The BMJ will start paying £50 for reviews. The catch? It’s not for peer review, it’s for reviews from patients and the public. They still ...

In the last few days, a bunch of people on Bluesky discovered a paper that has been out for a few months, “Practice of neurosurgery on Satur...

There’s an old joke: “Fast, cheap, good: Pick two.” Generative AI is fast and cheap. It will not be good. I would like “good” to be a higher...

My last jobs didn’t have any expectations for research, so my publication rate slowed significantly. I wanted to do something about that. A ...

I finally got a chance to update my collection of academic hoaxes ! I am now up to 42 academic hoaxes, which is triple the number that I sta...

Advice from people with experience fighting powerful fascist opponents: “ Do not comply in advance. ” In a new Science editorial , National...

You get hurt, hurt ‘em back. You get killed… Walk it off.  Captain America,  Avengers: Age of Ultron

Generative AI fatalism (or Gen AI fatalism): The assertion that generative AI must be accepted, because its widespread adoption is inevitabl...

Something I had long dreaded came to pass yesterday. Google Scholar introduced generative AI. “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim ...

Apropos of nothing, here are two pictures I thought I’d posted back in November 2016, but I can’t seem to find any more. They’re a couple of...

A new paper by Kasiouras and colleagues attempts to provide evidence for nociceptive neurons in a decapod crustacean, a shore crab.  The aut...

I was reading yet another “Scientists behaving badly” article . This one was about Jonathan Pruitt, who used to work where I used to work (d...

Oh, this is fun. Here is “Doctor Zen” in Gallifreyan writing from Doctor Who . I have to be careful, or I’ll spend hours translating things ...

A new article on how many people in the US are increasingly hostile to reality has much to contemplate, but I wanted to briefly muse on thi...

This is not a post about the Nobel prizes. It is a post about authorship. The Nobel Prize for chemistry was given two people for protein fol...

I haven’t had a job in a university for a while, and I’m realizing how much I cannot do and how many opportunities I am missing because I do...

We just passed the 25 anniversary of Breakaway Day, September 13, 1999, when 311 people on Moonbase Alpha were lost when the moon was blown ...

Bluesky is my main social media platform now. I mean, they called me an “elder”! Not just in an, “Wow, you old ” way. In a nice way! Yes, ...

Complaining about academic publishing is somewhere between “hobby” and “righteous cause” for many researchers. So I imagine that many will b...

Yes, this post is a not too subtle acknowledgement of the fact that I be old, but I don’t care. Buckaroo Banzai is one of those movies tha...