Blogs
The recent news that Marc Tessier-Lavigne is stepping down as president of Stanford University following an investigation into practices in his laboratory is sending shock waves across the scientific community. Much will be written about this apparent fall of a scientific superhero who managed to break ground in neuroscience, launch a huge and successful company (Denali Therapeutics), run research
I have unfortunately not been trying to follow all the complications of the LK-99 superconductor story - I write this blog in my spare time, after all! But it is time for another look. There have been uncountable twists, turns, and reversals in the story, and while I am definitely not going to summarize all those, I'll try to provide a rough summary of where things stand now.
My original hope was
Here's a really interesting paper at eLife on how well AlphaFold technology can predict drug binding modes. That's what a lot of us would very much like to be able to do, of course, and we've wanted to do it for decades now. But it ain't easy. AlphaFold (and RoseTTAFold, et al.) are strikingly good at protein structure prediction, and later refinements have extended that to proteins that don't eve
Editor's Blog
The recent news that Marc Tessier-Lavigne is stepping down as president of Stanford University following an investigation into practices in his laboratory is sending shock waves across the scientific community. Much will be written about this apparent fall of a scientific superhero who managed to break ground in neuroscience, launch a huge and successful company (Denali Therapeutics), run research
In April, Sean Decatur became the new president of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. I spoke to him about the challenges that museums face regarding their collections and ethics, and how museums nurture a science-informed society. Today’s editorial in Science highlights his views expressed to me in a recent conversation and shown below (lightly edited for clarit
When the US Supreme Court took up the case of affirmative action policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, I wrote an editorial arguing that “Science needs affirmative action.” As pointed out in the piece, I was partly responsible for the policies that were litigated in the UNC case, as I served as the chancellor there from 2008 to 2013,
Last weekend, Twitter and later the mainstream media exploded with a controversy surrounding an invitation to prominent vaccine scientist Peter Hotez to debate anti-vax charlatan and spoiler presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr on the podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. There was an immediate rally around Hotez by scientists and celebrities on Twitter and lots of discussion about why this in
In March, Science published a news story and an editorial about how the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been investigating researchers in the United States—mostly Chinese or of Chinese descent—who were identified as violating grant funding policies. Today’s editorial in Science highlights a conversation that I had with Michael Lauer, the deputy director for Extramural
Scientific research is a social process that occurs over time with many minds contributing. But the public has been taught that scientific insight occurs when old white guys with facial hair get hit on the head with an apple or go running out of bathtubs shouting “Eureka!” That’s not how it works, and it never has been. Rather, scientists work in teams, and those teams share find
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Visuals
The design team at Science works with a vibrant, talented community of illustrators every week. Their work captures the complex, often nuanced stories of research findings, policy changes, and the scientific community at large. Here are a few of the illustrations that stood out in our team’s minds from 2022.
2022 was a banner year for the Science family of journals′ social media: We hit 3 million followers on Science Twitter. News from Science Twitter reached half a million followers, and Science Instagram grew to 200K (and then some). We experimented with new ways to accurately communicate science in visually engaging ways, promoting short-form video and audio for the first time, as well as Twitter threads.
The graphics team at Science creates scientific visualizations that convey complex concepts with the highest standards for both accuracy and aesthetics. Using a multitude of creative disciplines and visual resources, we use graphic design, cartography, and data visualizations to tell beautiful and informative scientific stories. Our favorites from 2022 covered a range of research areas, from astro
The multimedia team produces the Science Podcast; creates videos on research, news, and original stories; and helps enrich Science content with audio and video. We asked the team to choose a few memorable highlights from throughout the year. Here are their picks for 2022.
Audio
After looking back through the year, Science Podcast host Sarah Crespi produced an entire segment of her favorite podcas
In the Pipeline
I have unfortunately not been trying to follow all the complications of the LK-99 superconductor story - I write this blog in my spare time, after all! But it is time for another look. There have been uncountable twists, turns, and reversals in the story, and while I am definitely not going to summarize all those, I'll try to provide a rough summary of where things stand now.
My original hope was
Here's a really interesting paper at eLife on how well AlphaFold technology can predict drug binding modes. That's what a lot of us would very much like to be able to do, of course, and we've wanted to do it for decades now. But it ain't easy. AlphaFold (and RoseTTAFold, et al.) are strikingly good at protein structure prediction, and later refinements have extended that to proteins that don't eve
Here’s an oddity for you. Some years back, the chemistry literature was full of papers on ionic liquids. Those are a “molten salt” phase, but it’s true that when you use that phrase you imagine something ferociously hot. After all, salts are pretty high-melting, right? I mean, the most familiar one (sodium chloride) melts at 801 C (1474 F), so it’s safe to say that mo
There are an awful lot of people in this industry who are interested in the idea of targeted protein degradation (TPD), and I've blogged about the topic many times in the past few years. Picking out proteins and sending them into the vicious shredder that is the proteasome is a completely new mode of action for drugs, and there are many examples of it leading to effects that you just don't see (ca
For this Friday post, I wanted to go a bit afield, similar to this one from last year. Human color vision is a very complex topic, and no matter which direction you turn (anatomy, physics of light, perception in the brain, sheer philosophical speculation) you find more complications and tricky problems. These range from the classic dorm-room discussion problem of "Hey, dude, how do I know what wha
Stuff aggregates. That's a lesson in drug screening for you in two words! The problem is that lot of the things that we would like to put into solution to run assays doesn't really want to be in solution all that much. They would rather stick to the sides of the container, or to each other. That goes for plenty of small molecules, and for quite a few proteins as well, even in aqueous systems. Some