I recently finished An Essay on Science and Narcissism by Bruno Lemaitre. I found this book really insightful and thought I would write some notes about it here. The book was published in 2016 although I only just got around to reading it. You can grab a copy for free here.

A funny thing happened on the way to the pandemic… In the summer of 2019 a colleague of mine, Dr. Peter Frederick – an expert in the wading birds of the Everglades – emailed me. Peter and I served on some university committees together, so I assumed we were just getting together to chat about changes in graduate student admissions or something else administrative.

We have a new paper out. It’s about how chromosomes get shared during cell division. The paper in a nutshell In science-speak Misaligned chromosomes outside the exclusion zone become *ensheathed *in multiple layers of endomembranes. This event consigns the chromosome to missegregation and generates a micronucleus. In normal language Cells can make mistakes when they divide.

In place of a generic blog post, I am reposting a short Twitter thread here. The thread is a response to an opinion piece on the Times Higher Education website titled Pay researchers for results, not plans. (Posts on the THE website require registration of an account that includes a couple of free reads.) I copy-paste thread into this post. If you prefer to read it on Threadreader, you find it here.

Quantifying the degree of colocalisation of two signals in microscopy images is very tricky. Lots has been written on this topic, including in my book The Digital Cell. The focus of this post is on visualising colocalisation . One way to look at colocalisation is two think about two sets of objects and how many of each set overlap. This is sometimes referred to as co-occupancy or object-based colocalisation .

In-person science meetings are returning. To the introverts and the carers, the time-poor and the cash-strapped, the climate-conscious and the travel-phobic, the visa-challenged and the real-coffee appreciators, we had our chance; but in-person science meetings are returning. It’s a sad fact that during the pandemic, we failed to make virtual events work as a complete replacement for in-person meetings.

A new paper means a new paper explainer. This post is all about our new paper on clathrin assembly. Some background info Endocytosis is the way that cells take up material from the outside world. The cell can make tiny vesicles that bud inwards from the cell surface and pinch off to travel inside the cell. This process is important for lots of things that cells do, so there is a lot of interest in how endocytosis works.

We have a new paper out! This post is to describe what our paper is about. The paper is free to read, so please take a look if you are interested. Gabrielle Larocque, Daniel J. Moore, Méghane Sittewelle, Cansu Kuey, Joseph H.R. Hetmanski, Penelope J. La-Borde, Beverley J. Wilson, Nicholas I. Clarke, Patrick T. Caswell &

There are perennial topics of discussion on Science Twitter. An example of this is: should figures be at the end of a manuscript are interspersed in the text. These topics tend not to be resolved because there are strong arguments (and personal preferences) on each side. I am not sure whether it is even possible to get people to agree with you using reasoned argument on Twitter.

The Costs of HARKing: Does it Matter if Researchers Engage in Undisclosed Hypothesizing After the Results are Known? While no-one’s looking, a Texas sharpshooter fires his gun at a barn wall, walks up to his bullet holes, and paints targets around them. When his friends arrive, he points at the targets and claims he’s a good shot.