Around the blogs this week: anti-social scientists, science grads who don’t know what a theory is and a system for handling difficult seminar questions…

How drug prices get high. Mike the Mad Biologist gets really mad about the way drug companies set drug prices.

Social networking - are we social enough? Jonathan Gitlin at Nobel Intent ponders whether scientists will buy into social networking, a timely article in light of the recent launch of the Small Worlds project.

Scientists who don’t know science. WritEdit at Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship comments on a shocking study that showed a poor understanding of the basic principles of science among a group of graduates from an English university.

Aquoria victorious. Alex at The Daily Transcript was one of a few bloggers who picked up on the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to the scientists who discovered GFP, but his excellent run-through of what makes GFP great makes this an article not to be missed.

and finally…

How to survive seminar questions. RMP at Evolgen came up with an excellent (funny) flow chart to help you when you get stuck with a question in your next seminar, inspired by the Sarah Palin debate flow chart apparently.

I just came across a very interesting book relating to biotechnology, but sadly it’s not due out until next year. By Janine Benyus and Gunter Pauli, Nature’s 100 Best: World-Changing Innovations Inspired By Nature, this book promises to tell of stories of past innovations coming from biology.

A collaborative effort of Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry Guild and Gunter Pauli’s ZERI Foundation, Nature’s 100 Best brings to light fascinating secrets of nature capable of revolutionizing nearly every aspect of our economy, and changing our destructive relationship with the environment to one of mutual benefit. The team behind Nature’s 100 Best recognizes that the best way to solve the world’s most intractable problems is to look where we haven’t looked before: in the extremely successful R&D lab that’s been operating on this planet for 3.8 billion years. In that time, 10-30 million species have learned to do everything we want to do, without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet, or mortgaging our common future. They’ve learned what works, what is appropriate, and what lasts here on earth.

Read more »

Whatever field you work in, effective project planning can make your work much more efficient, and make your like much easier.

Liquid planner is a unique, online project planning interface that is free as long as your project has three or less team members.

Liquid Planner has a nice interface for defining tasks and constructing Gantt charts, and great features like the ability to attach documents, comments and even mini-discussion forums to each task.But my favorite thing about it is the unique method it uses for determining the likely completion time for tasks.

Project planning is a frustrating business because from the moment you make the plan, you know it is unlikely that your project will pan out like that. The delays will mount up and your actual timeline will look nothing like the  original.

When planning a scientific research project, this is especially true because so much can go wrong with science.

For example, if cloning a gene is part of your project plan - how do you deal with the fact that the cloning might not work first time? If you use Microsoft Project or other traditional planners you have no choice but to plump for an estimated completion time and leave it at that.

Liquid Planner, on the other hand allows you to enter best and worst case scenarios for the completion of a task; e.g. you could say at best it will take you 1 week to clone your gene, and at worst 4 weeks.

From this Liquid Planner calculates various scenarios; an earliest finish date, then 10% through to 98% likely completion dates.

The power of this is that it gives a realistic view of your project timeline and when you have multiple dependent tasks these likely completion   dates are taken into account so that your projected timeline is much more realistic.

Whatever your project planning needs - whether you are planning for a detailed project with multiple users, or just going through the thought process of planning your own research project - I think that Liquid Planner is a useful tool that is well worth trying out.

If you give it a go, be sure to let us know your thoughts here!

An article in last week’s Science caught my eye. In An International Plan to Hatch Scientist-Entrepreneurs, there’s news that a panel at the summer meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) announced plans to award five $10,000 seed grants to the most compelling joint R&D proposals arising from interactions at the meeting between scientists and business leaders.

“The idea is to nurture new linkages,” says IAP co-chair Howard Alper, a chemist and chair of Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council. “Companies need not put in a cent at the beginning.” Alper expects many academies to provide matching grants. The effort is timely, says Padmasree Warrior, chief technology officer at the California computer firm, Cisco Systems. “The lines are blurring between breakthrough, start-up, and scale-up,” she says.

The trouble with entepreneurship of this kind however, is that you have to be a lot smarter than me. Or at least someone who thinks they understand either business or product design better than I.

Okay, joking aside. There are a lot of useful resources out there for enterprising young scientists. Like this Resource for Scientist Entrepreneurs.

Scientist entrepreneurs have an inherent advantage over other entrepreneurs. They are closer to the future than the rest of us. That proximity to the cutting edge gives them the opportunity to start businesses based on science that are truly breakthrough in nature.

Check it out.

Small Worlds is a new initiative organised by Alan Cann at the University of Leicester (and of the excellent Microbiology Bytes) that aims to encourage scientists to use the immense power of web 2.0 in their professional lives.

Alan points out that although scientists were the pioneers of the internet, we have been slow to latch onto the idea that it’s latest incarnation, web 2.0 (a.k.a. “the read/write web”), can be an extremely useful tool for forming professional collaborations among groups and individuals.

