For reasons that I will explain in a later post, I am parting with one of my most treasured possessions: the badger skull that I extracted from my roadkill specimen four years ago.

Since we wrote about the putative tiny bird Oculudentavis (Xing et al. 2020) last time, things have become rather weirder.

Back in March, Nature published “Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of Myanmar” by Xing et al. (2020), which described and named a tiny putative bird that was preserved in amber from Myanmar (formerly Burma). It’s a pretty spectacular find.

I think we’ve all had enough of the Impact Factor as a way of measuring the quality of journals.

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Mark Witton says this better than I could: Like many white folks, I have traditionally assumed that simply not being racist was doing my part, and that the actions of others would eventually convert society at large to seeing race as the non-issue it should be. I have also felt that, as a white, straight […]

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Credit: anonymous tattoo, Grant Harding for the caption. Update. Here is the Instagram post that Grant got this from. Unfortunately it seems to be from an account that specialises in reposting others’ work without attribution, so we don’t know where the tattoo photo originated.

My eldest son Dan went out to visit his girlfriend Beth, shortly before the Coronavirus crisis began, during her university placement in Toulouse.

I’ve written four posts about the R2R debate on the proposition “the venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”: part 1: opening statement in support part 2: opening statement against the motion part 3: my response for the motion part 4: the video!

In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports , in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature , is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the tiny figures that ram unrelated illustrations into compound images, the