BMC Medical Genomics publishes first articles

Today sees the publication of the first articles in BMC Medical Genomics. The biological sciences have been transformed by the recent explosion in genomic technology and genome sequencing projects and the next decade will see a similar revolution in medicine. BMC Medical Genomics aims to maximize the visibility and impact of this vital and growing field of research.

BMC Medical Genomics publishes articles on functional genomics, genome structure, genome-scale population genetics, epigenomics, proteomics, systems analysis and pharmacogenomics in relation to human health and disease, and is indexed by PubMed, BIOSIS, CAS, EMBASE, and Google Scholar.

By providing information on the interaction between genes, drugs and diseases, genomic approaches to medicine promise to contribute to the delivery of personalized and individual medical treatment. This is of particular relevance as these technologies increase in affordability and availability, especially given the enormous costs of the latest generation pharmaceutical drugs that often have serious side-effects or fail to work in significant sub-categories of patients.

The journal is entirely open access - all articles will be immediately available to read online at no charge to the reader. The availability of relevant published peer-reviewed research to clinicians, researchers, and patients is particularly important, especially given the rapid growth of commercial genetic testing and the concerns that have been raised about the lack of validation of such tests.

The first articles published today in BMC Medical Genomics display the breadth of topics covered by the journal, including molecular subtyping (McDonnell et al.) and biomarker profiling (Gast et al.), as well as fine mapping of chromosomal aberrations in bladder cancers (Heidenblad et al.), and the characterization of putative new signaling mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis of diseases such as multiple sclerosis and diabetes (Avasarala et al.).

These articles also demonstrate the broad range of genomic techniques that fall within the scope of the journal, such as expression profiling (Avasarala et al.), array CGH (Heidenblad et al.), tissue microarrays (McDonnell et al.),  proteomic technologies (Gast et al.) and SNP genotyping using arrayed primer extension (Podder et al.).

BMC Medical Genomics is edited by a team of in-house and Associate Editors and supported by an impressive international Editorial Board.  As with the other medical journals in the BMC series, BMC Medical Genomics will use open peer review; the names of the peer reviewers will be known to the authors and the reports will be made public alongside the published article.

If you would like to be involved in the journal as a reviewer, Editorial Board Member, or Associate Editor, please contact us.

Scott Edmunds
Senior Assistant Editor
BMC-series Journals

Posted by Matt Hodgkinson at 14:00    Comments (0)

 

BMC Public Health reaches 1000th article

BMC Public Health has the honor of publishing its 1,000th article. BMC Public Health is the first medical journal in the BMC-series to reach this symbolic milestone, following in the footsteps of BMC Bioinformatics in 2006 and BMC Genomics last year. The 1,000th article, "Does economic development contribute to sex differences in ischaemic heart disease mortality? Hong Kong as a natural experiment using a case-control study" by Prof Gabriel Leung and his colleagues from the University of Hong Kong offers the suggestion that the excess risk of heart disease among men in developed countries may be determined during puberty.

We'd like to thank Prof Leung for his support of BMC Public Health, both as an author and as a frequent peer reviewer for the series. We would also like to take this opportunity to say our thanks to all the authors who have submitted to the journal over the years, to our editorial board and to our peer reviewers for their time, effort and expertise.

We would also like to thank our readers, of whom hundreds of thousands have accessed our top ten most viewed articles over the last seven years. More than 28,000 readers have viewed our most accessed article, which examines bacterial contamination of water purification systems, a particular concern in hospital settings. The most viewed articles also include work with the striking result that even occasional passive smoking increases the chance of developing acute heart problems by over 25%. In addition to that study on passive smoking, BMC Public Health has been an important contributor to the debate around the banning of smoking in the public places, which finally came into force in England and Wales last year.

We have broken many national and international news stories, including the finding that South Asians living in Scotland are significantly more likely to suffer a heart attack than the rest of the Scottish population, which was covered by the BBC, and the worrying news that the half of the health workers polled in the US were planning to stay at home if there is a flu pandemic, which received worldwide coverage including in USA Today, the BBC, the Daily Mail and the Jerusalem Post. Open access means that everyone reading these stories in the media was able to read the original research immediately and for no charge.

