Posts By Giorgio
A puzzle worth a Nobel Prize.
Once again, it’s Nobel Prize time. The first prize to be awarded, as expected, was for Physiology and Medicine and went to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire. Mello and Fire were awarded for their discovery of
a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information
namely what is now known as RNA interference or RNAi. Uncommonly for a Nobel Prize, this year’s award came relatively soon after the discovery to which is referred. The paper describing Fire’s and Mello’s work was published in 1998 on Nature. This has been interpreted as a sign of the outstanding importance of their discovery since usually it takes decades for a work to be recognized valuable of such an award. Now, the very fact that someone is publishing a work that is so important to inaugurate a brand new field from scratch is definitely rare and it is something that every scientist dream about. It does happen periodically and many times is, indeed, well recognized for instance with a Nobel Prize. What is very rare, though, it’s the discovery to come out of the blue, completely unexpected. Was this the case for Fire’s Work (he was the corresponding author in the paper)?
All In The Mind
All In The Mind is a wonderful Radio program broadcasted weekly on ABC National Radio in Australia. You can listen at the radio show live if you live in that part of the world or simply download the mp3 files and listen at them from your computer. On the website you can also find transcript of the transmission, in case your english is not excellent and you need some sort of subtitles. The program is also reachable through iTunes so that automatic downloading from week to week is possible in an automatic way. Whatever your choice, I do recommend you hook on it since All in The Mind is one of the best science program you’ll ever experience. All in The Mind describes itself as
a program about the mind, brain and behaviour. From dreaming to depression, addiction to artificial intelligence, consciousness to coma, psychoanalysis to psychopathy, free will to forgetting – All in the Mind explores the human condition through the mind’s eye.
Natasha Mitchell is leading the discussions always in a brillant way; she is not just an ordinary science journalist being actually a scientist herself having studied ingeneering and gone through a PhD in engineering. We all know it is not straight forward to talk about science to non scientists but at the same time we are all well aware of how important this is. All in The Mind really does a good job such that contents are not only enjoyable to non experts but to scientists too. All programs focus on one topic, of course: the mistery of the human mind. It may sound reductive but I believe we got enough material to talk about!
Nature goes preprint for a while (or at least it tries so).
Not everybody is aware that the famous scientific journal Nature has started an editorial experiment on June 2006. Starting from that date all authors who submit their manuscript for reviewing can also decide whether they want their work to be publicly available to all readers on the Nature website for open reviewing: not only will readers be able to go through the manuscript but they are also invited to leave comment to the server. As of now 69 papers appeared on their website but only 37 comments were given in total: that makes far less than a comment per paper! Other websites exist where scientist can upload their work as preprint manuscript, the most famous being arxiv.org, well known amongst physicist. It is not unusual for a manuscript pre-published on arxiv to receive pages and pages of comments, sometimes including figures. The system of peer reviewing is universally considered as one the most powerful features of today’s science but its application is not seldomly debated.
Why is email addictive?
Did it ever happen to you to find yourself hitting the “get new mail” button over and over just as if it was something you cannot help but doing? Email addiction (also known as Emailoholism) seems to be a common experience for so many people working with computers and internet access. Some statistics say it might be of interest of at least 6% of internet users, meaning millions of people. Mindhacks features a wonderful, clear, article about it: here. The bottomline is that whenever we look compulsively for new email we actually obey to some reward-conditioning in our brain, as much as rats in a cage in a learning experiment.