Do you want to see the research you pay for?

Then you should sign a petition to encourage the White House to require all tax payer funded research publications to be freely available online.

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

* via access2research

Pirate Duck

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate duck is me
I’ve got a patch
I’ve got a bill
I’ve got a curvy sword
I’ve got oily feathers
So no water gets on board
Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate duck is me

via Tumblr

Why I don’t read science press releases…

…and you shouldn’t either. Larry Moran makes the catch.

The press release:

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have made a discovery that once again forces us to rewrite our textbooks. This time, however, the findings pertain to RNA, which like DNA carries information about our genes and how they are expressed. The researchers have identified a novel base modification in RNA which they say will revolutionize our understanding of gene expression…Although mRNA was thought to contain only four nucleobases, their discovery shows that a fifth base, N6-methyladenosine (m6A), pervades the transcriptome.

Continue reading “Why I don’t read science press releases…”

What rhymes with “Spinoza”? – Ros Peters’ “The Philosophy Song”

MC Shanahan is on tour today. So, y’all get stuck with me. In what may be a repressed hope that you will follow the back links to my stand-up comedy set at Bright Club Cambridge. Kind of sad, eh?

Bright Club featured the comedy musical stylings of Rosalind Peters, and we were featuring what was undoubtedly the nerdiest song of the night, “The Philosophy Song”. I’m pretty sure the lyrics were composed after Ros asked, “What rhymes with Spinoza?”

Sunday Poem

In honor of Walt Whitman’s May birthday, this week’s poem is “There Was a Child Went Forth”, which captures both Whitman’s omnivorous spirit, as well as the innate curiosity of children that lies, or at least should lie, at the root of every scientist’s drive to comprehend the world.

Contrary to what many think about the practice of science, the key to scientific success is not to master some authoritative corpus of knowledge; it is to know how to ask questions. The ever quotable Richard Feynman put it this way: “We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt.”

Children seem to naturally have this ability to recognize that they don’t know something, and to leave themselves open to new discoveries about what is real, and “the thought if after all it should prove unreal.” Continue reading “Sunday Poem”