The impact of the work published by BMC Public Health is reflected by its ranking by SCImago in the top quarter of public health journals and by the fact that its articles have been cited nearly 2,500 times.

If you are a researcher in epidemiology or public health medicine, we'd like to invite you to submit your next research article to the journal. And if you would like to be more involved in BMC Public Health, please contact me.

Annabel Phillips, PhD
In-house Editor
BMC Public Health

Posted by Matt Hodgkinson at 11:05    Comments (0)

 

Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine indexed by MEDLINE

Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine has recently been accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE, reflecting its growing importance and reputation in its field.

Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine was launched in 2006, and has since published a variety of articles covering all aspects of the philosophy of medicine, and the ethical aspects of clinical practice and research. The journal also publishes articles at the intersection of medicine and humanities that are relevant to contemporary philosophy of medicine and bioethics. Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine is overseen by the Editors-in-Chief Michael Schwartz and Dan J Stein.

A full list of the 81 BioMed Central journals that are indexed in MEDLINE is available from our website.

Posted by Charlotte Hubbard at 10:32    Comments (0)

 

Improved support for additional material files - "mini-websites"

With the upcoming launch of BMC Research Notes (which will have a strong data focus) BioMed Central's development team has been hard at work improving the handling of additional material files.

One request we have had from authors is to make it possible to upload collections of files that can be conveniently navigated in the web browser  - essentially a miniature website associated with the article. This functionality has now been added to our publication system.

To submit such a 'mini-website' as an additional material file, all you need to do is to ensure that the homepage is named index.html, and sits in the root folder of the content you wish to submit. Then convert the folder hierarchy into a ZIP archive, and upload this ZIP file using the regular manuscript submission system, which will recognize and process it automatically. Full guidelines are provided in each journal's Instructions for Authors (example).

Readers of the published article will have a choice of whether to download the ZIP file to view locally on their own machine, or alternatively they can follow a link to view the contents of the ZIP file via the BioMed Central website.

Several articles already published by BioMed Central have included such mini-website zipfiles, and the data for these articles have been converted to take advantage of the functionality. See for example Additional File 1 from the following article in BMC Evolutionary Biology:

Research article    
Natural hybridization in heliconiine butterflies: the species boundary as a continuum
Mallet J, Beltrán M, Neukirchen W, Linares M
BMC Evolutionary Biology 2007, 7:28 (23 February 2007)
[Abstract] [Full text] [PDF] 

Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 19:06    Comments (0)

 

UK PubMed Central announces workshop and online survey to shape future development plans

Researchers, librarians and research administrators working in the UK may be interested in the following update from UK PubMed Central:

1. UKPMC Workshop
We are entering the next stage of developing UKPMC into an innovative and useful resource for UK researchers. We want to ensure that your needs and ideas are heard and incorporated at the outset and to this end we are holding a free one-day workshop on the 4th February 2008.
If you have an interest in helping us shape this vision, then please register for this free workshop. Places are limited - so respond today to reserve your place.

2. UKPMC Survey
We would like to know your opinion on the current service and resources you would like to see in
the future.  This is your opportunity to influence the improvements that we make to the site.

Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 18:15    Comments (0)

 

Government report highlights need for research into cleaner next-generation biofuels

The debate surrounding the use of biofuels continues today with the publication of the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee report, “Are biofuels sustainable?”.

In the report, committee members acknowledge the power of biofuels to cut greenhouse gas emissions from road transport, but warn that a more balanced policy is needed in order to minimise wider environmental damage.

The production of biofuels continues to be controversial.  There is concern that first generation biofuels, produced from conventional crops, may even have a detrimental overall effect on the environment.  However, the development of next generation biofuels holds great promise.  Research and technological advances are driving a move towards “cleaner” biofuels, and efforts are concentrated globally on realising the potential of this expanding field.  The ongoing research in this area has wide implications for the environment, and is a topic of huge significance globally.

