February 2012
2 posts
Has Your Research Been Compromised? – The Role Of...
Do you use human cell lines in your research? Well, keep reading because this may be the most important article you will ever read in your research career. It is estimated that 18-36% of all actively growing cell line cultures are misidentified and/or cross-contaminated with another cell line (1). For researchers, this could mean that a significant amount of the experimental data published in...
December 2011
3 posts
October 2011
4 posts
How Recruiters Use Social Networks to Screen... →
Over the past few years, we’ve seen social media used in the job market in a number of ways — startups, small businesses and large corporations alike are diving into the socialverse to find top talent, and job seekers are likewise getting creative with social media. Social media monitoring se…
BioTechniques - Faster Than a Speeding Polymerase →
Could a new rapid PCR machine put an end to waiting for PCR experiments to finish?
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
2 posts
June 2011
2 posts
WatchThe PhD Movie trailer!
May 2011
2 posts
April 2011
6 posts
PhD Comics goes to Hollywood →
Piled Higher and Deeper: The Movie will be coming to a campus near you next fall. Based on the popular Sunday-funnies style newspaper and web comic strip drawn by Jorge Cham, the movie promises a lighter-hearted look at the slings and arrows of graduate student life in academia. Filming began last month at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
“I’ve been talking to Hollywood agents...
March 2011
7 posts
WatchBehind the TEDTalk is the touching story of two extraordinary people who shared the stage at the 2010 TED Conference.
(via swissmiss | Behind the TED Talk 2010)
How to Format Your Manuscript
Title
A good title catches the reader’s attention and makes him want to read the article. It tells the reader what the article is about. I’ve also found that it’s hard to write a good one, and that it’s one of the last things I do.
Most effective titles are fewer than ten words. Think of it as a label. Leave out nonessential words and phrases such as “report on,” “pilot study,” “assessment of,”...
Life's too short for the wrong job
via little chief honeybee
February 2011
3 posts
Can You Describe Your Research in 30 Seconds? 60?
As scientists, we tend to get engrossed in our own scientific world as we focus on graduating, publishing a paper or getting that grant out. Our labs, quite literally, become our world. Which is why we all know the glazed looks in the eyes of non-scientific people who have the misfortune to ask us what we do. We are so used to conversing in scientific code with our colleagues that unless we have...
January 2011
5 posts
Eight Steps to Start Writing Your Manuscript
You’ve done your research, you’ve got something important to share, and you’ve got the guidelines from the journal that you’re hoping will publish your results. Your goal is to write #### words. Before you is a blank computer screen. Don’t panic.
The guidelines give you a structure to follow. It probably looks like this:
Abstract
Introduction
Methods, or Methods and Materials, or...
December 2010
6 posts
The disposable academic
Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
On the evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original...
“I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I...”
– via Boing Boing
Weird or Cool? Social Networking From the Great...
As horrible and weird as this concept seems at first, anyone who has visited a graveyard probably has noted at one time or another that there are so many of the deceased who’ve passed away and been long forgotten. It would be a fascinating future if cemeteries allowed the living to learn a bit about the dead via technology.
via Apartment Therapy Unplggd
November 2010
12 posts
Shopping Tips for Men
Men, this holiday season, when you find yourself in your automobile with your wife or girlfriend, returning from some sort of entertaining event, watch out for any of these early indicators of a shopping bait-and-switch: “I just remembered something I need to pick up.” “We’ll be driving right past…” “This will only take a minute.” For a man, shopping...
Parkour for Lazies: The Bizarre British Lying Down...
It’s happening all around the world: people are taking pictures of their friends awkwardly lying face-down in all sorts of unlikely places. On top of statues, in the middle of roads, in front of famous landmarks – absolutely anywhere you can conceivably fit a horizontal human body, you’ll find someone playing the bizarre game. The weirder the place and the more people looking on, the better....