the ground. Stephen applies the same technique to his own cantering, and then visits an exhibition about Muybridge in a London gallery.

Jennifer Rohn, as is her wont, triggers off a lengthy discussion about the frustrations of manuscript rejection and the subsequent resubmission process:

In the end, the decision was ludicrous, and was based entirely on formatting. I drew up a list of half a dozen suitable journals of about the same impact factor and made a table with three columns: word limit, figure limit, and structure (whether the Results and Discussion should be merged or separate, or whether it didn’t matter), and we just chose the journal that was most flexible – in other words, where we wouldn’t have to make cosmetic changes like cutting or rearranging words, or relegating figures to Supplementary (which would have involved having to change text on the figures, or rearranging some of the panels).

Elsewhere, astronomer Alyssa Gilbert rebuffs the notion that all stargazers like sci-fi, Ayusman Sen discusses chemistry’s image problem and Viktor Poor asks, in his popular Stripped Science cartoon, what music would viruses listen to?

Forums: Local newcomers

Nature Network’s regional forums and hubs continue to grow. This week saw the beginnings of new forums for scientists in Colorado (moderated by Kris Hite) and Cambridge (the UK one). A pub meetup is planned for the latter next month. Both are still very new, but if you’re living in one of those areas, you should join up to get the latest local science news and events.

And finally…

The past and future of Nature Network have been under the spotlight this week. We recently received our 50,000th blog comment, our third birthday is fast approaching, and the site will shortly be implementing some improvements (more on this in coming weeks). These three ideas are conflated in a much-commented blog post from the NN team.