Dr. Patrick McMullen and alumnus of the Amaral lab has been appointed as a Senior Scientist by The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences . McMullen is “mapping the mechanisms that translate a cellular input into a specific response”, with a focus on toxicity pathways.
Being in a great lab as part of a college experience
As an undergraduate student, I have never envisioned joining a lab and doing research a year ago, but now (as you can see)––
Daniel Stouffer receives Rutherford Discovery Fellowship
Dr. Daniel Stouffer, currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences at University of Canterbury, and an alumnus of the Amaral lab was awarded a prestigious Rutherford Discovery Fellowship by the Royal Society of New Zealand. The NZ$800,000 fellowship will fund Stouffer’s research for the next five years. ...
Stand up and make a retraction
A Nature paper from 2005 that reported a connection between body symmetry and dancing ability was recently retracted. Whatever for? I Investigate.
Corporations are people, but some people are psychotic
Communicating with a distant friend twenty years ago meant that I would have to send a hastily composed letter or, gasp, ask my parents if I could call long-distance. E-mail and the internet weren’t pervasive and there were no apps that would alert me to how influential I was on ...
Why papers are like superhero movies
When you write a paper, you are thinking about science. When you watch a superhero movie, you are being entertained. A paper and a superhero movie appear entirely unrelated to each other. People rarely realize the similarities between them.
Amaral elected Fellow of American Physical Society
Luis Amaral has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society “for seminal advances in the characterization and modeling of complex systems, especially for the proposal and development of cartographic methods for the representation of large complex networks.”
The human side of science
The human side of science I’m not sure how we, as humans, ended up doing science, as we don’t strictly need it for surviving on Earth. But, the search for truth, which surely drives all scientists in the world, has little to do with their personal life. Anecdote #1The oil ...
Negative results are boring
A few weeks ago, The Economist ran an interesting series of articles chronicling “How science goes wrong.” While most of their points were – or should be – painfully obvious to academics, seeing it in writing has its merits, and helping to educate the general public on some of these ...
The Lunar Standard Time
A calendar for people on the moon. Because you never know when lunar colonization is going to take off. Better safe than sorry!
Annoying things about conferences (Part I)
I am not gonna discuss those big shots getting drunk and holding court. Whether they qualify as annoying or not, I guess it depends on the particular drunk.
The Messy Art of Teaching
Teaching is more than just presenting material and giving periodic exams. To truly transmit information to students, you have to be able to recognize how to best communicate with them, and sometimes that involves a little bit of guesswork!
Confirmation bias and proof by example: Why people think the Moon always appears at night (while it doesn’t)
Xiaohan Zeng, Andrea LancichinettiEdited by Nick Timkovich For thousands of years, people thought that the Sun and the Moon were opposites: the Sun governs the day, and the Moon dominates the night. Surprisingly, this observation is common across many cultures. In Greek mythology, Apollo, the god of the Sun, and ...
Looking Good
Researchers need to have a better appreciation of aesthetics; one can not simply avoid rainbow-colored text on a poster with a red-green gradient using illegible font sizes in PowerPoint and call it good.
OBITUARY-In Memoriam- Celebrating the life and works of François Jacob
FROM A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, THROUGH THE SEARCH FOR REGULATION PRINCIPLES, TO THE LOGIC OF LIFE.
A better way to communicate science?
Nowadays communication is becoming increasingly prevalent on the Internet from traditional outlets as well as in social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Although in this media we can create dynamic (and even real time) contents with just a web browser, we (scientists) commonly use static figures for our documents. Now it is time to embrace these new dynamic visualization techniques.
Coding in Emacs and PyCharm
While I’m paid to do research, much of my daily activities involve programming. As such, I like to experiment with ways to make writing code simpler and faster by playing around with my development environment.
Getting things done, the old fashioned way
There are days where my head is racing with ideas, my fingers are moving a mile-a-minute and I’m at some point faced with the fact that I have without a doubt accomplished more than I do during a normal week. Some might celebrate this flurry of activity. But I’m a ...