Erythropoietin is an effective drug to increase your number of red blood cells. It is primarily used in anemic patients with cancer and on dialysis, but it is also popular with athletes that want to (illegally) increase their endurance performance, most notably cyclists and cross country skiers.
Anna's recent post about her struggles with Pubmed searches reminded me that there is still a lot that could and should be done to improve the paper (or thesis) writing process.
Participation in a social network can have it's perks. Thanks to the O'Reilly Group on Facebook (that other social network), I received a review copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. But why would a scientist want to know how to write and edit articles on Wikipedia? Wikipedia has become a respectable source of information that rivals the more traditional encylopedias such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
A March 13 Nature News article (Six degrees of messaging) talks about a study on Microsoft Messenger chat users. Any random two Microsoft Messenger users (out of about 240 million) could be connected two each other via an average of 6 users that have chatted with each other. This study is just another confirmation of the six degrees of separation concept.
David Crotty, the Executive Editor from CSH Protocols, last month wrote a provocative blog post called Why Web 2.0 is failing in Biology. He did an informal poll among scientists and found that none of them read science blogs or use social networking sites for scientists.
To celebrate the annual Pi Day, and in the good tradition of geeky music by scientists, I would like to draw your attention to the American Pi Song (lyrics are found here), best listened to at 1:59 PM today.
Nature News this week reports that Seven US-educated scientists working at the Max Planck Society's institutes are facing criminal charges for impersonating a doctor. This extremely embarrassing story is fortunately no longer possible. The German Kultusministerkonferenz decided on March 6 (text in German) to allow U.S. PhDs to call themselves Dr. in Germany. Until this story evolved, I didn't even know that this is an issue.
You have finished all the experiments and are in the middle of writing that wonderful manuscript that will change not only the field you are working in but also your personal career. But then you encounter all these complicated issues related to paper writing, including duplicate publications, joint first authors, multi-authored papers and paper rejections.
Today is World Book Day, at least in the United Kingdom. So I wanted to join my fellow NN Bloggers in our newest SynchroBlogging effort and wrote this post about science and books. I decided to write about the last book I bought – which was yesterday.
Posters are an important tool to communicate your research findings to a larger audience. The format is different from oral presentations or full papers, and special rules for a good poster apply. Posters can be an important step before a full publication, although many posters will never be peer-reviewed and published. The problem with posters is that they are second class citizens to oral presentations in most meetings.
Donald Kennedy, the edior-in-chief of Science, yesterday wrote an editorial about a legal dispute between the New England Journal of Medicine and the drug company Pfizer. Pfizer wants the NEJM to provide the reviewer comments on submitted papers about the two Pfizer products celecoxib (Celebrex) and valdecoxib (Bextra). Both drugs are used to treat pain and belong to the COX-2 inhibitor class of drugs.