In the process of doing research for a snarky tweet I was looking for the yearly subscription costs of Nature . In itself not an easy task, as the corresponding page one finds via Google is devoid of content.

Being more of a dog-person (or to stay in OkCupid lingo likes dogs, has cats ) I was sad when I saw that the CatterPlots made their rounds on Twitter again this week, as there’s still no dog-centric alternative if you’re an R -faring data visualizer. In order to dry my tears I went over to dog_rates for some binge dog-watching. And then I wondered, aren’t these puppers all getting cuter and cuter?

Last week the The Royal Society issued a joint statement about the importance of the international nature of research along with national academies across the UK and Europe. At the same time they started the hashtag #ScienceIsGlobal on Twitter , where individuals reported what nationalities are collaborating in their labs. I, and many others, reported their lab’s composition using the emoji flags.