Nature Blogs

I may have a bit of excessive taste for melodrama, please forgive. In my experience, most scientists who are qualified to review a paper will be able to infer the name of the researcher behind it, based solely on the content. Your point isn't just anecdotal, the original Nature editorial mentions a study: "Referees could identify at least one of the authors on about 40% of the papers, undermining the raison d'être for double-blinding." http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7179/full/451605b.html#B1 But sexism is probably a problem with female names one doesn't recognize, not females whose work one is familiar with (anecdotal, but I'm sure I could find studies on prejudice/discrimination), so double-blind review would still help. Still, we're talking on different premises: I think it's important both for publishers to strive for fairness in publishing and for researchers to demand a unceasing effort towards general progress in publishing. The real problem is a lack of dedication to thought about the best way to organize research, which, if I understand correctly, is the biggest value added by the journals. Why is it that the closest thing to thinking about organizing research on a macro level is one of Nature's 17 blogs (is it really just as important as the Avian Flu)? http://blogs.nature.com/ Why is there so little thought about how it is we organize our research? Is it just because old business models stand in the way? Is it because those that benefit from the…

This is an enormous effort for an academic joke article. I am reminded of Upper's classic "The Unsuccessful Self-treatment of a Case of 'Writer's Block'" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jaba00061-014… and Goldberg & Chemjobber's "A Comprehensive Overview of Chemical-free Consumer Products" (https://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/files/2014/06/nchem_-Chem… not to mention Zongker's "Chicken Chicken Chicken" (https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf).

I recommend reading a series of academic journal articles on data visualization from Nature Methods (http://blogs.nature.com/methagora/2013/07/data-visualization-points-of…

Not in mine! I think you're right; it's my impression that passive voice has been the traditional style for scientific papers. However, the winds of change have been blowing for the last 15 or 20 years. Editors of most scientific journals now recommend using active voice wherever possible. I frequently fight with my collaborators over this. In a nutshell I think the passive voice style of science writing is unclear, and dishonest in that it pretends the researcher was not involved in the research. Check out p12 and p13 here: https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/events/professional-development… and: http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus/2007/01/active_is_better_than_passive…

Sadly, that research didn't pan out. One paper has been retracted and the other likely will be. I haven't followed it closely, but I understand there were some significant issues with edited images and results not being reproducible. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/06/last-remaining-support-for-contro…

David - great thought as usual - I think it ironic that I sent you that article earlier today, before reading this. Yes we need the data to power the algorithms. The best analogy I can come up with is fuel and a car. The fuel (being the data in this analogy) only has value with a machine (the algorithm) to transform it; to transform it into kinetic energy, or light, etc. And by the way, we are well below $7K/genome. We are looking right now around $1K and falling - http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/01/the-1000-genome-are-we-there-yet.… Cheers, Jeremy

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/09/reliability_of_new_drug_target.ht… The problem is that there is a lot of incentive to publish peer reviewed articles and very little incentive to publish articles confirming another paper. In my experience, the reproducibility of papers is tested in the worst possible way: during the process of more novel research. If we are to continue this exponential growth in technological and scientific progress we need to set up a far more efficient way of reproducing the papers, independently of ongoing novel research. This seems like a great way, especially considering the benefit it will give to startups and other companies that can allow new R&D to rely on papers that have been tested outside of the peer review/slow meta-review process in science.

This is a HUGE no-no in research, as research MUST be, for accurate information, anonymous. Are you sure that this is an invariant characteristic of good research? What is the authority for conducting a research project in a manner that doesn't allow another researcher to check the raw data? To the contrary, these days there are several very responsible researchers who call for much more open access to research data sets (yes, those could protect subject identities at the individual level while still being traceable to a specific site for follow-up) to promote better science. http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/ http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/data-detective-makes-his-fraud-bu…

It looks like they had the coordinates of the decent path of Curiosity, knew where to point the camera, took a large picture from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) like they did with Phoenix [1] and then when that picture hit human eyes NASA cropped it. That being said, if they have multiple HiRISE images of the decent[2] I think that would make one amazing film. Anyone know the FPS of HiRISE? [1]http://blogs.nature.com/news/files/2012/08/PhoenixHiRise.jpg [2]http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/62081000/jpg/_62081182_62081181.…

How about the magazine "Nature"? http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/09/enstrom_und_drang_… You need to realize that "better" sources might not report the story because it doesn't fit with their agenda.

