An article in the Atlantic by Ed Yong called ‘How brain scientists forgot that brains have owners’ reports on critics and criticisms of current neuroscience and the BRAIN initiative specifically. You should read it, it’s short! The main criticism is – and with this I whole-heartedly agree – that it’s all about the behaviour. The brain… Read More It’s the behaviour, stupid

Writing a blog post on Hans Rosling’s terrific work has been on my to do list for weeks. Sadly, he died of cancer last week, which gave rise to a whole range of articles, obituaries and tributes about him, which makes my blog post appear late. On the other hand, there are many worthwhile articles… Read More Look at the evidence – a tribute to Hans Rosling

Originally posted on GSNMunich:
https://twitter.com/PHDcomics/status/809444316649132037 Yes, it will be that time next year: when I need to figure out what I’m doing with my life. Academia? If not, what options are there? Since I have spent some time looking for other options, I will share the resources I came across – maybe you also need…

I came across two interesting papers recently which both dealt with why ‘bad’ science persists – it has been known for a long time that many studies are statistically underpowered, leading some people to famously state that ‘most research findings are false’. But why – when we as scientists know better – do we not… Read More Screwed scientific incentives

Recently I spent a few weeks doing experiments. This means that I do work where my hands are busy and I need to pay attention to what is going on, but often my hands know what they are doing and later during the experiment there are often 1-3 minute breaks where I do not need… Read More What I listen to when my hands are busy

Originally posted on GSNMunich:
When working on the figures for a recent paper I realised that I was using schemes of the animal I work with that come from a copyright-protected book. I decided that I will get rid of those schemes and instead produce my own. However, there was still a potential copyright issue:…

In addition to the sciency stuff, I also stumbled across some articles on meta-science. My favourite: ‘putting the biology back into neurobiology’, or a plea to diversify neuroscience. Whether it helps I don’t know, the same arguments were already made in 1950 (!), when Frank Beach lamented the decrease in the number of species and… Read More Recent meta-science reads