Funny story from Southampton: someone had a PhD viva which was so long they had to take multiple breaks for lunch, dinner, and tea. Eventually everyone was kicked out by security at midnight, and they decided to give the poor student a PhD for his trouble.

Bunsen burners don’t reduce contamination. It was all an illusion. My biology teacher was wrong. This isn’t surprising, though. So much of biology, and the way we do experiments, claims to be “scientific” but is actually swaddled in mysticism. Just walk into a laboratory and watch biologists for a day; they will do all sorts of weird rituals that — if you ask them to explain — will elicit no answer other than, “Well, that’s the way I was taught to do it.” Why are washes always five minutes long, for example? Why are they always done in groups of three? Did anybody actually ever measure this stuff? The Bunsen burner wasn’t even invented for its modern use. Robert Bunsen, a German chemist, invented it in the 1850s to heat up his chemical reactions. Microbiologists later used it to flame and sterilize instruments, which makes sense. And then there was all this debate and controversy about Pasteur’s swan-neck flasks, and this idea that microbes were floating in the air and contaminating things, and so microbiologists decided to take the Bunsen burners they had used to sterilize instruments and just …. put the open flames on their benches to sterilize the air. But this was pure mysticism. Nobody ever actually studied whether or not this worked. Someone ought to open up a lab and raise money to run “mysticism experiments.” Like, how bad is it (really) if we don’t wash things for five minutes in three cycles? How bad would it be if we didn’t incubate with antibodies at 4 degrees Celsius overnight? Why do cells eventually saturate in LB media? (Some people argue it’s because they run out of carbon, but others claim that's totally a lie and it's actually the magnesium.) Much of experiment is tacit illusion.

I've heard a rumor that someone has solved the figures-jumping-around-in-a-Word-doc problem…

Interesting failure of governance at @Nature. Scientists peer review for the scientific journal for free--building up the prestige of the brand--while the Editor-in-Chief & her team get to trash the brand with politicised opinion journalism. nitter.cf/SashaGusevPosts/status…

That's the popular opinion from what I routinely hear. Discrediting omics is fashionable. Poorly done omics is also routine. we credit all success to final validation (mol bio techniques) instead of omics that helped generate the hypothesis and claim victory.

Cambridge University's problems laid bare There's a troubling culture of institutional self-protection, with HR sidelining complaints and protecting the University’s reputation — while those who speak up for its core values and mission face retaliation thetimes.com/uk/education/ar…