Category Archives: Science

Can scientific productivity be optimized?

Posted on September 26, 2024 by Stephen

  This is a repost of an article that was originally published on the Research on Research Institute website. Comments welcome!  It is a truth universally acknowledged that scientists who take greater risks are more likely to make important discoveries. … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 1 Comment

Books of 2022

Posted on December 30, 2022 by Stephen

Another year, another tweet thread of the books I read these past twelvemonth. Click on the images to access higher resolution versions which are just about legible, or better still, read the thread on Twitter. In 2022 I managed just … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review, Science | 2 Comments

Intelligent life: Isaiah Berlin

Posted on November 18, 2022 by Stephen

Thanks to the paucity of my education and cultural life I have come late to Isaiah Berlin, the noted philosopher and historian of ideas whose thinking provided such a guiding light to the 20th Century. But I’m definitely a fan … Continue reading →

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Part-time talking – open science, research assessment and gender equality

Posted on October 26, 2022 by Stephen

Things have come to a pretty pass when the UK can turn out Prime Ministers more frequently that I post to my blog. It might be taken as a sign of the times if the times weren’t so damned confusing. … Continue reading →

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A Declaration on Bicycle Assessment

Posted on July 31, 2022 by Stephen

You’d think assessing bicycles would be a lot easier than assessing researchers, but I’m not so sure. Though I spend quite a bit of time as chair of the DORA steering committee pondering how best to evaluate research and researchers, … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 4 Comments

In the garden

Posted on December 27, 2021 by Stephen

What is it about living through a pandemic that has quelled the motivation to write? I suspect it may have something to do with the unstructuring of time, or rather its reduction through confinement to rhythms dulled by repetition. Whatever … Continue reading →

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A Reckoning with Huxley’s Legacy

Posted on November 23, 2021 by Stephen

Recognition and Redistribution for Imperial College’s Community This is a guest post by my former colleague, Dr Rahma (Red) Elmahdi, in which she lays our her reaction to the Imperial College History Report, and in particular the recommendation to rename the Huxley … Continue reading →

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No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding

Posted on December 2, 2020 by Stephen

(Please note that this post was updated on 12th Dec 2020 – see below) This week DeepMind has announced that, using artificial intelligence (AI), it has solved the 50-year old problem of ‘protein folding’. The announcement was made as the … Continue reading →

Posted in Protein Crystallography, Science | 23 Comments

Nature’s new open access option – a few first thoughts

Posted on November 24, 2020 by Stephen

A news article published online in Nature this morning discusses the announcement of new open access options in the Nature family of journals. The details are in the article, but the basic story (written by Holly Else) is that authors … Continue reading →

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Teaching online: how to use an iPad as a whiteboard

Posted on November 22, 2020 by Stephen

Last week I gave my first online tutorials in which I needed to scribble on a whiteboard and show the students their exam scripts from last term, which had been posted to my home. To solve both of these problems, … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 5 Comments

The Flattened Curve

Posted on May 25, 2020 by Stephen

The lockdown might have flattened the curve of infection and death, but it has also flattened the curve and swell of life. Existence has shrunk to fit within four walls; life ‘outside’ has largely been compressed within the flat rectangles of … Continue reading →

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Three weeks

Posted on April 5, 2020 by Stephen

Just three weeks ago, on eve of the weekend, my wife and I met an old friend for dinner at a restaurant in Southwark. Even then, the most normal things in the world were beginning to feel risky. Our friend … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 2 Comments