Condensed concepts

On a recent flight, I watched the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley . It chronicles the dramatic rise and fall o...

I am often on the lookout for interesting molecules and solids which involve short hydrogen bonds, particularly biomolecules where this bond...

Here are several interesting and related things about retracted journal articles. 1. Some retracted articles continue to get cited! For e...

I few times I have posted scenes from the TV show, The Big Bang Theory, that involved actual science such as topological insulators , spin i...

Unfortunately, I would say yes. I find it discouraging that some papers contain rambling speculative sections, particularly about connecting...

There is a very thoughtful article in Angewandte Chemie The Seven Sins in Academic Behavior in the Natural Sciences by Wilfred F. van Guns...

The Sunday New York Times magazine has a fascinating and disturbing article The Mind of a Con Man about Diederik Stapel , former Dean of Be...

The last post was about spam. Unfortunately, this one is too. It turns out there is a dark side to open access journals. This is covered ...

There seems to be a common view that on CVs (and grant applications) people should list the Impact Factors for each journal in which they ha...

I found this sad story interesting and disturbing because of what it reveals about journal impact factors, university rankings, self-citati...

The controversy about the plagiarised Ph.D of the President of Hungary, Pal Schmitt, is making for "interesting" reading. In 1992 ...

Remember Hendrik Schon ! A decade ago he published a string of very impressive Nature and Science papers that eventually turned out to be ...

Turnitin is commercial software that detects student plagiarism by comparing submitted assignments to everything on the web and a vast datab...

The flood waters are beginning to subside in Brisbane. Above is a picture of the northside of the UQ campus. Fortunately, no major building...

There is a good Opinion piece in the November Scientific American, Fudge Factor: a look at Harvard science fraud case  by Scott O. Lillienfe...

Everyone should make sure they are familiar with the American Physical Society's guidelines: Authorship should be limited to those who ...

The latest issue of Nature Physics has a review by Mike Norman of the book, Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the S...