First, lots of modifications to the lab website…

• The personnel page finally got edited to include all the changes we underwent last summer.
• The publications page is now up to date with all our latest papers (including the Slo2.1 paper that is finally out!)
• The research page has been edited to provide some more recent details on directions that different projects are going in, and to list our funding sources more accurately.

It’s also been a busy couple of months for travel and other lab’ happenings…

• Paul spoke at the Gaming Metrics conference at UC Davis, outlining some more recent data from the ongoing study of the impact of internet publicity on retractions/corrections of literature problems.
• Paul was also at the Oxygen Radicals Gordon Conference, talking about our work on Sirtuins and mitochondrial metabolism.
• We finally got our new custom antibodies against Slo2.x channel variants, from Aves labs, and are now testing them.
• A bunch of metabolomics samples went off to Metabolon, so now we’re waiting for a flood of data!
• Owen is off to the Biophysical Society meeting in Los Angeles.
• 3 other papers currently in the pipeline, so it should be a good year for publications. (It had better be – we have an R01 renewal going out the door in October!

Coming up…

• Raul Mostoslavsky (SIRT6 guru) is visiting Rochester next week for a seminar/visit in the cancer center.
• Steven P. Jones from the Cardiovascular Center at Univ. Louisville is visiting us on April 28th.
• There’s a new Mitochondrial Meeting announced at NIH campus, this May (these are usually great meetings, and free to register!)
• Paul’s final (?) stint on the MIM study section this June. Also there’s UMDF grant reviewing in May (we’re always looking for more panel members!)

Finally, there have been quite a few interesting happenings around the web/twitter of late, which deserve to be highlighted…

• The “Jingmai O’Connor” affair. For the uninitiated, this started out as an interview in Current Biology, in which Dr. O’Connor (a rising star in paleontology) made some disparaging remarks about blogging, along the lines of “those who can’t do science, blog about it“). The ensuing social media melt-down is nicely documented on Leonid Schneider’s blog post, in which Dr. O’Connor was found to have behaved in a totally unprofessional manner, sparking considerable general mockery and a parody twitter account.
• The Talia Jane incident, in which a millenial English Major wrote a whiny letter to her boss about shitty wages in the SF Bay Area, including not being able to buy bread. She was subsequently revealed on Instagram as a total foodie, with expensive habits such as having bourbon delivered by courier. The responses have been appropriately worded. If you haven’t read Jean Twenge’s book “Generation Me” for a deeper understanding of the millennial phenomenon, it’s a good read.
• The ASAPBio hashtag on Twitter provided updates on the eponymously named conference, where “influence makers” tried to sell the rest of the life-sciences community on the idea that we should all ignore glamour journals (Cell/Nature/Science et al.) and publish our work instantly as pre-prints. Part of the resistance to this idea is some of its proponents have built careers to date on glam-humping, so who are they to tell the rest of us to give up chasing high impact journals and just do everything open access / pre-print from now on?  Back in the real world, we’re unlikely to find success any time soon in convincing tenure/promotion committees to ignore publication venue as a factor in assessing a candidate’s CV. That’s not to say I’m anti-open access (we have plenty of papers in OA journals), I just think there are currently a lot of barriers to non-BSD labs going full-OA without career consequences for the PI and the trainees.