Content by The Scientist

Contributors William J. Pearce is head of the Genito-Urinary & Reproductive Pharmacology section of the Faculty of Pharmacology & Drug Discovery at F1000, and a professor of physiology at Loma Linda University School of Medicine. He writes in this issue about the inappropriate use of citations in science papers, a subject with which he is very familiar—he published his first peer-reviewed paper 30 years ago, has served on dozens of study sections

Mail Earmark Science The practice of funding science with congressional earmarks1 is just the tip of the iceberg. I fear that we are experiencing a general disintegration of the quality and integrity of American science and engineering. From fundamental research to operating decisions like the ones made on the Deepwater Horizon that led to the disaster in the Gulf, bad technical decisions are being made—more often than not driven by politicians, lawye

Eavesdroppings Science Quotations of the Month © João Fazenda “Even the crustiest editors have been known to turn giddy when new light is shed on [gerontology] and take to blowing raspberries at the Reaper with headlines suggesting immortality elixirs are just around the corner.” —Author David Stipp writing on thescientist.com about science’s quest for the fountain of youth. © João Fazenda &

By Richard P. Grant Creative madness Consider a brick. What can you do with it? Your answer to that question can be a measure of how creative you are. Örjan de Manzano, a PhD student at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, is using the query to explore the potential neurological link between creativity and psychoses. Highly creative people and those with mental disorders are usually better at seeing novel connections between ideas or objects—at t

Top 7 From F1000 © SERCOMI / Photo Researchers, Inc. 1. Piston proton pump » The X-ray structure of a membrane complex involved in aerobic respiration (and implicated in neurodegeneration) reveals an unusual piston-like mechanism for pumping protons across the mitochondrial membrane, and provides clues for developing drugs against Parkinson’s and other related diseases. R.G. Efremov et al., Nature, 2010 May 27, 465(7297):441–4

Jo Handelsman discusses a paper that found gut microbiota can influence sexual fitness in an invasive pest.

By The Scientist Staff Breakthroughs from the Second Tier Peer review isn’t perfect— meet 5 high-impact papers that should have ended up in bigger journals. © Pedro Scassa / Corbis Often the exalted scientific and medical journals sitting atop the impact factor pyramid are considered the only publications that offer legitimate breakthroughs in basic and clinical research. But some of the most important findings have been published in considera

The Scientist Readers' Survey: Methodology Best Places to Work in Academia 2010 Survey Form: A web-based survey form was posted on the web using Infopoll software from September 9, 2009 - March 8, 2010. Results were collected and collated automatically. Invitations: E-mail invitations were sent to readers of The Scientist and registrants on The Scientist web site who identified themselves as life scientists with a permanent position in an academic, hospital

The Scientist Readers' Survey: Survey Questions Best Places to Work in Academia 2010 Category Question Job Satisfaction My work gives me great personal satisfaction. Job Satisfaction My research activities are valued by my colleagues. Job Satisfaction My teaching activities are valued by my students. Peers My peers are excellent scientists. Peers There is a high level of coop

Contributors Peter Satir, a native New Yorker, became interested in ciliary motility when he saw protozoans swimming for the first time at Bronx High School of Science. Satir is currently a distinguished university professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the anatomy and structural biology department, where he researches the mechanisms of primary cilia signaling, evolution of cilia, ciliogenesis, and nanotechnology using molecular motors. The questi

Mail Synthetic Bio, Meet “FBIo” If the FBI wants to help protect scientists from bioterrorism, strategy needs to be first on this list, not last. Unless the FBI understands that, they won’t get anywhere. Scientists will be justifiably reluctant to work with law enforcement until they can be assured that the policies and procedures that led to the Steve Kurtz persecution have been fundamentally changed. Any lab that messed up a

Eavesdroppings Science Quotations of the Month © Brucie Rosch “From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery...It proves that sequencing and synthesizing DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life.” —Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson on the Venter synthetic biology paper in Science, quoted in Edge.org.“The price we wil

Top 7 From F1000 Image by Tamily Weissman and Jean Livet / Harvard University 1. Mice have it licked » Imaging of many cortical neurons simultaneously in live mice maps crosstalk between specific neuron clusters, showing how brain circuits remodel while mice learn a task—in this case licking of water in response to different smells. T. Komiyama et al., Nature, 464:1182–86, 2010 Eval by Noam Ziv, Technion, Israel; Mark Mayford, Th

One on One: Cell talk Martin Humphries on a paper that uses single-molecule techniques to resolve an important biological controversy. Cells bind to and communicate with the extracellular matrix via transmembrane integrins, enabling cells to respond to changes in their environment. To increase integrins’ affinity for ligand, the cell induces a process called “activation.” The details of how activation occurs, however, have been a mystery

Contributors For 16 years, Carmen Sapienza has been a faculty member of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia. He says that once scientists sequenced the human genome, Mendelian diseases became more completely understood, however, most “people in hospital beds aren’t dying from Mendelian diseases.” There’s clearly a lot more to learn, and in "Sticky Fingers", Sapienza and his colleague Ionel Sandovic