This is not a story about living in a foreign country in the end, but Timo Hannay's talk "The Future is a Foreign Country" is a must read for anyone who has lived in a different country for any length of time. Having lived in three very different countries for significant durations, I can't help but agree. http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2008/09/the_future_is_a_foreign_cou…

in part it's more dangerous than correction or passive braking system because you need a high twr motor and the explosive to go with it to have a way to correct for unforeseen consequences. see what happened with philae, they got two redundant system to land and both failed. if the scan reveal pluto to have an usable atmosphere, it will be much much easier to land however, if you look at the trajectory they used it's an orthogonal encounter [1] that means the speed they have relative one another is quite much more than when you approach calmly from behind using a hoffman transfer or the like - however if you go that route, instead of waiting 10 years you have to wait a load more, probably more like hundreds (exactly what they did with phila, they approached from the closest orbit possible to minimize the correction burn needed [2]) and let us not forget that having anything in space surviving for soo long is a challenge by itself, as having equipment on earth funded for so long to be maintained operational - remember this story about the other spacecraft that was sent to a comet flyby and was out of gas due leaks on its way back? [3] they had to work a great deal just to rebuild the communication equipement in time [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/New_Horizons_Full_… [2] http://i.imgur.com/TUkKuhf.gif [3] http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/07/attempt-to-retrieve-nasa-probe-ru…

The NIH open access policy is being expanded to nearly all US Government-funded research (including NSF, DOE and NASA): http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announces-open-acc… Similar policies are or soon will be in place at many of the largest grant agencies in other countries (Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, etc), and more are coming online. I expect we'll see this become near-universal by the end of the decade. The Gates policy is unusual in that it has no embargo period. That's not true of many of the other policies, including the NIH policy and the broader US policy. It'll be interesting to see if Gates causes other grant agencies to shorten or eliminate their embargo periods. Another unusual feature of the Gates policy: it requires a CC-BY license on the paper. That means that, at least in principle, some other publisher could simply republish the paper immediately, perhaps enriching it in various ways. It's a very interesting move. Incidentally, if anyone is interested: the best source of news about open access is Peter Suber's open access tracking project. It can be followed on Twitter at @oatp. Another good account is @SPARC_NA - SPARC has done a lot of the ground work preparing the way for open access policies.

Let's go point by point. 1) Regarding diabetes and the FDA: I don't think removing the FDA is going to find a cure for diabetes. Well, before the FDA as such even existed, Banting and Best came up with the idea for insulin supplementation in 1921. A patient was treated by 1922. They won the Nobel Prize by 1923. Today's FDA would have made their methods completely impossible and they would have been criminally prosecuted. http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/insulin/discovery-insul… Early in 1921, Banting took his idea to Professor John Macleod at the University of Toronto, who was a leading figure in the study of diabetes in Canada. Macleod didn't think much of Banting's theories. Despite this, Banting managed to convince him that his idea was worth trying. In January 1922 in Toronto, Canada, a 14-year-old boy, Leonard Thompson, was chosen as the first person with diabetes to receive insulin. The test was a success. Leonard, who before the insulin shots was near death, rapidly regained his strength and appetite. The team now expanded their testing to other volunteer diabetics, who reacted just as positively as Leonard to the insulin extract. The news of the successful treatment of diabetes with insulin rapidly spread outside of Toronto, and in 1923 the Nobel Committee decided to award Banting and Macleod the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Point: the FDA need not exist to make progress…

Sorry to be a buzzkill, but the LHC beam circulates in an extremely high vacuum. There's no way a hand could even get in the beam without breaking the vacuum, thereby causing the accelerator to shut down automatically. Also, it's cryogenically cooled. Radiation dose aside, the hand would freeze and probably fall off. http://www.lhc-closer.es/php/index.php?i=1&s=4&p=15&e=0 Incidentally, when I was working at CERN in the mid 1990's, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (the predecessor to the LHC) was shut down by an act of sabotage involving 2 Heineken bottles placed in the beam pipe. The electrons and positrons (and many physicists) were not happy bunnies. http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/Beer%20bottles.pdf Update: Now I see that the vacuum point has already been made. There are no heavy ions in the LHC main collider, they're produced by bashing protons into a target in one of the secondary beamlines. Also, antimatter is frequently the byproduct of extremely high center of mass proton-proton collisions.

So what's the prevailing wisdom today about the Hannah Poling case? ...the government’s Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation concluded that five shots Hannah received in July 2000, when she was 19 months old, “significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder” and resulted in a brain disorder “with features of autism spectrum disorder.” http://www.ajc.com/health/content/health/stories/2008/03/06/autism_030… Records were sealed at the time. Don't know if they have since been released. EDIT: Summary of latest news, 2010-09-11: US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) will pay over $1.5 million to the family of a child whose parents allege acquired autism after routine vaccinations in 2000....However, the payment does not acknowledge a vaccine-autism link. http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/09/us_vaccine_payout_… The 27 August 2010 Decision Regarding Damages: http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/CAMPBELLSMITH.%20DOE… EDIT 2: You can't make this stuff up: Then-director of the Centers for Disease Control Julie Gerberding (who is now President of Merck Vaccines) stated: "The government has made absolutely no statement indicating that vaccines are a cause of autism. This does not represent anything other than a very specific situation and a very sad situation as far as the family of the affected child." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20015982-10391695.html

