Now on ScienceBlogs: Will Quantum Fusion Save the Day?
PNAS: George Farrants, Freelance Translator (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of George Farrants, a freelance translator (and occasional marathon runner, as seen in the picture). The goal is to provide some additional information for...
PNAS: Jennifer Saam, Medical Science Liason (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Jennifer Saam, who translates between different departments at a medical diagnostic laboratory. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students...
PNAS: Adam DeConinck, High-Performance Computing Systems Engineer (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Adam DeConinck, who works at a company providing supercomputing resources. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about...
PNAS: Matthew Schlecht, Freelance Translator (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Matthew Schlecht, a chemist by training who runs his own technical translation service, Word Alchemy Translation. The goal is to provide some additional...
Some Advice for the Lonely Students Standing By Themselves Next to Their Posters Of course, the Mad Biologist never violates these rules. EVAH!
PNAS: Richard Lobinske, Hazardous Waste Manager (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Richard Lobinske, a Hazardous Waste Manager (meaning he handles chemicals, such as these decades-old pesticides, not particularly noxious low-level employees). The goal is...
PNAS: Darren Anderson, Start-Up Chief Technology Officer (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Darren Anderson, the Chief Technology Officer for Vive Nano. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their...
PNAS: Will Hendrick, (Former) Biomedical Technician (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Will Hendrick, who worked as a lab tech before returning to school. (This may seem like an odd inclusion, but there are people...
PNAS: Amy Young, Saponifier (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Amy Young, who runs her own soap-making business. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture...
Return of the Project for Non-Academic Science In keeping with this week's unofficial theme of wibbling about academia, there's an article at The Nation about the evils of graduate school that's prompted some discussion. Sean says more or less what I would, though maybe a little more...
Filtering Isn't the Problem Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating "social media" alternatives for academic publishing, citing "disastrous consequences" of the "filter-then-publish" model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I'm not convinced that social media...
NIH Inches Towards a Research Center Model When every lab group has to reinvent the wheel, there are no efficiencies of scale--and more importantly, no 'efficiencies of expertise.' So NIH is either going to require collaborative, focused centers or the continuing exploitation of scientific labor.
Why bother having a resume? I'm not usually a big fan of Seth Godin's guruish pronouncements, but I thought this one was a pretty good encapsulation of what it means to be a public professional or a public academic in the 21st century. In other...
CVs vs. resumes: when it matters So I ran across this thread, and it made me sad. (And no, not because it wasn't Ed Yong's blog, although that too.) It started off as a happy post: the author, Paula Chambers, is a PhD who began her...
Science Writing, Science Teaching Being a great science teacher is not so different from being a great science writer. You have to convince your audience to pay attention to you, rather than to the myriad other potential sources of entertainment and engagement out there....
Funding dreams and writing Advanced Technology Education proposals for the National Science Foundation It only takes a quick trip to the grocery store to see that familiar jobs are vanishing.
Reference Assistant (Map & GIS / Science), York University Libraries The following is a job posting for the York University Libraries for a Reference Assistant position. Note that a library degree is not required. The job involves both regular science reference and supporting maps & GIS users and will be...
Regarding the Ph.D. Glut, Nature's Heart Is in the Right Place, But They're Not Following the Money Nature doesn't get it: neither research universities nor funders see the glut as a problem-they're too dependent on the status quo.
A blast from the past and a personal update I was digging through some of my old blog posts and had almost totally forgot about this artwork I commissioned for the blog when I first started back on blogger. Check it out and then I'll fill you in on what I've been up to and why I've been so...
Are Smaller and/or Newer Labs More Innovative? Any data on productivity of different sized labs or original awards versus re-resubmissions?
I'll Try One More Time About Biomed Training: It's About Job Skills, Not 'Critical Thinking' As they used to say, learn how to type.
Why Biologists' Career Problems Are Unique: Life Outside of Academia Yes, funding is limited across the STEM fields in academia--and that makes everyone miserable. But I still contend that biomedical scientists are trapped within academia far more than other STEM disciplines.
Your Problems Are Not Unique Via Mad Mike, a discussion of why it sucks to be a biomedical scientist: 87% of my blog-related e-mail is from unhappy, bitter, troubled, distraught biomed grad students, postdocs, technicians, and early-career faculty. Others write to me with problems, but...
So I Was Interviewed... ...For a feature article in this week's Nature on how scientists go about developing and managing online personas. You can check out the article - for free - here. It's a good article, and you'll probably recognize some other familiar...
Why Biomedical Scientists Suffer More Than Others in STEM Fields A lack of options makes biomedical scientists (relatively) miserable.
Orac 04.13.2012
PZ Myers 06.17.2009
Orac 04.30.2012
Tim Lambert 09.12.2011
ERV 11.26.2011
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Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:
Pharyngula May 30, 2007
The Loom January 31, 2008
Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006