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The science journalism game of whispers
I’ve been hopping around the lab like a short order cook on the line for lunch hour*, but I can’t resist noting the degeneration of Higgs Boson headlines: The real scoop, at Scientific American: In...
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Former climate skeptic finally catches up to current science
LA Times: Koch-funded climate change skeptic reverses course WASHINGTON – The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause....
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Love art? Love science? Read The Age of Insight
Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel’s book about “The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present” will keep you busy. It’s stuffed with...
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Pursue ignorance, learn science
Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. – Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner Dr. Stewart Firestein, a...
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ENCODE Decodes the genome… but how much is functional?
The latest round of ENCODE papers are out, accessible via a handy ENCODE explorer gateway at Nature. I know what I’ll be doing for the next week. Stay tuned for more Finch & Pea coverage of what...
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Genome PR is OK
There was some criticism of this video out there, but I liked it. Given how little attention the average news reader/online browser is going to devote to genomics, I think this kind of thing is just...
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Life versus the molecular storm
Richard Feynman put it best: “Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not...
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ScienceOnline: More than a conference
The Finch & Pea would not exist as you know it today if it were not for ScienceOnline. Mike and I liked the pub idea, but also realized that a pub with only two people in it – no matter how...
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That, sir, is “craftism”; and “craftism” is wrong
On Wednesday, 16 January 2013, a group of intellectuals engaged in a legendary debate on the validity of “glitter” as an art supply, particularly as it related to science communication and science art....
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Retraction rate increases with impact factor – is this because of...
Folks have long noted the strong positive correlation between high impact factor and retraction rate. There are three primary theories I’ve run across that attempt explain why Nature, Science, Cell,...
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Giving credit where credit is due
Earlier this week, the very popular Facebook science outreach site, I Fucking Love Science, came under fire for its seemingly systematic use of copyrighted material from a variety of artists without...
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Online journals have not made publication dates irrelevant…
So why is it so hard to find the pub date in the HTML view of PLoS papers? The date needs immediately visible to be somewhere in this space: BTW, this is not my paper – it’s by the other, much more...
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Academics on the Internets
Via Scott Esposito, I read David Parry on why academics should write more for the general public: Meanwhile, the general public perceives faculty members as isolated from reality, holding cushy jobs,...
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Evolution and Gene Regulation in Chicago
Happening at the U of Chicago today is the ASBMB meeting “Evolution and Core Processes in Gene Regulation”. The attendees here are an eclectic mix of evolutionary geneticists, systems biologists,...
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Since when is cancer not caused by mutation?
I feel a major rant about epigenetics coming on… must hold it back until a more convenient time. But I can’t refrain from commenting on just how wrong this is: “We used to think that cancer was caused...
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…but my business cards are “cool”
One Version of My Business Cards (Art by Jill Powell; Used With Permission) It’s true. They are. They are those trendy small ones. They have a QR code. And, most importantly, they have original, The...
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We still don’t know why children resemble their parents
Back in May, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch held a mother-daughter look alike contest. In their write-up of the results, they turned to a geneticist, Barak Cohen, for some expert commentary on why...
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Please don’t blindly follow PopSci’s lead and get rid of comment spaces
Originally posted by Marie-Claire on her home blog, Boundary Vision. Reposted here with permission, because EXACTLY. A tiny explosion happened in the online science communication world yesterday....
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Reach out and grab some cash
I use twitter primarily to keep up with what’s new and newsworthy in science and science communication. It’s a great tool to quickly catch up on new discoveries or controversies. It also can expose...
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Pinker explains why academics can’t write
Ahead of tomorrow’s release of Steven Pinker’s new book on writing, The Chronicle features a teaser essay – “Why Academics’ Writing Stinks”: An insight from literary analysis and an insight from...
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