How to Succeed in Science?

Jonathan Yewdell M.D., Ph.D. (NIH) - leading immunologist and head of NIAID Cell Biology and Viral Immunology -- delivers a grantsmanship lecture on "How to Succeed in Science".

Nasa's new trip to Mars

This animated clip shows the journey that the Curiosity mission spacecraft will take on its way to Mars.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8698252/An-explanation-of-Nasas-new-trip-to-Mars.html 

Virus can produce energy?

Authors have developed a phage-based piezoelectric generator that produces up to 6 nA of current and 400 mV of potential and use it to operate a liquid-crystal display. Because biotechnology techniques enable large-scale production of genetically modified phages, phage-based piezoelectric materials potentially offer a simple and environmentally friendly approach to piezoelectric energy generation.
For more information :  http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.69.html

 

Cyanobacteria are really the movers and shakers of the Earth

Scientists have discovered skeletons in the cyanobacterial closet. A never-before-seen species of cyanobacterium loads its cells with little bonelike lumps that may act as ballast, helping to anchor the beastie in its home waters of a Mexican lake. The discovery, described in the April 27 Science, is the first report of such a microbe creating calcified structures inside its cells, rather than externally.

For more information: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340281/description/Bony_bacteria

Scale of Universe

This is fantastic and mind boggling

Check out the link below on the scale of objects in the universe. Very fascinating!!! 

Some key points:

1. You can use the scroll bar on the bottom of the screen to zoom in and out. 

2. Click on the objects to learn more.

Click here : http://static.flabber.net/files/scale-of-the-universe-2.swf

Literal and Intelligent Plagiarism

Students beware! When you indulge either in literal plagiarism or intelligent plagiarism either knowingly or unknowingly, you are putting all the authors in the manuscript at risk. Detection of plagiarism after publishing the paper can result in serious consequences to the organization where you work, and can severely damage your reputation and that of the co-authors.

For more information: http://mamidala.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/275/

Rapid Visual Inventory & Comparison of Complex 3D Structures

2011 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge

In this video, Ph.D. animator Graham Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, and colleagues take the normally jumbled pieces of a mouse pancreatic cell and stack them into neat piles. It's an organizational feat sure to please cleanliness-loving scientists. But the visualization also gives researchers and students a new look at the abundances and relative sizes of organelles, from mitochondria to insulin granules. “The cell is a lot more complicated-looking than most people think of it,” Johnson says. “We wanted to clarify it.” 
For more information : http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/534.full

Research efficiency

Research efficiency: Clean up the waste
    * Academic institutions that learn to manage themselves better will achieve more with less funding in coming years.
    * The main sources of inefficiencies are a wrong understanding of autonomy, weak leadership and a lack of strategic thinking when selecting research areas.
    * Adapting concepts from private business will help academic institutions to address inefficiencies and get faculty members back to teaching and research.
For more information: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/484027a.html

Research efficiency: Perverse incentives
Scientists may portray themselves as not being motivated by money, but they and the institutions where they work respond in spades to financial opportunities.
    * Science is full of incentives that encourage bad financial choices, such as expanding labs and hiring too many temporary scientists.
    * These incentives hurt both individual scientists and society as a whole, which gets minimal return on its investment when someone is trained for a field with no career prospects.
    * The way forward is to fix incentives that are damaging the system, by considering their true social and personal cost.
For more information: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/484029a.html

Research efficiency: Turn the scientific method on ourselves
It is time to turn the scientific method on ourselves. In our attempts to reform the institutions of science, we should adhere to the same empirical standards that we insist on when evaluating research results. We already know how: by subjecting proposed reforms to a prospective, randomized controlled experiment. Retrospective analyses using selected samples are often little more than veiled attempts to justify past choices.
For more information: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/full/484031a.html

Must try harder

Too many sloppy mistakes are creeping into scientific papers. Lab heads must look more rigorously at the data — and at themselves. “Handling corrections that have arisen from avoidable errors in manuscripts has become an uncomfortable part of the publishing process.”

