Category Archives: Science

Pre-prints: just do it?

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Stephen

There is momentum building behind the adoption of pre-print servers in the life sciences. Ron Vale, a professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UCSF and Lasker Award winner, has just added a further powerful impulse to this movement in … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Access, Science, Scientific Life | 16 Comments

Impressions of Australia

Posted on December 31, 2014 by Stephen

I have been struggling to write something about my trip to Australia in August, my first visit to that great continent and undoubtedly a highlight of 2014. In my determination to get away from the rather banal what-I-did-on-my-lecture-tour-and-family-holiday trope, I ended … Continue reading →

Posted in Science, Travel | Tagged | 5 Comments

Prize-winning video

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Stephen

Well this is nice. The Celebrating Crystallography video made last year by the Royal Institution, which I narrated and helped to script-edit, has won the the EuroScience New Media award. Full details are available on the RI blog but it’s great to see … Continue reading →

Posted in Communication, Science, Science & Media | 4 Comments

Debating the role of metrics in research assessment

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Stephen

I spent all of today attending the “In metrics we trust?” workshop organised jointly by HEFCE and the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University. This was part of the information-gathering process of HEFCE’s independent review of the role of … Continue reading →

Posted in Science, Scientific Life | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Advice on presentations: I’m not as clever as you think

Posted on July 23, 2014 by Stephen

I spent the last two days in Leicester at Translation UK, a two-day conference that is an annual gathering for scientists working on all aspects of translation — the protein synthesis kind. The conference is friendly and informal. It is … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | 8 Comments

Australia Tour 2014

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Stephen

It’s funny how one thing leads to another. The video of my Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution last year caught the attention of a former colleague and produced an invitation to contribute a lecture to her plans to … Continue reading →

Posted in Protein Crystallography, Science | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Mars Attacks (the senses)

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Stephen

Last night on Twitter someone posted a ‘selfie’ taken by the Mars Curiosity rover. It’s quite a photograph, particularly since it captures a fantastic piece of human technology amidst the landscape of another planet. The detail is what makes the … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, Science | Tagged , | Comments Off on Mars Attacks (the senses)

Losing my virginity and the Café Scientifique Reading List

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Stephen

Last night I lost my virginity. To be precise, I lost my Café Scientifique virginity because I gave a talk about science in a café in Portsmouth at the kind invitation of local organiser Maricar Jagger. It was a really … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review, Communication, Science, Scientific Life | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Remembering Innisfree

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Stephen

I observed recently how the rise of the internet has eliminated letter writing and so caused some of the wells of correspondence that historians and biographers have relied on down through the ages to fall into disuse. But the internet is … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Impact factors declared unfit for duty

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Stephen

Regulars at this blog will be familiar with the dim view that I have of impact factors, in particular their mis-appropriation for the evaluation of individual researchers and their work. I have argued for their elimination, in part because they … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Access, Science | Tagged , , | 41 Comments

What does the Higgs boson look like? (Audio Version)

Posted on September 30, 2012 by Stephen

As a little experiment I sat down and recorded an audio version of my Occam’s Corner post on the historical account of the difficulties that scientists had in accepting the reality of atoms. You can listen here:   And here … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Around Downe

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Stephen

Around Downe, Sept 2012, a set on Flickr. I visited Downe yesterday. Darwin’s home village is quite close to where I live and we like to avail ourselves from time to time of the local environs and the local (which … Continue reading →

Posted in Science | Tagged , , | 4 Comments