Periodic Tabloid

Most of us over the age of 30 have pleasant memories of quiet reading in the library, perusing issues of Current Contents, and wandering around book stacks looking at volumes we hoped to read some day. Thanks to the Internet, Google, and other assorted technologies, most of us no longer do these things.

Project Zero, that is. PZ is a center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education whose mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity.

I’m at the beach today, slathered with sunscreen of course. No useful work is likely to emerge from such circumstances, hence no regular blog post on this Thursday. 

Twelve years ago John Horgan announced The End of Science in a book with the same title. He didn’t think the process or practice of science was over, but he predicted there would be no more major new scientific discoveries, revolutionary changes, or paradigm shifts.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has just published a report on the master’s degree in the sciences. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the committee that authored the report.) Originally (and cleverly, or at least so thought we committee members) the report’s title was “Mastering the Future: Educating Science Professionals for a Competitive Future.” The final version, compliant with NAS rules, is the more sedate “Enhancing the Master’s Degree in the Natural Sciences.”

One of the beautiful attractions of the modern scientific enterprise is the utter honesty of its practitioners. It simply does not cross one’s mind that results published in a technical paper might be faked, made up, distorted, adulterated, or otherwise misrepresented. The interpretations might be questioned, but not the results.

The Biotechnology Heritage Award is given annually by the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Biotechnology Industry Organization to recognize outstanding contributions to the biotechnology community. The award recognizes an individual within the biotechnology community.

Most people who labor in the vineyards of the physical sciences have a certain affinity for mathematics. Quantitative reasoning skills are pretty much essential for success in fundamental scientific discovery.

STEM: an inellegant term signifying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Usually STEM is an adjective describing such nouns as education, initiative, program, coalition, and the like. If it were up to me, I’d drop the TEM and let S be the synonym for the whole lot.

When you string several hundred amino acids together, they don’t like to exist all stretched out, but instead fold into a compacted form. In fact, proteins fold, all on their own, into a single unique form, and no other form will function correctly.