I’m a bit behind in writing summaries of recently published papers from my group. Here’s one that’s a few months old — I’m spurred to write now since I just learned two days ago that it got onto the cover of JACS, the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society: M. D. Hammers, M. J. … Continue reading Seeing the smell of rotten eggs
A long post, in which you’ll have to slog or scroll through several paragraphs to get to the real question: can we navigate using fallen sticks? These days we seem to be inundated with deeply flawed scientific papers, often featuring shaky conclusions boldly drawn from noisy data, results that can’t be replicated, or both. I … Continue reading On the replication crisis in science and the twigs in my backyard
Two posts ago, I wondered about how long the average peer-review of a journal article takes to write. Most people I know reported “a few hours” as the average time, with the upper end of the range being a day or two. I emailed several journals — mostly ones that I’ve reviewed papers for or … Continue reading Review times revisited
A recent article in Physical Review Letters reports on “self-propelled droplet removal” from fibers — the authors designed hydrophobic fibers with the property that when water droplets grow and coalesce on them, the energy released by the coalescence flings the drops off the fibers. The underlying phenomenon is one we’ve all seen: two water droplets, … Continue reading On fungi and fabrics
There’s an interesting question about peer-review of journal articles that I’ve never seen addressed: How long does it take to review a paper? I don’t mean the three weeks or so between getting a request and submitting a review, but rather the time spent actually reviewing. In other words, how many hours does a reviewer … Continue reading In the future, my reviews will consist solely of one carefully picked emoji
In my last post, I wrote about a remarkable recent paper reporting that C. elegans, the well-studied nematode worm, can sense magnetic fields. In a series of elegant experiments, researchers at UT Austin showed that C. elegans moves at a particular preferred angle to an applied field. Moreover, that angle matches the angle between the … Continue reading On second thought, don’t ask worms for directions
It’s great to find a scientific paper that reports something really new — something interesting whose very existence as a substance or behavior or phenomenon was unexpected. It’s doubly great if the paper itself is clear, thorough, and convincing. And it’s almost too much to ask, in addition, for for the topic to be biophysical … Continue reading Worm Positioning Systems
(A more technical post than most, in which we look at bacterial population densities, and watch a movie.) This term I taught a graduate biophysics course, about which I’ll write a recap later. Bacteria came up a lot in the course, both because they’re important but also because they offer many nice illustrations of how … Continue reading Bacteria and Boltzmann
The University of Oregon’s Research Development Services (RDS) sends a weekly email listing funding opportunities — grants, fellowships, and awards that we might be interested in. It’s a good thing to do, and each week there’s a nice variety of programs from many federal and private funding agencies. RDS might be a bit too permissive … Continue reading And the funders said, “Let there be funds,” and there were funds
A friend pointed me to a recent study looking at the earnings (salaries) of people with degrees in different majors — for example, what’s the average salary of a physics major? Or a history major? The authors of the study are economists, and in my opinion put forth in their exposition of the study an … Continue reading How much is that physics major in the window?
The Eighteenth Elephant 