<img alt="" height="360" src="https://cdn.the-scientist.com/assets/articleNo/34521/iImg/10368/3b76ad38-9e1a-4929-a07a-ff8a159da872-640picks3.jpg" title="" width="640">FLICKR, <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mknowles/47457221">MICHAEL KNOWLES</a>

TS Picks: November 9, 2015

Social network users rank papers; STAP researcher loses PhD; &ldquo;tinkering with the fundamentals of life&rdquo;

Biochemistry

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Image of Julie Huber holding up vials of different deep-sea microbe cultures.

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Fantastic Microbes and Where to Find Them

Image of a peacock with brightly colored tail feathers on display.

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A grayscale image of several small, round zebrafish embryos. 

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A rendered image of a needle going into a cell.

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On the left, several white sperm face towards a pink ball representing an egg, which is held in a woman’s hand.

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How Cryptic Female Choice Shapes the Evolution of Species

Brown and white photo of Ivan Shiller standing in a cotton field looking at a boll.

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An illustration that shows the different measures taken to save US cotton from pink bollworm pest.

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How America&rsquo;s Cotton Farmers Eradicated the Pink Bollworm

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An extremophile hunt is underway to leverage their resilience tactics, from medicine to space exploration.

A citizen science game explores how social choices and networks can influence how an illness moves through a population.

Image of small blue creatures called Nergals. Some have hearts above their heads, which signify friendship. There is one Nergal who is sneezing and losing health, which is denoted by minus one signs floating around it.

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Nergal Networks: Where Friendship Meets Infection

Tracy Vence

Life Sciences

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Industry-first smart HPLC system to provide authenticated user access verification on onboard touchscreen for superior security.

Waters Enhances Alliance iS HPLC System Software, Setting a New Standard for End-to-End Traceability and Data Integrity&nbsp;

Product

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Setting new standards for intelligent mass detection, sensitivity, and sustainability.

Agilent Unveils the Next Generation in LC-Mass Detection: The InfinityLab Pro iQ Series

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Compact, Powerful, and now Mass Spec-Connected for Superior Analytical Performance

Agilent Announces the Enhanced 8850 Gas Chromatograph

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The Wellcome Sanger Institute, Helmholtz Munich, and Parse Biosciences have announced a landmark international collaboration to create a Cancer Plasticity Atlas.

Pioneering Cancer Plasticity Atlas will help Predict Response to Cancer Therapies

Explore synthetic DNA’s many applications in cancer research

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Twist Bio

Twist Bioscience

Modern DNA synthesis platforms empower researchers to explore the molecular world, from next-generation sequencing to cell and gene therapy development.

Weaving the Fabric of Cancer Research with Synthetic DNA

eBook

Illustrated plasmids in bright fluorescent colors

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Cytiva

An improved chromatography membrane elution method helps scientists achieve higher yields of pure plasmid DNA.

Enhancing Elution of Plasmid DNA

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An illustration of green lentiviral particles.

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By fine-tuning polishing conditions, scientists attain high titers of infectious lentiviral particles during purification.

Maximizing Lentivirus Recovery

Explore new strategies for improving plasmid DNA manufacturing workflows.

Discover a scalable and flexible GMP-compliant workflow for producing plasmid DNA.

Overcoming Obstacles in Plasmid DNA Manufacturing

FLICKR, MICHAEL KNOWLES

Selections from The Scientist’s reading list:

“CRISPR technology offers a new outlet for the inchoate fear of tinkering with the fundamentals of life.” —The New Yorker on the gene-editing technology in its November 16 issue

With its feature PaperRank, Academia.edu is harnessing user recommendations to rate papers discussed on the social-networking website, TechCrunch reported last week (November 4). “What I’m trying to do is take the flat distribution right now of two peer reviews per paper and augment it and collect more sentiment,” Academia.edu founder Richard Price told TechCrunch. “And the way we’re getting it is by asking people who read the paper just what they thought.”

Waseda University has revoked the PhD that biologist Haruko Obokata earned there in 2011, The Japan Times reported last week (November 2). “The university found that the thesis lacked scientific basis and logic,” according to The Japan Times. Obokata, who resigned from RIKEN last December, was found guilty of scientific misconduct in April 2014 in connection with the work she led on stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells. Two months ago, researchers at RIKEN and elsewhere published a series of papers in Nature—where the retracted studies were published in January 2014—showing that published STAP protocols were irreproducible. “The consensus is that STAP is not a real phenomenon,” Paul Knoepfler of the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in these studies, told The Scientist in September.

Social network users rank papers; STAP researcher loses PhD; “tinkering with the fundamentals of life”

TS Picks: November 9, 2015

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