BioMed Central will launch its new journal, Biotechnology for Biofuels, in the Spring of 2008, overseen by Editors-in-Chief Michael Himmel, Bärbel Hahn-Hägerdal, Chris Somerville, and Charles Wyman, and supported by an international Editorial Board.  Biotechnology for Biofuels will feature the latest cutting-edge research in the field, reviews and commentary articles from both Academia and Industry, and will run a blog, dedicated to all aspects of the biofuels world.

To keep abreast of the latest developments with Biotechnology for Biofuels, please register to receive regular updates.

Posted by Anna Webb at 13:26    Comments (0)

 

Mammographic density review articles published in Breast Cancer Research

Breast Cancer Research, a BioMed Central journal, has published the first articles in a new series on Mammographic Density, the latest of the journal's regular review series.

This series is edited by Dr Norman F Boyd from the University Health Network in Canada. The review from Vachon et al. summarises the relationship of density to risk and its potential use in risk prediction, and the review from Martin and Boyd describes a hypothesis using epidemiological data to explain the increased breast cancer risk associated with extensive density.

Review    
Mammographic density. Potential mechanisms of breast cancer risk associated with mammographic density: hypotheses based on epidemiological evidence
Lisa J Martin, Norman F Boyd
Breast Cancer Research 2008, 10:201 (9 January 2008)
Abstract | Full text | PDF

Review    
Mammographic density, breast cancer risk and risk prediction
Celine M Vachon, Carla H van Gils, Thomas A Sellers, Karthik Ghosh, Sandhya Pruthi, Kathleen R Brandt, V Shane Pankratz
Breast Cancer Research 2007, 9:217 (20 December 2007)
Abstract | Full text | PDF

Breast Cancer Research’s reviews and commentaries require a subscription for access, but if you do not currently have a subscription to the journal, you can register for a free 30-day trial.

All research articles published in Breast Cancer Research are open access.

Frances Mulvany
In-house Editor, Breast Cancer Research

Posted by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz at 19:53    Comments (0)

 

Biology Direct launches new Mathematical Biology section

We are delighted to announce the launch of the new Mathematical Biology section of Biology Direct, over seen by the Section Editor Andrei Yaklovev, and supported by an international Editorial Board.  Full details are available in our recent Editorial.

Biology Direct, founded by David J Lipman, Laura Landweber, and Eugene Koonin, operates a unique open peer review system, whereby reviewers’ comments and authors’ responses are published alongside the final article, making the process of peer review open, rather than anonymous. 

Biology Direct was launched in 2006 and has since published over 75 articles; nearly half of which have been accessed over 2,000 times, and seven articles have been highlighted on the literature evaluation service Faculty of 1000 Biology. 

Biology Direct is tracked by Thomson Scientific and is on course to receive its first impact factor in 2008.  As an open access publication, all articles are freely and immediately available online, maximising the visibility of the author's work, and copyright is retained by the author.

To keep abreast of latest developments with Biology Direct, please register to receive regular updates.

Posted by Anna Webb at 16:37    Comments (0)

 

Genome Biology Advisory Board member Edward Marcotte receives Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award.

One of the newest recruits to Genome Biology’s Advisory board, Edward Marcotte, has been awarded the 2008 Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award from The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST). Edward Marcotte is the William and Gwyn Shive Endowed Professor and the Mr. and Mrs. Corbin J. Robertson Sr. Regents Fellow in Molecular Biology in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a member of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology and is co-director of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology.

In addition to his role in mapping protein network interactions in different organisms, he created spotted cell microarrays for measuring protein expression and in keeping with his advocacy for open access, founded the first open-access database for mass spectrometry proteomics data. We are thrilled that his contribution to the field of systems and synthetic biology, the area in which he provides expert advice to Genome Biology and in which he has published in BioMed Central journals, has been justly recognised and rewarded. A full report detailing this award can be read on the news site of the University of Texas at Austin.

Many congratulations from everyone at BioMed Central.

Posted by Clare Garvey at 14:17    Comments (0)

 

Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance publishes first open access articles

The Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (JCMR) has published the first articles on BioMed Central’s open access publishing platform after its move from Taylor & Francis. JCMR, now in its tenth year, is the official journal of the Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance.

