I apologise to you both for the late arrival of this post. I have been otherwise preoccupied with promoting my latest book Demure Mindfulness the Taylor Swift Way as well as contending with a great ...

I asked Chat GPT: Please recast the argument between Donald Trump and Elon Musk as a scene from a play by William Shakespeare. A Scene from The Tempest of Tech and Throne Act III, Scene II A courtyard ...

The answer to many of today’s problems seems to lie in the magic word ‘skills’, but this word can be used to mean so many different things, depending on audience and context, that in itself it is far ...

Update (17:00 03 Mar): all members of the UK or international scientific community were invited to indicate their support by signing the letter. The opportunity to do so closed at 17:00 UK time on 03 ...

Dear Materials Science and Engineering Students, I congratulate you whole-heartedly on your choice of Materials Science and Engineering for your undergraduate studies. You are all a whole lot smarter ...

Last winter seemed to go on for ages. At least, way back at the end of January I remember desperately longing for summer. And then I was made redundant, which hadn’t been on my bingo card for 2024.

Regulars at this blog will be familiar with the dim view that I have of impact factors, in particular their mis-appropriation for the evaluation of individual researchers and their work. I have argued ...

I am sick of impact factors and so is science. The impact factor might have started out as a good idea, but its time has come and gone. Conceived by Eugene Garfield in the 1970s as a useful tool for ...

I am Stephen Curry, a Professor of Structural Biology at Imperial College London. Few people know what ‘structural biology’ is but in my case it means I figure out the three-dimensional structures ...

As part of its celebrations to mark the 350th anniversary of the publication of Philosophical Transactions, the world’s longest-running scientific journal, the Royal Society has organised a conference ...

Really, who doesn’t love a good old tiled floor. So classy. We have tiled floors in our flat, of course we do. Our Regency flat (yes, I am persisiting in calling it that) only became a flat in the ...

Twelve months after the publication of the Finch Report, during which the new RCUK policy on open access has been published, dissected, debated (including by committees in both Houses of Parliament), ...