I am now running a new module for masters students, MD997. The aim is to introduce the class to a range of advanced research methods and to get them to think about how to formulate their own research question(s). The module is built around a paper which is allocated in the first session.

Another post using R and looking at Twitter data. As I was typing out a tweet, I had the feeling that my vocabulary is a bit limited. Papers I tweet about are either “great”, “awesome” or “interesting”. I wondered what my most frequently tweeted words are.

I wondered how many of the people that I follow on Twitter do not follow me back.

We have a new paper out. The title is New tools for ‘hot-wiring’ clathrin-mediated endocytosis with temporal and spatial precision. You can read it here. Cells have a plasma membrane which is the barrier between the cell’s interior and the outside world.

We have a new paper out! This post is to explain what it’s about. Cancer cells often have gene fusions. This happens because the DNA in cancer cells is really messed up. Sometimes, chromosomes can break and get reattached to a different one in a strange way.

In the UK there is an advertising disclaimer that “the value of your investments may go down as well as up.” Since papers are our main commodity in science and citations are something of a return, surely the “value” of a published paper only ever increases over time.

To validate our analyses, I’ve been using randomisation to show that the results we see would not arise due to chance. For example, the location of pixels in an image can be randomised and the analysis rerun to see if – for example – there is still colocalisation.

We have a new paper out! You can access it here. The people This paper really was a team effort. Faye Nixon and Tom Honnor are joint-first authors.

I’ve generated a lot of code for IgorPro. Keeping track of it all has got easier since I started using GitHub – even so – I have found myself writing something only to discover that I had previously written the same thing.

Caution: this post is for nerds only. I watched this numberphile video last night and was fascinated by the point pattern that was created in it. I thought I would quickly program my own version to recreate it and then look at patterns made by more points.

Previously I wrote about our move to electronic lab notebooks (ELNs). This post contains the technical details to understand how it works for us. You can even replicate our setup if you want to take the plunge. Why go electronic? Many reasons: I wanted to be able to quickly find information in our lab books.