Scientific journals tend to have very strict formatting. There is an expected structure. There are templates. If an author tries to deviate, it’ll probably get changed back to tradition somewhere in the editorial process. Not to mention it’ll annoy the reviewers and you really don’t want to do with that. But every now and then […]
After vanishing for a bit into the world of working strange hours and taking classes, I am back with a discussion of discoveries hiding in plain sight. That almost seems topical! There have been plenty of scientific discoveries that occurred, essentially, because someone decided to actually look. So let’s look at some recent and not […]
In my early days of grad school, I was going to look at the mechanism of reactions with silicon and gemanium triple bonds. Of course, it eventually became clear that my chemistry talents lay in spectroscopy, computational, data analysis and actually writing the paper and not at all in the actual synthesis. But in the […]
There is a tendency to interpret the phrase “hotly debate” in academic matters as a rather sedate sort of thing. Which is absurd, since scientists are, contrary to popular belief, still people. And that makes them just as prone to absurd drama as knitting enthusiasts and science fiction fans. Though maybe not quite as much […]
I’ve been pretty sick for the past week and a half, so we’re going with a really easy post today. Aka I am going to share a recipe. More specifically, I am sharing the recipe for the fudge that inevitably earned an excited “Margaret made fudge!” when I brought it to lab functions. This fudge […]
As a Terry Pratchett fan, I love a good footnote. Scientific footnotes are generally fairly dry things. However, every now and then you get a footnote that is in fact hilarious. I’ve already shared my favourite, which I love for its pure “Reviewer 3 made me do it” honesty. But there are several other great […]
Angewandte Chemie is one of the top journals in chemistry. This means that knowing a bit of German is very useful for reading older papers (not bad considering I originally took it to be able to eat lunch!). For some reason, this also means that the entire chemistry community gets exposed to on average one […]
Usually, the abstract of a scientific paper is quite a wordy thing. Shorter than the paper itself by a considerable margin, but it still says a lot. It gives a general overview of what the paper is about and what techniques are used. But every now and then you see an abstract where the authors […]
I was going to try to be topical and do a post about odd things that have won the Nobel Prize. But then I read back through the list and was reminded that the Nobel Committee is in fact dreadfully serious. Needs more Andre Geim, apparently. That’s why we have the Ig Nobels. Then I came […]
There was a great discussion this week on Twitter about science communication inspirations. One thing that came up was how important it was that the Magic School Bus encouraged kids to go out there and make mistakes. During the discussion, it became clear that some of the public doesn’t realize just how important mistakes really […]