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.
Category Archives: Science
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.
The economics of life, death and weekend working
The Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has been going round saying* “At the moment, for example, if you have a stroke at the weekend you are 20% more likely to die. That cannot be right, and that is something every doctor wants to sort out as well.”. This is a rather alarming way of saying that 11.1% of those admitted on a weekday because they have had a stroke are dead within 30 days, whereas 12.9% of those admitted on a weekend die within 30 days. This is from work of Roberts and coworkers.
Tiny tiny origami
My Christmas reading has included a PhD* thesis, I am external examiner for a student at Oxford, and the viva is mid-January. The thesis is on the computer simulations of a model of DNA. The simulations are of what is called DNA origami. Origami is of course folding up a sheet of paper in a precise way, to make a paper plane, paper flower, etc.
Interwoven networks of crystals
Jelly is bad for our nerves
My Christmas viewing has included (amongst the Strictly, Agatha Christie adaptation, etc) a webinar entitled Fluid Business: Could “Liquid”Protein Herald Neurodegeneration? The webinar is on droplet-like structures inside nerve cells that may be associated with some diseases that kill these nerve cells, such as Alzheimer’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), etc. The webinar includes short talks by a number of scientists, including a presentation by Peter St George-Hyslop that is based on a very recent paper in Neuron. The report reports a lot of work by a small army of scientists on a protein called FUS. Some mutant variants of FUS are associated with the disease ALS.
Teaching till I drop, and now some chaos
Most of my teaching is in the semester whose teaching weeks ended yesterday — it has been a bit crazy. I was more-or-less completely revising two of the three courses I was teaching, so I was a like a little hamster perpetually running on a hamster wheel of lecture and question sheet writing.
Many genes, simple models
Next week is the last teaching week of this semester. I have been revising almost from scratch both of my second year courses, which at times has taken most of my waking moments. Most of my teaching is this semester, so I have been crazy busy. But I have had time to add a small new bit to my final-year biological physics course. This is on the fact that many aspects of our bodies, and the diseases that afflict them, are controlled not by a single gene, but by many.
Creating a paper trail to prove an article is on the web
This post is a slight lament at good intentions turned bureaucratic drag. In what we must now call the good old days, the final stages of publishing a scientific paper were free of paperwork. You would just check the proofs of your article, then sit back and wait for it to appear, whereupon your coauthors and you could sit back and bask in a warm glow.
Why oh why did it have to be sausages? Why is it sausages?
This week’s devastating news is the declaration that sausages, bacon, etc cause cancer. Sigh. Why couldn’t it have been cabbage? The news was triggered by a report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. There is an interesting blog post on this by Cancer Research UK (CRUK).
Chance & Necessity 