JCMR readers now have free, instant online access to all published articles, not only via BioMed Central’s website but also via  PubMed Central and other open access repositories. “Open access brings benefits to readers that are of utmost importance to science - free, unfettered and widespread access to all research,” says Editor-in-Chief Dudley Pennell. “Authors will benefit from faster publication cycles and a wider readership, leading to increased citation counts.” The online format also allows authors to publish colour images and embed movies at no extra cost, a great advantage in a field that relies heavily on high-quality image reproduction.

For further details regarding the journal’s move to open access publishing with BioMed Central please read the Editorial ‘Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance: Open access in 2008.

The first and only journal devoted exclusively to CMR, Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance includes basic and clinical research articles, technical notes, review articles, and editorial commentary on the research, design, development, and evaluation of magnetic resonance methods applied to the cardiovascular system.

BioMed Central publishes a growing number of journals affiliated with learned societies. In addition to the transfer of existing society journals, BioMed Central is also working with societies to launch new journals such as the forthcoming Journal of Foot & Ankle Research, the official journal of the Australasian Podiatry Council and the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists (UK).

Posted by Stefan Busch at 10:32    Comments (0)

 

Medscape develops Continuing Medical Education based on open access research articles

Several open access articles published by BioMed Central have recently been used by Medscape to produce Continuing Medical Education (CME) material.  These articles span a broad range of specialties, including general practice, psychiatry, surgery, endocrinology, and preventive medicine. 

It is wonderful to see open access research being used in this way to create CME. A key advantage of open access is the opportunity it provides to reuse published research to educate researchers, clinicians and the general public. BioMed Central is planning increased activity in the area of medical education over the coming months. We are working with Medscape to increase the number of CME activities created from BioMed Central articles, including the use of case reports from the Journal of Medical Case Reports. The latest journal metrics also show that BMC Medical Education is rapidly establishing a reputation for itself in this field, and we hope to build on the success of this journal. Lastly, plans are being developed for a new Journal of Clinical Education Resources, scheduled to launch in the first half of 2008.

Melissa Norton MD
BMC-series Editor-in-Chief 

List of Medscape CME based on BioMed Central articles

Journal	Article-based CME
BMC Psychiatry	Attitudes to Antipsychotic Drugs and Their Side
Harm Reduction Journal	A review of the evidence for the effectiveness of primary prevention interventions for Hepatitis C among injecting drug users
BMC Public Health	Racial/Ethnic and social class differences in preventive care practices among persons with diabetes
BMC Surgery	Diagnostic value of blood inflammatory markers for detection of acute appendicitis in children
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes	Which health-related quality of life score? A comparision of alternative utility measures in patients with Type 2 diabetes in the ADVANCE trial.
BMC Family Practice	Quality of life and metabolic status in mildly depressed patients with Type 2 diabetes treated wth paroxetine: A double-blind randomised placebo controlled 6-month trial

 

Update: May 6th 2008

An up to date list of CME items based on BioMed Central open access content is now available from the MEDSCAPE website. 

Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 14:44    Comments (0)

 

Alzheimer’s article in Journal of Neuroinflammation catches media attention

An article reporting a reversal of Alzheimer’s symptoms has captured the attention of science journalists around the globe.

The case report, published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation, describes a dramatic reversal of Alzheimer’s symptoms in a patient following treatment using the anti-tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF) therapeutic, etanercept.

Coverage has included a 3 minute broadcast feature  on CNN, with newspaper reports spanning the world from the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail to the Australian Herald Sun, and web coverage including ScienceDaily, Ars Technica and Slashdot.

Matt McKay
Head of PR, BioMed Central

Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 18:13    Comments (0)

 

SCImago – a new source of journal metrics offering a wealth of free data on open access journals

Bibliometrics (the measurement of scholarly citation) has long been dominated by the Science Citation Index. Created by Eugene Garfield in the 1960s, the SCI is now made available online as Web of Science by Thomson Scientific. In the last few years however two new services, Scopus and Google Scholar, have created competition for Web of Science, providing an alternative means to discover which articles have cited a particular research article. Scopus, a paid for service, offers an attractive user interface that is arguably easier to use and in some ways more powerful than that of Web of Science, while Google Scholar, though more limited in functionality, has the significant benefit of being free.

