http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34518/title/O...
Scientific Peer Review in Crisis

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34518/title/O...
Scientific Peer Review in Crisis

My reply to this article: Opinion: Scientific Peer Review in Crisis
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34518/title/O...
If you read some of the papers published in the journals around the world you feel this is true.
Ignorance, lack of quality reviewers who are good at several things, confusion all around, commercialization of science and biases are playing a great part in substandard stuff coming out of these journals.
But who cares and who reads? Like Indians say 'sub kutch chalta hai idhar' - everything is okay here or everything and anything goes here! I thought till now this is relevant to developing countries. But now I feel anything goes in the developed world too! We are on the same wavelengths! Standards?! Forget them. If you have that big name and aura around you, or money to support scientific research you can get away with anything and everything! Yes, with rubbish too!
But science is suffering in all this. People will lose their faith in science if this is allowed to go on.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112799946/genetic-dust-mites-...
Study Of Dust Mites Show That Reverse Evolution Is Genetically Possible

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/mar/13/jo-marchant-science-w...
Science writing: 'You need a burning curiosity'

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=split-brain-patien...
Split-Brain Patients Reveal Brain's Flexibility

http://babscience.com/Home.html

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/03/18/tourist.fed.stingrays.c...

Tourist-fed stingrays change their ways

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/03/18/elite.athletes.also.exc...

Elite athletes also excel at some cognitive tasks

Women have more efficient brains: Study

Women may have smaller brains than men, but they are more efiiccient at completing a task, a new study has claimed. It has been a mystery for scientists why women show no difference in intelligence, although their brains are eight per cent smaller than men's. Neuroscienitsts found that women's brains are more efficient , needing fewer neurons and less energy to complete a task. The study conducted a range of psychological tests on 59 women and 45 men, aged 18-27. They found that in women the hippocampus, which plays a central role in memory , intelligence and emotion, consumes less energy and uses fewer brain cells on a given task than in men, the Sunday Times reported.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/03/26/you.dont.own.your.own.g...

You don't 'own' your own genes

http://www.spongelab.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Hop+on+...

http://www.scilogs.com/communication_breakdown/four-ways-to-open-a-...
Four ways to open a science story

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=india-court-ruling...
India Court Ruling Upholds Access to Cheaper, Generic Drugs

India’s Supreme Court today rejected efforts by the Swiss drug major Novartis to patent the anticancer drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate), in a ruling that signaled India’s determination to support affordable medicines.

The court rejected the Basel-based company’s challenge to India’s patent law, which limits drug firms’ ability to extend patent life beyond 20 years by making minor modifications to drugs, a tactic known as ‘evergreening’. Novartis's patent claim on a modified version of Gleevec (marketed in some countries as Glivec) “fails in both the tests of invention and patentability”, the court said.

****

The Supreme Court denied efforts by Novartis to patent an anticancer drug by "evergreening" its chemistry, signaling India's commitment to price reductions for drugs, especially HIV drugs
The purpose of evergreening by the pharmaceutical companies is to extend the patent on the old drug and NOT allow generics to be made. This keeps the price & $profits high and restricts access to the drug.

"This technique, known as “evergreening,” allows pharmaceutical companies to obtain or extend monopoly protection for old drugs simply by making minor modifications to existing formulations or dosages, or by identifying a new therapeutic use for an existing medicine."

http://aids2012.msf.org/2012/the-trans-pacific-partnership-agreemen...

http://adage.com/article/global-news/courvoisier-unilever-manipulat...
How Courvoisier and Unilever Manipulate the Senses
Other Marketers Lag In Sensory Marketing; Expert Spells Out Opportunities

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mirror-neurons-can...
Mirror Neurons Can Reflect Hatred

Mirror neurons distinguish between those we like and those we do not.
Mirror neuron activity is thought to be a very basic part of brain function—and it can be seen in many animals besides humans—the new finding supports the notion that our brain is predisposed to distinguish “us versus them.” This distinction can be beneficial, encouraging caution around those with harmful intentions, or dangerous, further entrenching prejudices. To weaken unwelcome biases, lead author Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, suggests that exposure and perspective taking could go a long way.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/27-science-fictions-that-became-scie...
27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2012

Official mind reading is possible

Crime drama CSI, which airs on KHQA-CBS.
One of that show's saying is, "Science doesn't lie." - Very True!

