Grant Jacobs • Nov 03, 2011 •
Trust science, not scientists says the title of an article written by virologist Professor Vincent Racanielo. It’s a great line. Vincent Racanielo was writing in the context of the continued saga over proposals of a link between the mouse XMRV virus (xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). My interest … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Oct 27, 2011 •
Yay! There’s going to be some happy science historians, including amateur ones. (And just plain ol‘ scientists, too.) Readers who have followed this blog for some time, might recall me writing about the Royal Society of London opening it’s full collection for a period in 2010. The Royal Society website has … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Aug 24, 2011 •
In January 2009, Ian Sample, a science correspondent writing for the Guardian opened an article writing, Charles Darwin's "tree of life", which shows how species are related through evolutionary history, is wrong and needs to be replaced, according to leading scientists. The great naturalist first sketched how species might evolve along branches of … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Aug 15, 2011 •
Bioinformatics researchers, managers and consultants may like to know that the long-running EMBnet news has expanded to become a peer-reviewed journal, EMBnet.journal. The first issue is now out and has a focus on next generation sequencing data analysis. Readers can download the individual papers or the whole issue. RSS tracking is … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Aug 08, 2011 •
(Particularly for those interested in science writing.) Some time ago I wrote about a local study surveying errors of fact and logic in media reports about immunisation. Also some time ago, attracting a little fuss on the same topic, was a study in PLoS One, arguing that misrepresentations in the conclusions and summaries of … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Jun 30, 2011 •
Over at Occam’s Typewriter[1] Frank has written introducing an initiative by The Wellcome Trust, the Max Planck Society and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to launch a new top-tier open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. Frank has most of the news, so I won’t repeat it, but to add that there is … Read More
Grant Jacobs • May 30, 2011 •
I lead off from Carl Zimmer relating how on-line conversation played a role in ’the arsenic bacteria’ publication as an excuse to muse about post-publication peer review. Reading Carl Zimmer’s update on the ‘arsenic bacteria’ story in Slate last night, while writing my own update, I encountered again the phrase ‘post publication … Read More
Grant Jacobs • May 20, 2011 •
Last tonight I was browsing Occam’s Typewriter, one of my favourite science blogging collectives.[1] Frank’s article, The challenge of going beyond, leads off from two people independently remarking to him that they thought that electronic journals have resulted the loss of serendipity in their reading. The article and comments are well worth reading; I encourage my … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Apr 01, 2011 •
I have previously written about the origins of bioinformatics as a field, starting by reposting an article I wrote in 2002, The Mythology of Bioinformatics, and subsequently introducing the first and second articles in the Roots of Bioinformatics series published in PLoS Computational Biology. A third article in the series,* The Roots of Bioinformatics in Theoretical … Read More
Grant Jacobs • Mar 19, 2011 •
I’d rather be reading, so in a round-about sort of way I’m offering you some ancient reading so that I might excuse myself to do my own (more modern) reading. [caption id="attachment_6039" align="aligncenter" width="640"] From Brunschwig's Liber de Arte Distillande[/caption] … Read More