scientificactivist

As my own department faces budget shortfalls and considers increasingly extreme measures to improve the situation, I thought it would be appropriate to bring back this post from the archives. The following post explores the results and interpretation of a recent study that found that university…

Last week's Fantastical Fridays was a big hit, so we'll keep the momentum going with more chemistry this week. Instead of anthropomorphic molecules, though, this one is all about chemicals with downright ridiculous names. If you still have any doubts after last week that chemists can have a great…

The National Academies today released their report on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years. The verdict? "High confidence that planet is warmest in 400 years; less confidence in temperature reconstructions prior to 1600." The reviews from around the web are equally mixed…

We all know that the blogosphere is the most incestuous place outside of Arkansas, so why fight it? In that spirit, here's a post that contributes no new information to the web. Luckily, though, some people are actually expanding our body of knowledge. For example, Jake Young of Pure Pedantry,…

The latest word on the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose fundraising challenge is that as of Tuesday the total amount of donations had reached $12,325.59, plus $10,000 in matching funds from Seed. Here at The Scientific Activist we've raised $345.00 in generous donations, bringing us to 7% of our…

Today's issue of Nature includes a particularly damning news story about the financial troubles facing the Public Library of Science, a publisher of several prestigious open access journals. In the article, Nature describes PLoS's difficulties and heavily stresses its continued reliance on…

Today, the Interacademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), an organization of 92 scientific academies from around the globe, released a statement endorsing the importance of teaching evolution as a fundamental scientific principle. The IAP emphasizes the following uncontested evolutionary facts…

Nature started it with its recently begun open peer review trial, and PLoS got on board with its own announcement of a new interactive journal, PLoS ONE. Now, The Daily Transcript reports that Cell has also joined the latest trend by allowing reader comments on some of its articles. What's the…

The latest edition of the science blog carnival Tangled Bank is up at Centrerion Canadian Politics. Go check it out for a good sampling of what people have been writing about around the science blogosphere, which does, you may be surprised to find out, extend beyond the confines of Seed's…

It was a huge pain in the ass, and it probably wasn't worth the effort, but I'm happy to announce that I have organized all of my posts from the old site by category and by date. You can now access them from my main archives page or from this post. Enjoy! By date: June 2006 May 2006 April 2006…

This week, Seed asks its ScienceBloggers: How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?... As you probably know, I find myself in the grad student demographic, and as…

It looks like I have quite a few new people coming to the site today to read about some pretty bizarre chemistry, so if you happen to be one of them, I'd encourage you to have a look around the rest of the site. To find out what The Scientific Activist is all about, read my introductory post, or…

As I've spent my entire weekend alternatively sitting in front of a ginormous magnet running NMR experiments and in front of a computer screen analyzing the data from those experiments, the blogging has unfortunately been light. However, I just wanted to give a quick update on the ScienceBlogs/…

I just found out that the journal impact factors for 2005 were recently released, and as usual, the journals with the highest impact factors are not necessarily the ones that would be considered the most prestigious. Therefore, the following post from the archives, about an alternative rating…

Lurking beneath the surface here at ScienceBlogs is a force that compels people to do extremely gimmicky things on Fridays. Since I know that I'm no better than anyone else, I've decided to join in on the fun. Therefore, I introduce to you Fantastical Fridays at The Scientific Activist. From now…

OK, people, here's your chance to help out science and math classrooms with much needed funding and to show everybody here at ScienceBlogs that The Scientific Activist has the best damn readers around! To donate to a worthy cause, click here. The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-…

On Sunday, I wrote about the Miller Amendment to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Act, an amendment that would put into law some of the most comprehensive protections against political interference to date. I noted that the amendment had been stalled by the Republican leadership…

Via Evolving Thoughts comes news that the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is starting a series of blogs to promote its recently announced interdisciplinary PLoS ONE journal. PLoS publishes several prestigious open access scientific journals and is now taking things a step further with a new…

I see that Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science recently republished an interesting series of posts on animal rights and scientific ethics that originally came out around the same time I was writing about my experience at an animal rights protest. In light of that, we'll keep this…

Here's another post from the old site. Since I've been writing quite a bit lately about Pro-Test and the response of Oxford scientists to animal rights extremism, it's important to understand why the current movement is significant, in light of what scientists in Oxford have been facing over the…

Although Steinn Sigurdsson of Dynamics of Cats beat me to this one, I still thought I would chime in. The Guardian reports today that is was recently able to purchase a 78-nucleotide sequence of DNA based on the small pox genome and that it was able to get the supplier to mail it to a residential…

"Ph.D. programs don't really attract the most exceptional students," he said. I was having dinner with a few professors and graduate students from the Oxford Department of Biochemistry last night when one of the professors made that assertion. The topic of conversation was why so many graduate…

Here at The Scientific Activist, we welcome criticism--intelligent criticism, that is (as opposed to unintelligible dribble like this). Besides, when it comes to boosting traffic stats, any link is a good link, so I thought I should give a shout out to some of the nice folks who linked to me over…

It looks like it's going to be a pretty busy day for me, so here's a post from the archives. I picked this one because it's still very timely (the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 is still in committee in the Senate) and it's related to my recent post on open peer review. (4 May 2006)…

The Bad Astronomy Blog reports that NASA has officially admitted that censorship did in fact take place there recently. In a letter to Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT), NASA writes: ...an internal inquiry has revealed that one recent media request to interview Dr. James Hansen, of the Goddard…

Each week, Seed magazine poses a question to all of its ScienceBloggers. This week's question, from reader Jake Bryan, is: Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why? My current work is in…

I bring of the subject of political interference in science so much that I'm starting to sound like a broken record. By this point, it's pretty much a topic that needs no introduction around here, so we'll just dive right in. In the ongoing struggle against political interference Michael Stebbins…

This is a plug for an event that the Oxford University Biochemical Society is putting together. This Monday, June 12th, at 4:00 pm the Oxford University Biochemical Society will be hosting a talk by Nobel Laureate Robert Huber in the University Museum (on Parks Road). The topic of the talk will…

Conservatives in America have become pretty adept at shrugging off worries about global warming, and when it comes to evolution, well, they have their own ideas about how that works. However, this headline from National Geographic might cause some circuits to blow: "Global Warming Is Spurring…

I mentioned earlier this week on my old blog that White House Science Adviser John Marburger would be answering questions from the public via Newsweek, and his answers have now been posted. My reactions are mixed, although he was more open than I had expected. So, what did he say? Well, I'll…