starting 'em early

(via Metafilter)

A team of researchers publishing in Biology Letters have concluded "We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before."

The authors are 25 students at Blackawton Public School, aged 8-10, which I'm going go out on a limb and guess is the youngest age to be published in a peer reviewed journal ever.

The organizer and lead scientist is Beau Lotto, whose son Misha is in the class. I nominate Lotto for the title of DorkiestBest Dad Ever. Lotto has previously given a TEDglobal talk.

The study itself was on bees, concluding "bees use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from."

Biological Letters is an RSC journal with a 2009 impact factor of 3.52. The authors tried to submit to Nature, Science, Current Biology and PLoS ONE, who were enthusiastic but declined to publish due to lack of referencing and simplistic writing style. Which, coincidentally, is a rejection that I've heard many a time. Maybe I should have gotten started in research a bit younger...

Boo, ribosomes.

I have a vision: one day, some other Nobel prize will be stolen by a chemist![1] Why wouldn't cheap and plentiful solar cells made by chemists that solve the world's energy crisis be eligible for the Nobel Peace prize? Couldn't Pd coupling or Click chemistry be eligible for the Medicine prize for their contributions to drug discovery?

Alternatively, we could try to go the other route and try to get someone like Roald Hoffman a literature prize.





[1] In the Pipeline has a good description of the chemistrybiology behind this year's Chemistry prize. Ribsome interactions with antibiotics actually does sound pretty cool. Just not Chemistry, that's all.

[2] LOLcatz courtest of Paul Krugman, who posted it when he won an Economics prize last year.