“Our study indicates that a disturbingly high proportion of parents, > 1 in 5, continue to believe that some vaccines cause autism in otherwise healthy children” This is actually a big problem and a symptom of the difficulty of explaining science to the general public. There are dozens of papers that prove otherwise, the original paper that made this claim has been withdrawn after being proven erroneous: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8493753.stm http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/02/lancet_retracts_mm… The Lancet's editor, Richard Horton, tells the Guardian that when he read the GMC ruling, it became clear that statements in the paper were "utterly false" and that he felt "deceived". http://press.thelancet.com/wakefieldretraction.pdf and yet this message doesn't seem to get through to people. The reduction in vaccination is (at least part) of what is behind several of the outbreaks mentioned in the article and the increased incidence of several diseases that had practically been eradicated.

Funny D-Wave claimed to have solved this problem years ago http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/d-wave-quantum-computer-solves-pr…

Nature has a fiction section: https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures > Futures is a venue for very short stories or ‘vignettes’ of between 850 and 950 words. The subject is typically near-future, hard SF, although this can be interpreted liberally. http://blogs.nature.com/futureconditional/2015/04/19/how-to-write-for-…

You must be kidding right? If not how do you explain the overwhelming rejection of evolution in countries with a majority Muslim population like Saudi Arabia [1], Turkey [0] or even "moderate" ones like Malaysia? I come from Malaysia and I see how evolution as a topic is studiously avoided in school curriculum. [0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/08/20/540965889/in-turkey-… [1]: http://blogs.nature.com/houseofwisdom/2011/05/saudi_arabia_leads_the_w…

> Still, you have data entry that everybody in the field understands, that's rock solid (so no need to unit test anything) Hey @TeMPOraL, there's a guy with a withdrawn PhD thesis on line 1 who'd like a word with you... http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2017/02/27/escape-gene-name-manglin…

> But why haven't deer or bunnies, for example, evolved to have white patches on their rear ends They have. Bunnies famously have distinct white tails that bob up and down as they run. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/08/why-rabbits-have-white-tails.html And some deer have distinct white/dark patches on their backside: https://krahnpix.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/t6c8813.jpg https://i.imgur.com/6JZdQBz.jpg The article conjectures that the function of these is to be a super-salient signal for a predator's visual system, so they attend to the wrong end of the prey in a chase. Maybe tracking the back end gives a degraded cue to the predators prey-motion-model. But the high-contrast patches are hard to ignore, like chaff for radar. This is probably a different effect than false eyes have on cats, since cats sneak up on prey that aren't looking.

No kidding. https://www.thelocal.de/20170503/german-scientists-to-identify-nazi-di… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Hare_murders http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/02/guatemala.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio

She was found See http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/05/missing-biologist-surfaces-reunit… The last info about her (in the first link the letter is incomplete) http://weeklyscientist.blogspot.com/2016/06/margie-profets-unfinished-…

This blog post describes the stuff Interstellar mostly gets right, and the big thing it's lacking (a brightness asymmetry from the rotation of the accretion disk). http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2017/03/28/imaging-black-ho…

Hi sytelus, Nature is piloting (analytical/computational) reproducibility as part of peer review with, disclosure, the company I work for, Code Ocean: http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/2018/08/01/nature-research-j… A few political science journals also hire staff to make sure that the code reproduce the results in the article: https://ajps.org/ajps-replication-policy/ A nice writeup of the AJPS's experiences: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/rethinking-research/should-journa…

Nature Blog had a recent article about scientific figures: http://blogs.nature.com/onyourwavelength/2018/07/18/heuristics-for-bet…

Not exactly the kind of "captain of industry" Rand wrote about. And from her update after being found (http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/05/missing-biologist-surfaces-reunit… she was far from rich: "Unable to work because of it and subsequent injuries, she had long lived in poverty, sustained largely by the religion she had come to early in the decade."

Aha--this story triggered her coming back to her family: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/05/missing-biologist-surfaces-reunit…

arXiv only handles a small corner of scientific publications, so 0.83% doesn't sound out of whack. Most folks in biology or chemistry aren't on there, for example. A Nature study from 2014 (http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-doubles-… pegs the number of papers published between 1980 and 2012, with at least one citation, at 38 million. So, 69 million publications including uncited ones and ones from outside this time range actually sounds like an underestimate - that is, the 69 million paper archive is probably missing a fair number of articles.