Latest posts

Litreview

Posted on 20 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Yes, it’s that time again, when I list the books in the year just passed that I have most enjoyed. I’ve been doing this since 2014. That’s when I started noting authors and titles of books I’d read in a small notebook given me one Christmas by my friend H. F. of Edgefield.

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Posted in a dominant character, a suitable boy, Alexander Hamilton, american gods, anansi boys, borges, bram stoker, colour of magic, dirtyfilthysexy, discworld, dracula, entangled life, erin morgenstern, fungi, garlic, good omens, james bond, JBS Haldane, just william, kurt vonnegut, Lin-Manuel Miranda, merlin sheldrake, neil gaiman, olaf stapledon, psilocybin, Ron Chernow, samanth subramanian, scarlett thomas, slaughterhouse five, star maker, terry pratchett, the end of mr Y, The Night Circus, the starless sea, tolkien, van helsing, vietnam war, vikram seth, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Litreview

Why Unicorns Aren’t the Answer

Posted on 15 December 2020 by Athene Donald

I’ve railed against pinkification, and the ‘gift of pink’ in the past – especially at this time of year when presents, notably toys and clothes, are to the fore for Christmas purchase. I hadn’t realised that books, too, come with gender neatly attached from an early age, not just toys and clothes. Amazon at least wants to direct grandparents like myself to different pages, and different sorts of b Continue reading →

Posted in Books, education, Equality, Fawcett Society, gender stereotypes | Comments Off on Why Unicorns Aren’t the Answer

Naturistical

Posted on 14 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Thirty-three years ago today Sgt Pepper taught the band to play I started work at Nature. I joined as a junior news reporter on a three-month contract. It’s the longest three-month contract anyone has ever had.

Because I am a monster of vanity and arrogance people sometimes ask me how I got to be where I am today, I have decided to write this as a kind of public service. So pay attention. Continue reading →

Posted in bacterial genomes, Electric Banana, extrasolar planets, feathered dinosaurs, hobbits, human genomes, John Maddox, journalism, long-playing records, mammoths, Motorhead, nature, new scientist, radiological protection guidelines, The Thunderer, Writing & Reading, yetis | Comments Off on Naturistical

Misterious

Posted on 10 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Yesterday I drove Mrs Gee, a student nurse at the University of East Anglia, to UEA where she had to do some necessary admin that couldn’t be done remotely. While she was doing that, Posy the Golden Retriever took me for a walk in Earlham Park, which is just across the road. Earlham Park is lovely. Huge swathes of grassland punctuated by the occasional stately tree. Posy was delighted.

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Posted in Apparitions, desert, dog, Earlham Park, fist, fog, fossils, landscape, Leakey, Lomekwi, mist, mog, navigation, norwich, palaeontology, Science Is Vital, self-similarity, Turkana, UEA | Comments Off on Misterious

The Need for Bounce

Posted on 6 December 2020 by Athene Donald

What would you feel if someone described you as a ‘demoralised pile of pulp’? I was distinctly taken aback by this extreme phrase, describing myself – by myself. It referred to the ‘me’ I had been a year previous to the moment of writing, during the time I had been a spectacularly unsuccessful postdoc. The phrase turned up in one of a large pile of letters written to my mother – perhaps I wrote a Continue reading →

Posted in failure, pandemic, Research, resilience, Science Culture | Comments Off on The Need for Bounce

Dreamages

Posted on 3 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Oh, these dreams. I don’t know whether it’s the present situation, or the drugs, but I do have the most vivid dreams these days. Sometimes they are photo-realistic … except that the reality is not as one might expect.

Some years ago when these drugs were just recent invaders of my system I dreamed I was in conversation with a close colleague. I’d have sworn it was real exce Continue reading →

Posted in Cromer crabs, Dreaming, dreams, Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright, Leeds University, Portuguese cuisine, Science-fiction, Silliness, Springfield (Illinois), University Challenge, venlafaxine | Comments Off on Dreamages

No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding

Posted on 2 December 2020 by Stephen

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 results were released from the 14th and latest competition on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14). The competition pits teams of computational scientists against one another to see whose m Continue reading →

Posted in Protein Crystallography, science | Comments Off on No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding

Differetail

Posted on 2 December 2020 by Henry Gee

News has reached Cromer that the Pfizer vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, has been approved for use in the UK. This information followed the news yesterday that Debenhams, a department store founded well over a century ago, had collapsed; and, before that, that the business of the Arcadia Group, a retail concern that owns many fashion stores, was now under the aegis of t Continue reading →

Posted in circumlocution, circumnambulation, circumnavigation, Commutatis Maledictis, COVID-19, futures, SARS-CoV2, snoop dogg, The High Street, The Tiger Who Came To Tea | Comments Off on Differetail

On fraud, redux

Posted on 1 December 2020 by rpg

One of the worst things about the pandemic is that it reminded me that once upon a time I was really rather good at RT-PCR. And that reminded me of when I spent 8 months in Sydney trying to replicate a result that was, essentially, made up.

A brief exchange on the Twitter with Henry Gee of this parish made me think that the story, which I have told once elsewhere, probably bears repeating.

Posted in covid19, Ethics, figure 5B, fraud, Grauniad, Ill-considered rants, J Cell Biol, Lab ratting, Me, PCR, send to Ireland for processing, Sydney, War stories, znf265, zranb2 | Comments Off on On fraud, redux

Sex, Gender, Research and Fairness

Posted on 30 November 2020 by Athene Donald

It is a daily matter to look around a typical laboratory and note the imbalance of the sexes in different roles. In a lab using animals, there may be a fair number of female technicians, but the PI is more likely than not to be a man. In a computer laboratory, women are in short supply at all levels, despite the prevalence of women as ‘computers’ in the early days of the subject. Read Programmed I Continue reading →

Posted in cell-lines, ERC, Gendered Innovations, Londa Schiebinger, machine learning, Research, Science Funding, statistics, Women in science | Comments Off on Sex, Gender, Research and Fairness