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It's amazing how the field of stem cell research has advanced so much in such a short amount of time. Today, just a little over a decade after the first stem cell line was produced, scientists announced another breakthrough - turning stem cells into sperm.
In a paper published in the journal Stem…
For those of you are are snickering at how this blogger didn't really understand trackback, a basic feature of blogging, just picture for a moment the all-too-common occurrence of four PhDs struggling at the lecture podium to get the A/V program to work for an esteemed guest speaker.
Well, I've got…
Here's a good science blog you can help: Biofortified, a group blog on plant genetics and genetic engineering (and, by the way, Sb's recent addition, Pamela Ronald, is part of the team). They are in a contest to win a small cash grant and an interview with Michael Pollan, and this group is…
Colleges and universities working on a semester calaendar are just finishing up classes now, which means that most academics (unlike those of us in Trimester Land, who have been out of session for a few weeks) are currently buried in grading. This leads to some fun blog posts:
Grading as a text…
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The advice started out reasonable: first read the abstract, and then the figures and figure legends. It then veers sharply downhill. What about the fucking Results!? You know, where the authors tell you what they did and what they observed! If you go right to the "Conclusions", "Discussion", and "Introduction" sections without reading the Results, you are setting yourself up to buy into the marketing hype.
Lay-people read (and should read) the scientific papers differently. It is OK for laymen to skip over the hard parts. I start with Refernces, then dig through the Materials and Methods, then figures/results in parallel. I will read the rest only if it is really important for me. But I see why lay audience should do quite the opposite - their goals are different.