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Another season starting for Breaking Bad
Hey, Breaking Bad fans–season three starts on March 21! (Coincidence or not that that’s also opening day of the spring ACS meeting?)
To get you in the mood, David Bianculli of the public radio show Fresh Air interviewed Breaking Bad director Vince Gilligan on Tuesday. And here’s a teaser from AMC:
For those who haven’t watched past seasons, it looks like AMC is once again doing a marathon of previous shows over the weekend leading up to the season premiere.
ETH Data Manipulation Report Posted On-line
Last fall, chemist Peter Chen voluntarily resigned from his post as the vice president for research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zürich, (ETH) following a report from a scientific board of inquiry–that Chen had himself requested–which found that data from his lab published a decade ago in two peer-reviewed papers and a doctoral thesis had been falsified.
The university announced the board of inquiry’s results in September 2009 but it was prevented from releasing the full report publically by a court order from the graduate student involved. According to a post today on the ETH website: “The Court has now ruled, in an initial decision taken at the end of December 2009, that ETH Zurich may in principle publish the export report but only in such an anonymised form “that no conclusions can be drawn about the dissertation or the identity of the complainant”.”
You have to go to the university’s German site to access the report. The blacked out lines are actually multicolor and here is the legend: Blue = PhD Student, green = molecule 1, yellow = molecule 2, black = miscellaneous, red and grey = additional members of the research group.
The basic conclusion from the board of inquiry: “The only credible explanation is manipulation of the data.” They finger the graduate student and vindicate Chen.
Some parts of the 22-page document are dry, but in general it is well-written and shows a measured and comprehensive analysis by the scientific board of inquiry. It also gives insight into how such investigations proceed…
Jobs Do Exist
Those of you who follow C&EN writers on Twitter may have noticed the small blitzkrieg of tweets (a twitzkrieg?) announcing open positions at C&EN. We’re looking for two assigning editors for C&EN’s ACS Journal News & Community department. Read the full job description/qualifications and apply here. Contrary to what the job ad has listed, location may be flexible.
They Might Be Giants of Science
Time has a nice video up with interview footage of They Might Be Giants talking about their new album, Here Comes Science. My kids love the album–their current favorite song is The Ballad of Davy Crockett–and if TMBG schedules a family show for SF, we’ll be there!
Caroling Beaker
Last year Beaker offered up “Ode to Joy.” This year we get “Ringing of the Bells.” Happy holidays, everyone!
C&EN Summer Intern
Attention aspiring science writers: the C&EN summer internship is back on!
The candidate should be a highly motivated student or recent graduate with demonstrated interest in science writing and at least a bachelor’s degree in chemistry or a related field. The intern will have a chance to write bylined news and feature stories for publication in C&EN. We offer a $1500 monthly stipend for three months. The intern ideally will be based in our Washington, DC, headquarters; however, exceptional candidates unable to relocate may be considered. Starting and ending dates are flexible.
Click here for details on how to apply. Deadline for applications is Feb 22, 2010.
The Wonderscope Challenge
Around here we love a good science video contest, and apparently the folks at NPR do, too. They’ve just launched The Wonderscope Challenge. They give a topic, a length, and a deadline, and contestants upload their videos via the Wonderscope site. The first assignment is Time, which is maybe not such a great topic for our crowd to tackle, but if submissions are anything like the ones for NanoTube, there should be some pretty entertaining ones to view. Doesn’t look like any prize money is involved, but the top 3 videos will be highlighted on npr.org. NPR includes a great promo video on their Wonderscope site, but you’ll have to go to the site or NPR’s YouTube channel to check it out as it doesn’t seem to be embeddable.
Instead, I’ll leave you with a reprise of “The Nano Song,” for inspiration:
The Nano Song from nanomonster on Vimeo.
More Falling Walls
Before heading to last evening’s rainy celebration of the Berlin Wall’s collapse at the city’s historical Brandenburg Gate–which featured a symbolic toppling of 1000 painted, wall-like dominoes, statements by various political dignitaries (Merkel, Clinton, Brown, Gorbachev, Sarkozy, Medvedev, etc), and performances by Placido Domingo and Jon Bon Jovi–I spent the day at a conference called Falling Walls, which was organized by the Einstein Foundation.
Taking place in a renovated water pumping station in the middle of the former so-called death strip, the no-mans land that abutted the Berlin Wall, a variety of top researchers from the sciences and humanities described the “walls” which were falling or which needed to fall in their area of research. The organizers had also managed to book German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is a scientist-turned-politician from the former GDR (more below). Although no late-breaking new discoveries were announced, the conference provided a fascinating overview of research in a real potpourri of great topics: vaccines for neglected diseases like malaria and TB, three-dimensional televisions, how to make concrete less polluting, and how researchers are cracking the secrets of ancient civilizations , the origin of Homo sapiens. We also heard from Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, about the Large Hadron Collider (which will hopefully start pumping out data one of these days) and from Norbert Holtkamp, who heads Iter, the fusion energy transnational research organization that originated during a 1985 conversation between Gorbachev and Reagan.
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