Figuring out what controls to do, and designing experiments aimed at testing [and falsifying] a hypothesis, should be a major part of graduate science education. And yet – in many of the papers I referee and in papers in the literature, I see a lack of this basic capability.

For more information: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483509a.html

10 Unsolved Mysteries

The 10 Unsolved Mysteries
1. How Did Life Begin?
2. How Do Molecules Form?
3. How Does the Environment Influence Our Genes?
4. How Does the Brain Think and Form Memories?
5. How Many Elements Exist?
6. Can Computers Be Made Out of Carbon?
7. How Do We Tap More Solar Energy?
8 What Is the Best Way to Make Biofuels?
9. Can We Devise New Ways to Create Drugs?
10. Can We Continuously Monitor Our Own Chemistry?
For more information: http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v305/n4/full/scientificamerican1011-48.html

PhD survival guide

PhD is not just a project to be completed and written up. It is a training period during which aspiring scientists must learn the right way to do science. The secret to surviving a PhD is proactively avoiding common problems and learning to enjoy what you are doing.

For more information: http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v13/n3/full/embor201215a.html

Human brain project

The brain, with its billions of interconnected neurons, is without any doubt the most complex organ in the body and it will be a long time before we understand all its mysteries. The Human Brain Project proposes a completely new approach. The project is integrating everything we know about the brain into computer models and using these models to simulate the actual working of the brain. Ultimately, it will attempt to simulate the complete human brain. The models built by the project will cover all the different levels of brain organisation – from individual neurons through to the complete cortex. The goal is to bring about a revolution in neuroscience and medicine and to derive new information technologies directly from the architecture of the brain.

For more information:  http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

Free will

Scientists think they can prove that free will is an illusion. Philosophers are urging them to think again.
For more information: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html

How the first plant came to be

By studying the genetics of a "glaucophyte" — one of a group of just 13 unique microscopic freshwater blue-green algae, sometimes called "living fossils" — an international consortium of scientists led by molecular bioscientist Dana Price of the University of Queensland, Brisbane, has elucidated the evolutionary history of plants. The glaucophyte Cyanophora paradoxa still retains a less domesticated version of this original cyanobacteria than most other plants.

For more information: http://www.nature.com/news/how-the-first-plant-came-to-be-1.10048

Cancer-causing mutations yield their secrets

The mystery of how mutations in a gene called isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1) cause brain cancer and leukaemia is beginning to be unravelled. Researchers have discovered that the mutations cause the production of an enzyme that can reconfigure on–off switches across the genome and stop cells from differentiating.
For more information:  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10898.html

Jay Bradner: Open-source cancer research

How does cancer know it's cancer? At Jay Bradner's lab, they found a molecule that might hold the answer, JQ1 -- and instead of patenting JQ1, they published their findings and mailed samples to 40 other labs to work on. An inspiring look at the open-source future of medical research.

 Find video: http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_bradner_open_source_cancer_research.html

Leonardo’s Rule, Self-Similarity, and Wind-Induced Stresses in Trees

Abstract:
Examining botanical trees, Leonardo da Vinci noted that the total cross section of branches is conserved across branching nodes. In this Letter, it is proposed that this rule is a consequence of the tree skeleton having a self-similar structure and the branch diameters being adjusted to resist wind-induced loads.

For more information: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v107/i25/e258101

Mutant Flu

Scientists have created a form of the H5N1 avian flu virus that is transmissible between mammals, raising fears that it could trigger a human pandemic if it escapes from the lab - either through accidental release or as part of a bioterror attack.

For more information:  http://www.nature.com/news/fears-grow-over-lab-bred-flu-1.9692

How friendships and tastes co-evolve on Facebook

Facebook friends share similar tastes not because they influence one another but because this similarity was part of the reason they became and remained friends in the first place, a study reports.
For more information: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/1/68

A long-lived horseshoe companion to the Earth

Astronomers from the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland have found that asteroid, 2010 SO16, and the discovery that it is a horseshoe companion of the Earth. The object’s absolute magnitude (H = 20.7) makes this the largest object of its type known to-date.
For more information : http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0036