Here is an experiment to investigate dependence on your “digital dummy”. A digital dummy is any computer, smartphone or other digital device on which you suckle data like a baby. What you need to do is: Delete all your so-called “social networks” on LinkedIn, Facebook etc. Being sat in front of a computer is distinctly unsociable. Delete your twitter account.

What do the following people have in common? Lady Gaga Michael Gove Dilma Rousseff Prince William Mark Zuckerberg Colin Firth Sayeeda Warsi If you think you know, leave a comment below.

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA) has an interesting series of video lectures from “the world’s most inspiring thinkers”. If you haven’t seen them already, they’re worth watching not just for their stimulating content but for the beautifully produced hand-drawn animations.

As Tom Lehrer once sang on his christmas carol: “Christmas time is here, by golly, Disapproval would be folly, Deck the halls with hunks of holly, Fill the cup and don’t say ‘when.’ Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens, Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens, Even though the prospect sickens, Brother, here we go […]

Whatever your views on Facebook [1], you can’t deny that from space, “Planet Facebook” looks rather intriguing. The wonderful diagram below of Facebook connections has been made by Paul Butler.

Of all the things you can do with a Science degree, being paid money to stargaze from the top of a volcano in Hawaiʻi has to be one of the more interesting.

If you took an infinite number of Professors, added some comedians, recording studios (instead of typewriters) and got them to record random radio shows you might just end up with a program like the Infinite Monkey Cage.

There are at least two ways of looking at the history of Science: If we have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants . If we have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of tyrants . Take Isaac Newton for example, a giant whose shoulders we all stand on today. During his scientific career he employed plenty of tyranny to get ahead.

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): Both books give numerous and often amusing examples of the ways that various incentives often result in unexpected outcomes.

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. At the time of writing Mendeley claims to have over 36 million papers, added by just under half a million users working at more than 10,000 research institutions around the world.

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? Is it a triumph or a tragedy that PubMed® is the size it is? PubMed triumphs Let’s start with the reasons to celebrate the triumphantly relentless growth of PubMed.