Friday, August 9, 2013

Links

Some interesting links:

Open access and professional societies

Access to research results

Faking data ??: Note in SI in ACS journal

A video on Saha, Raman and Bose: The quantum Indians

A big controversy on the use of cryo electron microscopy to image HIV viruses

The PNAS paper shows a 6-ångström view of HIV's surface proteins.... If the results hold, Sodroski, Mao, and co-workers have unveiled the sharpest view of the trimers ever captured in the precise configuration that the immune system sees them. This could lead to new insights about how antibodies capable of stopping HIV bind to the virus. 

Several respected HIV/AIDS researchers are wowed by the work. But others—structural biologists in particular—assert that the paper is too good to be true and is more likely fantasy than fantastic. "That paper is complete rubbish," charges Richard Henderson, an electron microscopy pioneer at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K. "It has no redeeming features whatsoever."
Another controversial issue based on another PNAS paper is on monogamy

As the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there was a strong correlation in time between all three hypotheses—parental care, female range, and infanticide by males—and the rise of social monogamy in the roughly 60 primate species that live in pairs. However, among the three explanations, only infanticide actually preceded social monogamy in time and thus could be a driving evolutionary force, the team concludes;