The Small Worlds project hopes to overcome this by providing information on how scientists can use services like Twitter, Seesmic, Delicious, Friendfeed etc. to build their network and, crucially, by encouraging us all to make a concerted effort to link up.

One group who could particularly benefit are early stage research scientists who lack an adequate mentor/peer support structure around them, for example those in small research groups, who could use web 2.0 applications to build a network of fellow researchers whose experience they can draw upon to help with their professional development.Such a network can also provide valuable moral support at an often difficult period career period!

Many of our readers fall into this category, so I’d encourage you to head along to the Small Worlds project site and start getting yourself networked!

If you use web 2.0 in your professional life already, drop us a comment on your experiences.

COME AND GET IT! Hot blog posts around the intertubes, served up from the feed reader.

More classroom science blogs: the collection continues
Calling all scientists and science-fans: you can help with science education by letting students know you’re interested. How? Go and comment on classroom blogs and wikis.

Emerging Model Organisms
A new book is coming out from Cold Spring Harbor Protocols, of the same title.

Author’s initial entry: Autism’s False Prophets
Finally, science pushes back against antivaccine lunacy.

Gaze into the crystal ball - Nobel Prize Predictions
Who do you think will win?

David Goldstein on the failure of genome-wide association studies

Varmus on “The Cure” for Cancer
Some of the Nobel Laureate’s thoughts on an oversimplification of cancer biology.

A bacterium’s-eye view of life
An informative post on E. coli’s major life challenge: living life at low Reynolds’ Number.

Whirlpool of scientific thought
Stream-of-consciousness whirlpools emerge from a grant-writing process.

GoPubmed is a powerful new way to search the literature. As the name suggests, it is based on our old, familiar friend the Pubmed database but GoPubmed provides a whole new set of tools that will power-up your search.

After entering your search term into the search box at gopubmed.org, GoPubmed mines a vast array of information on your search term from Pubmed, including the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Gene Ontology controlled vocabulary databases, then, uniquely displays it as links that allow you to drill down to the information that is most relevant to you.

As you can see in the image below, the links, which appear in the sidebar on the left, categorise the search results by relevant MeSH terms, gene ontologies, concepts, authors, journals, publication date and a whole lot more. By clicking on these you can narrow your search to the areas that you are most interested in.

From the GoPubmed FAQ:

[Consider] the following question: Which biological process is the protein Rab5 involved in and where is it located in the cell? Type “rab5″ and wait for the tree on the left to appear. Have a look at the “Top categories What, Who, Where and When”. A click on biological process shows endocytosis and clicking on cellular component shows endosome as answers for this question

This sounds simple- and it is -but the ability to easily narrow your search results allows you to get to the relevant information more quickly, and with so many ways to view your results you can be alerted to publications that you might not have come across otherwise.

This is the main feature of GoPubmed but by no means the only one. There are a whole load of nifty little features to explore and try out. Take a look at gopubmed.org

With all of our recent talk about how SDS-PAGE works and how to improve your gels, I wouldn’t want to give the impression that running protein gels is easy or foolproof.

On the contrary, just like everything else in research, SDS-PAGE can go wrong in a multitude of ways. And if you took a peek inside some of my old lab books you would have all of the proof you need about how easily this technique can make you look like a fool.

But luckily, I don’t have to air any dirty laundry in public to show you, because someone else has done something similar already.

As part of a lab guide for an experimental biology course at Rice University, David R. Caprette has pulled together an “SDS-PAGE Hall of Shame“. It’s made up of photos of gels produced by course students, as well as some from the university’s research labs, that have gone horribly wrong for all manner of reasons.

As well as providing entertainment for ghoulish (science geek) onlookers, the gallery is, of course for educational purposes. It is intended as a troubleshooting resource; by clicking on the picture that looks most like your poor, messed up gel you will be given a pearl of wisdom that suggests what you might have done wrong so you can remedy it in the future.

But perhaps the best things about it is that in an uncertain world, it shows that everyone else has protein gel disasters too. And most of us can probably take comfort from that.

The September 20th issue of Science had a news article that I hope Bitesize Bio readers didn’t miss. In case you do however, the article was And Then There Was One:

A decade after 26 members of the entering class of 1991 earned their Ph.D.s from Yale’s elite molecular biophysics and biochemistry program, only one holds a tenured faculty position. But is an exodus from academia a bad thing?

Read more »

Popular voting is open for the Nikon Small World competition. This thing is great, revealing the beauty of the extremely small in images such as the above one from last year’s competition.

Small World is regarded as the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope. For over 30 years, Nikon has rewarded the world’s best photomicrographers who make critically important scientific contributions to life sciences, bio-research and materials science.

It looks as though every imaging technique, from photon- or electron-based to computer generated images, has at least one representative entry. I figure that most people will vote for something related to their field (or major). Or am I wrong - is there a particular imaging technique that people find more aesthetic, regardless of background in science?

Image: Dr. Eric Hwang at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA - Retinoic acid-induced P19 neuronal aggregate (40x)