Freakonomics and its successor Superfreakonomics are two books by the economist Steven Levitt and his partner in crime Stephen Dubner that have a common theme running through them (quote): “People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable and manifest.

Mendeley is a handy piece of desktop and web software for managing and sharing research papers [1]. This popular tool has been getting a lot of attention lately, and with some impressive statistics it’s not difficult to see why.

A quick search on pubmed.gov today reveals that the freely available American database of biomedical literature has just passed the 20 million citations mark*. Should we celebrate or commiserate passing this landmark figure?

Science Online London (#solo10 September 3-4, 2010) is an annual gathering of people interested in the use of web technologies for scientific collaboration and communication.

According to some estimates, there are fifty million articles in existence as of 2010. Picture of a fifty million dollar note by ZeroOne on Flickr. Earlier this year, the scientific journal PLoS ONE published their 10,000th article. Ten thousand articles is a lot of papers especially when you consider that PLoS ONE only started publishing four short years ago in 2006.

Football fever grips the globe as we reach the final stages of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Alongside the traditional game where one winning team takes all, leaving 31 losing teams to go home earlier than expected, there is another competition running in parallel.

[This post is part of an ongoing series about impact factors. See this post for the latest impact factors published in 2012.] Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen, Impact Factor Boxing is here again. As with last year (2009), the metrics used in this combat sport are already a year out of date.

Have you ever wondered how heavy all that Gold and Malachite is in the FIFA World Cup Trophy is? Professor Martyn Poliakoff from the Chemistry department at the University of Nottingham and his partner in crime Brady Haran over at the fantastic Periodic Table of Videos explain: Which just leaves one question, who will be […]

Release 69 of Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) is now available, with 584,456 total entities, of which 21,369 are fully annotated to three star level. This months Entity of the Month is the smell of bread (baked and toasted), or more precisely 6-acetyl-2,3,4,5-tetrahydropyridine.

This years Reith Lectures by Martin Rees are being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during June. An important theme in the lectures this year is scientists relationship with society.

Many people are still trying to work out exactly what twitter is good for [1] but with more than 100 million users worldwide making around 50 million tweets per day, the website is clearly popular with those who like to communicate via short “sound bites” of 140 characters or less.