Scientists 'read dreams' using brain scans

Scientists have found a way to "read" dreams, a study suggests.

Researchers in Japan used MRI scans to reveal the images that people were seeing as they entered into an early stage of sleep.

Writing in the journal Science, they reported that they could do this with 60% accuracy.

The team now wants to see if brain activity can be used to decipher other aspects of dreaming, such as the emotions experienced during sleep.

Professor Yukiyasu Kamitani, from the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, in Kyoto, said: "I had a strong belief that dream decoding should be possible at least for particular aspects of dreaming... I was not very surprised by the results, but excited."

Brain wave

People have been trying to understand dreams since ancient Egyptian times, but the researchers who have carried out this study have found a more direct way to tap into our nighttime visions.

The team used MRI scans to monitor three people as they slept.

Just as the volunteers started to fall asleep inside the scanners, they were woken up and asked to recount what they had seen.

Each image mentioned, from bronze statues to keys and ice picks, was noted, no matter how surreal.

This was repeated more than 200 times for each participant.

The researchers used the results to build a database, where they grouped together objects into similar visual categories. For example, hotel, house and building were grouped together as "structures".

The scientists then scanned the volunteers again, but this time, while they were awake and looking at images on a computer screen.

With this, they were able to see the specific patterns of brain activity that correlated with the visual imagery.

Dream machines?

During the next round of sleep tests, by monitoring the brain scans the researchers could tell what the volunteers were seeing in their dreams. They were able to assess which broad category the images were in with 60% accuracy.

"We were able to reveal dream content from brain activity during sleep, which was consistent with the subjects' verbal reports," explained Professor Kamitani.

The researchers now want to look at deeper sleep, where the most vivid dreams are thought to occur, as well as see whether brain scans can help them to reveal the emotions, smells, colours and actions that people experience as they sleep.

Dr Mark Stokes, a cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Oxford, said it was an "exciting" piece of research that brought us closer to the concept of dream-reading machines.

"It's obviously a long way off, but there is no reason why not in principle. The difficult thing is to work out the systematic mapping between the brain activity and the phenomena," he explained.

However, he added that a single dream-reading system would not work for everyone.

"All of this would have to be done within individual subjects. So you would never be able build a general classifier that could read anybody's dreams. They will all be idiosyncratic to the individual, so the brain activity will never be general across subjects," he said.

"You would never be able to build something that could read other peoples thoughts without them knowing about it, for example."

Sursa: bbc.co.uk

Thank you, Georgescu, for posting this information!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9977464/Scientists-...
Scientists should be celebrities, says Prof Brian Cox
It means he can no longer visit his favourite pub incognito, but Professor Brian Cox has argued scientists should be celebrities as it gets people interested in the subject.

The particle physicist and television presenter said he hoped for a return to the way of the 19th century, when British scientists such as Michael Faraday and Humphry Davy were “celebrities hanging out with the romantic poets.”

It was a time when attending science lectures was a popular pursuit and “ideas were seen as exciting,” he said.

Reflecting on the renown that means he can no longer visit the Clapham High Street pub he loves in south London for fear of being ambushed by fans, he said: "Why wouldn't you want academics to be celebrities?... Of course I want science to be part of popular culture like that again.

“It's the way you get people interested in scientific ideas."

Prof Cox, who has recently returned to lecturing at Manchester University, where he teaches quantum physics and relativity, denied that his students were star struck by him however.

He told the Sunday Times News Review: “Maybe in the first lecture that I give in September they'll behave differently when they first come in, but within minutes they're criticising the size of your writing or whatever."

While he did not tend to listen to his critics, he said, “sometimes they make you aware of the clichés you've created or any laziness that's coming into what you do, so for that reason they can be good.”

Prof Cox, who played the keyboard in a hard rock band called Dare before joining the better known pop group D:Ream, said he had learned his lesson about critics then.

“Our first album was criticised for not being heavy enough, so we followed it up with one that was heavier but basically fairly s***,” he said of Dare.

