We notice that Children’s Hospital is tweeting its own horn about coming in as No. 7 in a ranking of the best academic institutions for researchers to work. According to a survey by The Scientist trade newspaper, Children’s came in right after The Trudeau Institute of Sarnac Lake, New York.

(As the accompanying article put it, “among the winners of this year’s survey are few places that don’t automatically spring to mind as hot beds of research.”)

We don’t see any other tweets from Boston area hospitals, probably because only one other — Mass General — made the top 40 list. Maybe the folks over there thought coming in at No. 29 was nothing to chirp about.

Oddly, respondents listed “job satisfaction” as a weakness at both institutions. So, it’s clear best doesn’t mean most satisfying in this case. “Tenure and promotion,” which were also listed as weaknesses must not factor in. The survey found that “peers” and “management and policies” were cited as strong points at both institutions.

Click here to read about the methodology, which included a web survey and email to Scientist readers. The results were based on about 2,300 responses.

Agricultural research needs to focus more on making farming sustainable, including looking at its effects on water use and the social and economic impacts on farmers lives, and not just on increasing food production, a report recommends.

The report from the National Academies’ National Research Council published yesterday says federal and state agricultural R&D programmes should “aggressively” fund research on sustainable farming practices, such as crop rotation and integrated livestock and crop production, to ensure future food demands are met.

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Bees may seem a surprising choice as a monitoring tool. But their sensitivity to chemicals has made some scientists big fans.

The buzzing, pollen-loving insects have been utilised for potential bomb detectors at airport, landmine seekers, and pollution monitors.

Using living organisms to test environmental health is known as bio-monitoring, and it dates back to the classic canary-in-a-coal-mine trick. Now the New York Times has a nice story on how the Düsseldorf International Airport and seven other airports are using bees to monitor air quality.

If plants have been exposed to toxins, that would show up in the nectar and any subsequent honey from bees that visit the flowers. By keeping hives near an airport, you should have a natural accumulator of any pollutants.

The first batch of this year’s honey harvest from some 200,000 airport bees was tested in early June, and indicated that substances such as certain hydrocarbons and heavy metals were far below official limits.

Local bee-keepers keep the bees, bottling up the honey – Düsseldorf Natural – which was comparable to honey produced in areas without any industrial activity and can be gifted, reports the Times.

Image: photo by MB Jarrosak via Flickr under creative commons.

Who’d ever have believed people would queue for science? But queue-they-do for the monthly Lates evening at the Science Museum. Tonight’s event will be no exception as curious adults wait in line for a chance to tour the museum’s treasures with live music, wine and NO CHILDREN.

This month’s theme matches up to the venue’s new gallery, which focuses on genetics, neurobiology and how these lead to our sense of identity. (Keep an eye out for a table full of knitted people – members of Stitch London, including my wife, have crafted woollen versions of themselves for the exhibition.)

Expect games, quizzes, voice-altering gizmos, face-morphing gadgets, few tourists and, did I say it already?, NO KIDS. The fun and games start at 6.45pm and last till 10pm. Entrance is free.

Today’s dose examines a novelist suffering from a mysterious neurological ailment.

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Just a few years ago, researchers rarely identified industry sponsors of their clinical trials.

But when these conflicts of interest began to emerge, so did questions of bias. Now, as one critic puts it, we have “an orgy of disclosure.”

So, it was a bit surprising to see the reaction to a piece in last week’s issue of the

Annals of Internal Medicine suggesting corporate sponsorship may have introduced bias in the Jupiter study., That study concluded that statins are effective for primary prevention of heart attacks in patients with normal cholesterol but high CRP levels.

In a story in The Heart Wire on the flap, PI Paul Ridker of Brigham and Women’s Hospital notes that his corporate sponsorship is well known and that BWH owns the patent for the CRP test in question.

This is one of the most independent trials ever done. We had a truly independent DSMB, totally independent statisticians, and we structured this trial to be completely independent of the company.’

He also charged critics with “going after” Rory Collins, who chaired the data monitoring committee.

In the same story, Dr Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic stood up for Ridker and Collins, calling the critical AIM paper “troubling and, frankly, offensive…” The authors, he said “spend much of their paper impugning the integrity” of Ridker and Collins.

Another website, CardioBrief, described two of the paper’s authors as member of “obscure, cult-like group of cholesterol skeptics.”

So, NNB checked in with the local author on the paper, John Abramson. He is not a member of the “cult” but is a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and the author of the 2008 Book Overdosed America.

He said no one should take personal offense when researchers raise questions about conflicts of interest.

I think it’s a smoke screen to cover up the real issue in the article that we wrote in the AIM, which is that the numbers that were reported in the NEJM don’t add up.

He believes an independent analysis of all of the data would answer many of the questions he and his group raise. But, that data is not available.

Data from commercially sponsored trials is treated as proprietary information, like the recipe for Coke. … That’s a major problem. .. Even though this data is privately owned, it functions as a public good in society. It is going to command public funds and it is going to dictate how people are treated. .. This trial is so important that the researchers and the sponsors, in good faith, ought to open up the data to independent analysis. I don’t mean just the calculated data— I mean the case reports from the individuals who had adverse events in the study. It’s like having a corporate financial report that the corporation doesn’t allow to be audited independently

He also notes that he’s not a member of the cholesterol skeptics group like his co-authors and believes that statins are useful.

I think people who have heart disease benefit from taking a statins… Statins also appear to benefit very high risk men who don’t have heart disease…… They certainly can’t paint all of us with the same brush.