You can say all you like about lions or elephants being the coolest animals in Africa. They are awesome for sure but they’re not quite the top. I suggest that that title goes to the chameleon and the zebra.
Why? They are just so unique: one changes colour as much as a fashion model, and the other has a coat pattern unlike any other mammal. And thanks to two papers released this year, we’ve begun to understand a bit more about their unique skin.
Would you look at that! The story of mosquitos, cheese and body odour has taken another leap into scientific respectability with a paper being published in the pinnacle of journals, Nature. “Evolution of mosquito preference for humans linked to an odorant receptor” by McBride and colleagues was published towards the end of last year and looks at how the domestic form of the mosquito Aedes aegypti has evolved striking evolutionary adaptations that help it to find, bite, and spread disease to humans.
I caught this paper in a TOC email from Current Biology. “Predict who becomes a PI” they say. “Hmm,” I think, “This should be interesting.”
The abstract sets out the problem simply: “so far there has been no quantitative analysis of who becomes a principal investigator (PI). We here use a machine-learning approach to predict who becomes a PI, based on data from over 25,000 scientists in PubMed. We show that success in academia is predictable.” Continue reading “Predicting your academic career”
Science requires controlled and well-planned experiments. Without correct set-up, results from experiments may not be reliable enough to be trusted. Circadian biology is no different in that regard, and especially when trying to find out if something has a working circadian clock, controlled experiments are crucial. Continue reading “How do you study circadian rhythms?”
A lot of research (especially in biological sciences) is conducted using ‘models’. Like models in the fashion world, research models serve as a showcase of a specific (trait) or phenomena and can be a very useful tool for those scientists who are interested in that problem. Continue reading “Models in research”