Until very recently, though, one area of Thomson Scientific's monopoly has remained essentially unchallenged – that of journal metrics. Thomson's Journal Citation Reports service (JCR), whilst frequently criticized, has been the unchallenged de facto standard for the comparison of journals, and the "impact factor" metric used in the JCR to rank journals has acquired almost mystical importance within the scientific community as a measure and signifier of the kudos associated with publication in a particular journal. For this reason, the announcement of SCImago Journal and Country Rank, a alternative database of journal citation metrics developed by researchers in Spain, is highly significant for the communication and evaluation of scholarly research.

Unlike the JCR (which is available to subscribers only), SCImago is freely available online, but in addition to being free, SCImago offers important improvements, compared to the JCR:

• Perhaps the most fundamental improvement, compared to the JCR, is the breadth of SCImago's scientific, technical and medical journal coverage. SCImago makes use of data supplied by Scopus which covers 13,000 journals, including many STM journals not tracked by Thomson Scientific. Thomson Scientific often wait several years before including new journals in, and in some cases (see below) may not track journals at all, even though they are highly cited. As a result of this, although those BioMed Central's journals which are listed in the JCR have impressive impact factors, many other high calibre BioMed Central journals are not currently listed in the JCR. In contrast, Scopus has a more systematic policy on content inclusion and adds all new BioMed Central titles to its database on an annual basis, and so SCImago contains reliable bibliometric data and rankings for around 100 BioMed Central journals that are not yet listed in the JCR.
• The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is used as an alternative to the impact factor, as the primary measure of a journal's citation impact. One of the major criticisms of the impact factor algorithm is that it gives equal weight to all citations – a citation from a very obscure journal is weighted as being just as important as a citation that occurs in the New England Journal of Medicine, or Nature. This is a problem, as it seems intuitively clear that a citation from a journal that is itself highly cited is a more reliable and significant indicator of importance and impact. To address this weakness, SCImago have taken the mathematical approach behind the PageRank algorithm that has been central to Google's success as an internet search engine, and have adapted it to journal metrics in order to create the SCImago Journal Rank. The PageRank-style approach weights citations from journals according to how highly cited the journal itself it, using an iterative approach. Details of the SJR algorithm are available here.
  [SCImago is not the first group to apply a PageRank style algorithm to bibliometrics - Eigenfactor.org launched last year with a similar approach, and the Eigenfactor.org methodology page provides a good overview of the mathematical background and previous work in this area. However, because Eigenfactor.org relies solely on Thomson Scientific data, it does not offer the same breadth of coverage of new open access journals as SCImago].
• One additional point of note is that while impact factors are derived from citations in a single year to articles from the two preceding years, the SJR calculation looks at citations made in a three year period, of articles published in an earlier, but overlapping, three year period. This makes the SJR a more stable indicator of trends than impact factors, which often fluctuate substantially from year to year.

How do SJR rankings for BioMed Central journals compare with JCR rankings?

The SJR algorithm, combined with the more comprehensive pool of citation data provided by Scopus, leads to many significant changes in the relative ranking of journals. A few examples of this are identified below:

• Genome Biology is ranked 54th of all the 13,000+ journals listed by SCImago, outranking journals such as PLoS Biology (which is ranked 60th). In fact, excluding review journals, Genome Biology is the 29th most highly ranked title in SCImago, putting it in an elite club of the most influential research journals.
• Arthritis Research & Therapy is ranked 2nd of 37 in Rheumatology by SCImago, outranking journals such as Annals of Rheumatic Disease, Current Opinion in Rheumatology, Rheumatology, and Osteoarthritis and Cartilage even though those journals have higher impact factors according to the JCR.
• Breast Cancer Research, which ranks 26th of 139 journals in Cancer Research similarly leapfrogs its competitor Breast Cancer Research and Treatment (which is ranked 43rd in this category).

What about BioMed Central journals that are not yet listed in the JCR?

