For one student, it was, “Keep it simple. Science is hard enough as it is.” For another student, it was, “It’s a skill, like anything e...

I’ve seen a few graduate programs announce that they are not going to require students submit GRE scores any more. These announcements are w...

I just looked in the introductory textbook we use for general biology, and it provides a good explanation of chemical neurotransmission ...

Matthew Hahn reminded me of a paper that proposed the “Kardashian index” for scientists. I don’t like the paper. It demeans outreach by ...

Mensh and Kording (2017) have a new paper on scientific writing. It’s very good. I agree with most of their advice. But not this. You ...

Anne Madden asked : Academic scientists, how many of you have contributed significant out of pocket funds (or fam. $) to make your sci...

There’s an editorial in the journal mBio asking members to publish in society journals. The editorial contain some nice data outlining t...

By happenstance, I thought of Microsoft’s imitation of Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Research, yesterday. I reviewed it years ago, ...

Richard Poynder and Michael Eisen got into it on Twitter over the weekend over open access publishing. Poynder wrote : ...

It’s so nice to have two new papers drop in short succession! I had one come out in Journal of Coastal Research last week, and another pape...

You have to be honest about your papers. I am happy with my latest paper, for several reasons. It’s probably the longest I’ve ever col...

Portia Roelofs and Max Gallien argue that the high altmetric score for a dire article defending colonialism is evidence that academia has b...

Over a year ago, I uploaded a preprint into bioRxiv . When people upload preprints, bioRxiv sensible puts on a disclaimer that, “This ar...

I wrote the bulk of this post this post five years ago, back in 2012. That week, a paper came out in Nature that claimed to predict... the...

In the game Pokémon Go, pidgeys are pokémon that you see everywhere. They’re super common, super small. They are not very powerful. You...

The Voynich manuscript is a potentially obsession creating item. It’s routinely described with phrases like, “the world’s most mysterious...

It’s been a week since Harvey changed everything for Houston, Texas. And since then, I’ve been waiting. After Katrina hit new Orleans, ...

When I took my current job, one of the things that attracted me was that I was told the department would probably have a Ph.D. program, mayb...