When UTRGV was forming, I blogged a lot about the choice of a name for a new mascot. What we got was... something that not a lot of people w...

Been meaning to make GIFs of a sand crab digging, suitable for social media sharing, for a while. Here’s a serious one. And here’s a ...

A recent article describes a practice unknown to me. Some authors submit papers for review, get positive reviews, then withdraw it if the r...

It takes a certain kind of academic who refuses to review papers. Not because of lack of expertise, a lack of time, or a conflict of interes...

Lots of academics are upset by bad journals, which are often labelled “predatory.” This is maybe not a great name for them, because it impli...

A common question among non-scientists is how to tell what science you can trust. I think the best answer is, unfortunately, the least pract...

My wife asked me, “Why do you love monsters so much?” Maybe because I can’t remember ever a time I didn’t know about Godzilla. The name a...

There are many days where I am good at my job. The last weeks of the last semester were not among those days. And I say this with a couple ...

There is a certain class of people who are convinced that higher education as currently taught is a stupid waste of time, and that the futur...

In 2016, I wrote a grumpy blog post about my worries that posting preprints is probably strongly subject to the Matthew effect. It was a re...

There’s an old saying that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. I think that’s true of shortcuts, not...

Ton van Raan had a paper rejected for referring to “sleeping beauty.” This is a term that van Raan and others have used to describe papers...

Earlier on Twitter, I shared an Instagram picture of Dr. Katie Bouman at work, imaging a black hole . This has been a widely shared pi...

Wingfield and Millar have a well-meaning but misleading article, “The open access research model is hurting academics in poorer countries.” ...

Having been interested in science communication (and being a low-level practitioner) for a while, I recognized that there are a lot of ol...

In the light of the “Operation Varsity Blues” college scandal last week, a lot of people were complaining about university admissions gener...

At any given moment in time, there are people who are well known for giving good presentations. In the early part of the twenty-first cent...

This morning I learned of the UK advocacy group “ Crustacean Compassion ”, which wants to change laws around the handling of crustaceans in ...

One of the downsides of living in a world where you can verify so many things with a single search in Google is that when you can’t do that,...

In politics, there is constant referencing to the “news cycle”, which is generally considered to be 24 hours. The next day is not quite a ...