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