Understanding how crystals start to form is tricky. We can’t see how it happens as crystals start off microscopic, it is very sensitive to pretty much every aspect of the experimental set up, and the standard theory (called classical nucleation theory) has basically zero ability to predict anything. So we are a bit stuck. But we don’t have the toughest job around, arguably the most complex, and hardest to understand, thing around is the human body, so perhaps the toughest job belongs to medics and biomedical scientists studying diseases.
Monthly Archives: March 2016
Chicken Little comes home to roost
Two years ago I wrote a blog post expressing amusement at Altmetric’s top papers for 2013. Now that Altmetric is rating a paper of mine #5 of 13,240 outputs (from the journal publisher and as of time of writing), it is clearly time for me revisit my position on Altmetric. Surely, anything that ranks my collaborators and me that highly must be on to something? Altmetric is software that collects references in the news media, blogs and on twitter, to a research paper, and then both provides links to them, and ranks the paper.
The right tool for the job
I almost titled this post Daily Mail celebrates work of immigrants shocker but as they have written a pretty accurate article on work I am part of, that would be a bit ungrateful. Yesterday a paper came out in Physical Review Letters that I am really rather proud of, although I made only a small contribution to it. Most of the credit should go to Andrea Fortini, who discovered the effect the paper describes, and to Nacho Martin-Fabiani and Joe Keddie who did the experiments to show that it works in the real world too. Andrea found the effect in computer simulations. We also had help from collaborators in Lyon who made the particles Nacho used.
Chance & Necessity 