The scientific journal club at the Institute for Integrated Micro & Nano Systems at the University of Edinburgh is a student-organised, casual discussion group. We meet fortnightly during semester time to discuss current scientific news and have covered a wide range of topics, from astrobiology to regenerative medicine. The next scientific journal club is scheduled for 10th May, 12:30-13:30 in the SMC room 1.03. We will be discussing Small-scale soft-bodied robot with multimodal locomotion.
Last month’s Scientific Journal Club events included a seminar titled ‘Stargazing with Stephen Hawking’ which was delivered by Professor Joe McGeough. Forty postgraduate researchers took part in this event. Joe shared with us his memories of a summer job at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. In 1961, Joe was part of a group of undergraduate students who helped astronomers take photographs of the night sky. Amongst this group was the then 19-year-old Stephen Hawking. Joe and Stephen went their separate ways after this summer. After Stephen graduated from Oxford he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease and given only two years to live; a prognosis that he outlived by over 50 years. In this seminar Joe shared with us some key events of Stephen Hawking’s life and gave a brief overview of his work. This seminar was very popular and well-received. I plan to hold the next journal club seminar in the coming winter semester.
The summer of 1961 – Joe (top row, third from the right) and Stephen (bottom row, third from the left) were part of a group of students that worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. This photo was kindly provided by Prof Joe McGeough.
We also held two journal club discussion rounds. One meeting was focussed on scientific fraud, specifically a case of image duplication and manipulation which puts 38 papers by IIT Dhanbad faculty under scrutiny; we also discussed the functions of COPE, the Committee on Publication ethics, and of several reader-initiated online platforms, such as PubPeer and retraction watch. The other meeting was focussed on a neuroscience study on the human decision-making process. This study found that the decision-making process can be measured in the prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10s before the subject becomes aware of it.
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