Round Up #4

Back when I was blogging regularly, and when I was writing more about science news and less about the woes of being a PhD student I did a few round ups of interesting things I had read that week which I didn’t have the time to write an entire blog post of. Given how much stuff I’ve managed to stray across this week (mainly because I seem to be back on Twitter, after a long hiatus) I thought it was time for another one.  

The Academic Spring… and what it means for Joe Public

In the scientific world, peer-reviewed publishing is the gold standard. When some too-good-to-be-true research is reported on the BBC website or a vaccine sceptic makes a seemingly questionable claim, the first question of every scientifically-minded-person’s lips is: Where is the paper? No matter how strong or persuasive the argument, we want to see the data. We want to scrutinise the methods. We want to know that even if we’re not 100% clear on how the experiment was carried out, the scientific community as a whole has given the research its golden seal of approval. Christians have priests, and Jews have rabbis: Scientists have Nature, Science and Cell.