“It was exactly the wrong thing to do and I've always remembered that.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/04/12/secrets.bacterial.slime...
Secrets of bacterial slime revealed
Newcastle University scientists have revealed the mechanism that causes a slime to form, making bacteria hard to shift and resistant to antibiotics. When under threat, some bacteria can shield themselves in a slimy protective layer, known as a biofilm. It is made up of communities of bacteria held together to protect themselves from attack.

Biofilms cause dental plaque and sinusitis; in healthcare, biofilms can lead to life threatening and difficult to treat infections, particularly on medical implants such as catheters, heart valves, artificial hips and even breast implants. They also they coat the outside of ships and boats polluting the water.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/saying-it-with-science/a...
Saying it with Science

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-explodin...;
For Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia
The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects.
But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé.

“I think we were duped,” one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society.

Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events.

Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon “the dark side of open access,” the movement to make scholarly publications freely available.

The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them.

Open access got its start about a decade ago and quickly won widespread acclaim with the advent of well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals like those published by the Public Library of Science, known as PLoS. Such articles were listed in databases like PubMed, which is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, and selected for their quality.

My take on this: I have seen several common people gaining 'some partial knowledge' from the internet and actually arguing with scientists about science! Even I don't  do that with my well qualified colleagues! Wikipedia is one such thing which doesn't give full proof  information on science. Anybody can write anything on the site. I came across people giving references of Wikipedia with regard to science. Internet is confusing people too. Everybody is an expert here! Who can people believe here? Who is a 'real scientist'?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sea-urchin-evoluti...
Can Evolution beat Climate Change?

http://www.examiner.com/article/bad-decisions-come-from-bad-informa...
Bad decisions come from bad information, new study says
Science Daily reported yesterday on a new study that showed bad decisions come from errors in sensory input, rather than the brain's decision-making process.

While it might seem obvious that bad information leads to bad decisions, the question Princeton University researchers were trying to answer was whether the errors that lead to bad decisions occurred during sensory input, or deeper in the brain where decisions are made.

To do this, they subjected 4 human volunteers and 19 lab rats to streams of randomly timed clicks, which were played in both the left and right ear. Once the subjects listened to the stream, the subject had to choose which side more clicks originated from. The rats were previously trained to turn their noses in the direction of the most clicks.

More often than not, the subjects chose the correct side. When they did make the occasional error, it was when two clicks overlapped. There was no observable "noise," meaning errors, in the brain systems responsible for tallying the clicks. Multiple replications of the experiment showed these results. That meant that the errors leading the the wrong decisions occurred based on inaccurate sensory inputs, rather than faults in how that information was processed.

The data from the study were put into a computer model of the decision making process, giving insight into how the brain interprets sensory data and goes about making a decision.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130415172429.htm
Bad Decisions Arise from Faulty Information, Not Faulty Brain Circuits

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/warning-bad-science-can...
Warning: Bad science can damage your health

Nature's great ecologists:

http://www.google.com/green/products/engineers/#/bower-birds

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/35143/title/J...
Jailed for Faking Data

A researcher working for a US pharmaceutical company’s Scotland branch is sent to prison for falsifying safety test data on experimental drugs due for clinical trials.

http://www.techlicious.com/guide/top-sites-that-make-science-awesome/
Top Sites That Make Science Awesome

"As for integrity, those researchers who are surprised that the world of peer-reviewed publication does not always produce the highest quality research should have their degrees revoked. Academic credentials aren't sufficient if you don't understand how the human being works, particularly en masse.

Just because an article has been published, even in a highly reputable journal, doesn't mean it couldn't possibly contain an error. And if an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is. "

This is a sweeping statement. It is the endeavour of the scientific community to get things improved. Only because people understand things, they point the flaws out and bring it to the notice of the scientific community, for it to take steps to make the changes for the improvement. Not because to understand the flaws of how human beings or their minds behave and work and keep quiet. Science degrades if scientists fail to raise their voices against "substandardness"! Science can never correct itself if this happens. Science learns by its mistakes and advances by correcting itself.

Thank you, Georgescu, for the informative images.

http://incubator.rockefeller.edu/?p=1123
5 Steps to Separate Science from Hype, No PhD Required

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/talking-back/2013/05/02/spring-...
Spring (and Scientific Fraud) Is Busting Out all over

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/borges-and-the-para...
Paradox of the perceived and Quantum mechanics