Interesting post over at Nature’s Nascent blog regarding scientists and social software. While they do make a great point, that new tools need to focus more on the level of the groups in which scientists work, I still get the feeling that there’s an essential point being missed by so many of these “myspace for scientist” efforts. Just building a tool, just taking advantage of technology that’s available isn’t enough. For real large scale uptake, any such tool has to serve a need of the community, and it has to do so in a compelling manner. And on top of that, it has to be much, much better than whatever is currently filling that need. Read the rest of this entry »

Seed Magazine recently posted the winners in their 2nd annual writing contest. This year’s question was, “What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century?” It’s interesting that both the first and second place winners make essentially the same point–being scientifically literate has nothing to do with having an encyclopaedic knowledge of scientific literature. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few months (and in coming months), we’ve presented a series of protocols for genotyping and DNA isolation in a variety of model organisms. Much of this material was adapted in advance from Genetic Variation: A Laboratory Manual, which is now available from CSHL Press. It’s a difficult subject for a laboratory manual, as it’s such a rapidly advancing field, and the question when it was proposed was, is it possible to put together a manual that isn’t obsolete the moment it’s published? Read the rest of this entry »

As neuroscience methods continue to improve by leaps and bounds, researchers are starting to dissect behavior on a molecular level. These types of experiments call for highly defined, repeatable behavioral assays, something that’s not always easy to establish. As author Carol Ann Paul and colleagues note, “The behavioral approach to solving neuroscience questions, unlike cellular and molecular approaches, is difficult to define and is therefore sometimes considered a less-disciplined approach. Methods describing behavioral procedures are often thought to be crude when compared to the precision of physiological or molecular methods.” This month CSH Protocols presents a series of rat behavioral protocols to address these issues. Read the rest of this entry »

September’s issue of CSH Protocols is upon us (my, that was a quick summer–Kurt Weill sure knew what he was talking about). We’re featuring two protocols this month, both available freely to non-subscribers (as are all of our sample protocols). The first is for generating mouse models for squamous cell carcinoma and the second is for the Oligonucleotide Ligation Assay (OLA), used for finding Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP’s). Read the rest of this entry »