/
I've been awfully busy lately between planning for a wedding (well, my own wedding), trying to finish one paper in lab and analyzing the results for another, and a show I'm in this week (see below).
I get to make funny voices on-stage. It's convenient since I'd be making funny voices anyway.
It's still fun to sacrifice life-snippets to the Blog Gods (blods?) so I'll start posting some short bits more frequently. Here's one such item.
A rich stew.
This is what happens when you store rich nutrient agar in a recycling bin for a week or so. It was meant to be a temporary location for some poorly-melted yeast growth media but was forgotten. Now we have a survey of the organisms present in laboratory waste receptacles (at least, we would have if I hadn't just scraped it all out into a biohaz bag).

Just don't do it.

/
If you're going to lie to someone about your work, don't do it in science.
If you're going to lie to someone about your scientific work, don't do it in biomedical research and especially not when researching potential gene therapies.
If you're going to lie about your gene therapy findings, don't do it repeatedly and egregiously for almost a decade and never do it to the source of your funding.

Dr. Li Chen did all that. The NIH (and by extension, the US Dept. of Health and Human Services) is not pleased with him. It's bad enough that his former lab had six retractions all around the same time in 2010. Dr. Chen was intimately involved in the whole mess.

His punishment is essentially a 3-year ban from federal funding and involvement. I'm inclined to think that the investigations and retractions are damning enough. This guy now has a smoldering crater in his CV. Even once he's eligible for federal funding again, I suspect he'll have some trouble getting his grant applications approved. That's a life-threatening condition in any field of science.
/
Let's see what happens when we add an extra letter to some popular web addresses.
You'd think they'd all be trying to ride on the fiber optic coattails of their more popular brethren. You may be correct in many cases.* Here are a few exceptions.**

It's an archive of the FAQ from the Usenet group alt.magic, a group for magicians to discuss their craft. The most recent updates to the FAQ are from 1998 and they're mostly listings of brick-and-mortar magic equipment suppliers. I wonder how many of them are still in business.

A choice quote from one of the supplier descriptions: "He uses a tremendous amount of hyperbola in his advertising..." Are these people magicians or mathematicians?

An Amsterdam-based web design studio. They seem like they made a good choice.


Redirects to a site for some manner of art-printing business. The images are largely uncredited, leading me to suspect they were hijacked from Flickr. They also offer a sizable collection of Licensed Artwork From Star Wars, so if you're still looking for that finishing addition to your Boba Fett-themed living room, try Amazon because there isn't a retail frontend on this site.



*Most single-letter modifications to google.com appear to lead straight to Redirect City by way of the Download This Surreptitious Software Bypass.

**atwitter.com is for sale!
/
Today, I learned about the existence of RoMEO, a database used to answer a very specific but often problematic question about peer-reviewed journals. The question is "Can I store and share the work I've published in this journal with people who want to read it?" and the answer is often "No, nope, never, probably not, you don't have that right, this is ours now, bwahaha, etc. etc." RoMEO lists which publishers feel that way and which publishers have more open attitudes toward self-archiving.