Here are a few examples of the journal metric data available from SCImago for BioMed Central journals which do not yet have official impact factors:

• Journal of Biology, which Thomson Scientific strangely do not track due to its small publication volume, confirms its status as a journal of the very highest quality. It ranks 44th of all 13,000+ journalss in SCImago (21st if review journals are excluded).
• BMC Biology, the flagship biology journal in the BMC-series, ranks 227th of all 13,000+ journals listed in SCImago – i.e. one of the top 2%
  (BMC Biology is expected to receive its first impact factor in June 2008)
• BMC Medicine, the flagship medical title in the BMC-series, is ranked 3rd of 241 titles in SCIMago's Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health category and 532nd in the overall database - a very high ranking for a medical journal.
  (BMC Medicine was recently accepted for tracking by Thomson Scientific, but will not appear in the JCR until June 2009)  
• BMC Medical Education, not yet accepted for tracking by Thomson Scientific, ranks 14th of the  249 journals in SCImago that include 'Education' in their title. (i.e. it is one of the top 6% of such journals)
• Retrovirology, due to receive its first impact factor in June 2008, ranks 5th of 46 in Virology.

Update 04-Jun-2008

Some further notable SCImago rankings

• Molecular Pain, due to receive its first impact factor in June 2008, ranks 1st of 87 in Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine
  
• Frontiers in Zoology ranks 4th of 235 in Animal Science and Zoology
• Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling ranks 2nd of 24 in Health Informatics
• International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, Nutrition & Metabolism, and Nutrition Journal rank 1st, 2nd and 4th of 30 respectively, in Nutrition and Dietetics
• BMC Biotechnology ranks 7th of 141 in biotechnology
• BMC Plant Biology is not currently classified under Plant Science but has an SJR that would place it 10th of 274 in this area
  

 

Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 14:40    Comments (5)

 

Neural Development celebrates its 1st birthday

Neural Development, launched a year ago under the guidance of Editors-in-Chief Andrew Lumsden, Joshua Sanes, Bill Harris, and Rachel Wong, celebrates its 1st birthday with a special Editorial, highlighting the successes and future directions of the journal.

Since launch, Neural Development has become a must-read within the community, filling a vacant niche in journal coverage for developmental neurobiologists.  Articles published have been of a consistently high quality, cover the breadth of the field, and come from labs all over the world.  Several articles have been selected by the literature evaluation service Faculty of 1000, and many articles are “highly accessed”. 

Neural Development plans to build on the successes of the last year by introducing new features; of particular interest is the development of “head-to-head” reviews from key proponents of contemparily contentious issues.  To keep abreast of the latest developments with this exciting journal, please register to receive regular alerts.

Submit your next manuscript to Neural Development and take advantage of our special features such as unlimited colour figures, embedded movies, and personal cover pages. 

Happy Birthday Neural Development!

Posted by Anna Webb at 11:28    Comments (0)

 

"What have you changed your mind about?"

One of the great things about the internet in general, and open access research in particular, is how accessible the frontiers of human knowledge have become. The website edge.org demonstrates this with a thought-provoking set of 165 short essays from leading neuroscientists, physicists, technologists, philosophers and other thinkers, in response to the following question:

When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

A small selection of highlights:

• Roger Shank, one of the founding fathers of AI, notes his fading hopes for superhuman AI in his own lifetime: "I am a lot older and we are barely closer to creating smart machines."
• Bart Kosko, fuzzy logic pioneer, says why he now thinks the sample mean isn't all its cracked up to be (he'd take the median).
• Neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux discusses the surprising evidence that memories are altered by the act of remembering them, so that in fact, "your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it".
• Terry Sejnowski questions the conventional reliance on the average firing rates of neurons as the primary statistical variable, noting that increasing evidence suggests that the exact timing may after all encode important information.
• Stanislas Dehean speculates as to whether we may be getting close metaphorically speaking, to finding a Schrödinger equation for the brain.
• Physicist Lee Smolin relates his changing views on the concept of time.

It is stimulating stuff, and thanks to the combination of Wikipedia and open access research literature, these essays provide 165 accessible starting points that can be used by anyone who is curious to explore some of farthest reaches of our knowledge (and ignorance) about the world around us.

Posted by Matthew Cockerill at 18:33    Comments (0)