NCBI ROFL blog – funny items with a serious scientific crust

Most of us are trying to do science and treat our experiments and scientific subjects as a serious business. This is not always the case, though. There are people who do ‘science’ on some silly things. Rather then just trying to find these silly ‘scientific’ papers, there is a blog out there that does it for you: NCBI ROFL (link to blog).

Here are just some of this blog entries:

Airplane vacuum toilets: an uncommon travel hazard.

When it comes to penis length and economic growth, size does matter.

Domestic cats do not show casual understanding of a string-pulling task.

The efficacy of stethoscope placement when not in use: traditional versus ‘cool’.

Effects of menstrual cycle phase on ratings of implicitly erotic art.

And yes, these are all real articles you can find on NCBI’s pubmed.

A sucessful webside

Mendeley v1.0 – and its free

All of us are familiar with Endnote or Reference Manager, including all the troubles it causes when trying to use it. Now there is a new option which has been in beta-mode for a while: mendeley and it’s free. It not only does the same things as Endnote and alikes, it also looks for duplicate articles you have, open pdf’s inside the program, and you can share your articles with fellow researchers, as in social networking. Oh, did I already mention it is free?

What is Mendeley? from Mendeley on Vimeo.

Also note, that one of our professors, Jonathan Eissen, likes this program. He is an advocate for Open Access in science.

10 rule-of-thumb in genomics

More and more people are working on genomics. Although the term genomics embrasses a large and poorly defined field, there are common features. Ewan Birney, head of Nucleotide Data at EMBL’s EBI, shared 10 rules of how to go about genomic data. It is always good to be reminded of the pitfalls of genomic data.

Thanks to Keith Bradnam (here is his blog) for pointing out this interesting item.

Retractions – how to keep track of them?

Science is a human endeavour and humans are notoriously bad in judging their own mistakes and being honest about them is not always their virtue either. The one part that makes science a unique human endeavour is that published results are being replicated by others, as well as different labs are competing to answer the same question(s). This results in, by approximation, self-correcting communal behaviour. Because of this self-correcting behaviour of the scientific community, it would seem obvious that cheating is not going to bring very far as it will most likely be revealed sooner or later. Once it is proven you have committed to biggest sin in science: scientific misconduct, you are done being a scientist. But these are the big cases to which the main-stream media loves to point at and magnify beyond recognition. Honest mistakes are far more common and will subsequently result in retractions.

You would expect that journals are in line with the overall goals of the scientific community to promote truth-finding over anything else. In other words, if a paper is to be retracted, that all journals would deal with these cases in a similar way that would be obvious to the readers, both scientific as well as non-scientific readers. This is not the case.

It is not uncommon that a journal will just post a short message that a paper was retracted, without removing the original paper from their online archives. If you would do a PubMed search, you would still find these papers. In other words, retracted papers are still part of the large body of published results.

For this purpose Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky made a blog on retracted papers called: retraction watch.

 

Klingon-cloaking protein coat on human sperm

Does human sperm have a ‘Klingon cloaking-protein coat’? A recent study from UC Davis does suggest this might be the case and could be accountable for male infertility without low sperm count.

Link to original article.

Photo contest 2 for Fall Colloquium

Hello everyone,

The first year (incoming second year) BMCDB students are in the early planning stages for the fall colloquium. We are currently looking for research images to adorn the booklets for this year’s colloquium.

If you are interested in having an image of your research featured on the booklet, please send a file to Andy Murley (acmurley@ucdavis.edu) and/or the BMCDB blog (bmcdb.ucdavis@gmail.com). All submissions will be featured on the BMCDB blog (http://bmcdb.wordpress.com) and 1-2 images will be selected for the front and back covers of this year’s booklet by the colloquium planning committee. Winners will receive fame and a prize that is TBD.

Please send your submissions by Friday August 12.

Thanks,

BMCDB 1st Years

Make your lab greener

Being green is not only being responsible with resources, it also saves money. Sure, an individual researcher might not notice all the money that is being saved, but it does add up when we all work together to use less resources; especially in the current day of ever more limited financial support from the state of California.

A recent article in the online version of The Scientist give some great suggestions, ranging from being better organized by having a up-to-date inventory of what is in the lab to turning appliances off when not in use. These suggestions arose as only 21% of Harvard campus are lab-space, but they consume 48% of all the energy used on campus. This makes the labs we work in one of the most energy-greedy spaces on campus.

UC Davis has been at the forefront of trying to reduce the energy consumption in both labs (as you can read in The Scientist’s article) as well as campus wide. The new Mondavi Institute for food, brewing and wine sciences uses large storage tanks to catch rainwater for use in the labs. To make this possible for all the research buildings on campus would mean massive retrofitting, which is not financially viable. On the other hand, UC Davis campus is also trying to reduce waste that is being produced by 1000s of students and faculty.

Also the NIH, the nation’s largest funding agency, has a Go Green Lab Challenge, which is currently in draft form. Even on the regular individual consumer market companies start to hone in on energy conservation.

So help your university, your lab and your environment and start using our resources more responsibly.

 

At the bottom of The Scientist’s article are more links to make your lab greener.

Register for the MCB Joint Seminars!

BMCDB’ers,

We need your help with MCB joint seminar, 291.  While the room gets filled almost every time the enrollment is less than a fifth of the capacity.  We need to max out registration in order to more accurately reflect attendance and get a bigger room in the future.

Please register for CRN: 70864 as soon as possible.  You should have already registered for Fall – if not then consider this a reminder for that too!

 Register for MCB 291!

Call for Alternative Career Option Seminar Speakers AND Hosts

Greetings, BMCDB faculty and students!

     I hope your summer is off to a good start. But far off as it might seem, Fall is just around the corner, and with it our new Career Options Seminar (COS) series…

       Have you been considering what you will do after graduate school? Are you curious about careers outside the traditional academic postdoc and industrial scientist trajectories? Then this seminar series is for you!

      We will feature speakers who earned their PhDs in molecular biology just like you did (or are about to), but then went on to become science journalists, HR people, high school teachers, or work at funding agencies, state or federal labs, or other non-canonical professions. Basically, this will be a forum for discussing what to do after graduate school and how these people got to where they are now—what made them, who they are (professionally speaking, of course).

      To make this a success, we need your help! We will need remarkable speakers to invite and outstanding graduate students to host them. In total we plan to host 9 speakers, so we need 9 hosts.

Do you have friends who are currently working in government, (popular) science journalism, secondary education, or any other career apart from industry or academia? Then we would be honored to have them present at the Career Options Seminar! Keep in mind: nominating someone does not hog-tie you into hosting, so feel free to come up with any name you can think of, and we’ll do our best to find a suitable host.

In fact, if you are just interested in hosting, and have no suggestions for speakers, speak up! The more hands on deck, the less work there is for everyone. We’re happy to have extra potential student hosts.

We will be accepting nominations up until August 1^st 2011. PIs and students alike are encouraged to submit the name of the speaker, his or her affiliation, and their general availability.

     Please send us an email at dpmelters@ucdavis.edu, katgarvey@ucdavis.edu, or ddguerra@ucdavis.edu.  Don’t be shy, think of everyone you know! With your help, this will certainly be an outstanding seminar series.