Links: Spidey suits, and tips on writing papers

Science Daily: Physicists have found a formula for a Spiderman suit.

Chemical & Engineering News: Tips for writing a journal article.

Some materials links

Invisible electronics.

To create their thin-film transistors, [Tobin J. ] Marks’ group [at Northwestern] combined films of the inorganic semiconductor indium oxide with a multilayer of self-assembling organic molecules that provides superior insulating properties.

Synthetic Gecko materials that mimics “microscopic hairs on a gecko foot”. It is “made of layers covered with thousands of stalks with splayed [...]

War for open access publishing

Via Inside HigherEd: A US federal legislation would mandate making all academic publications available for free (presumably over the internet) some ‘n’ months after their original publication date. This legislation is being bitterly opposed by several professional societies (and in particular, by the American Chemical Society). Sometime ago, it found support from high officials of [...]

Depression, migraines and conflicts of interest

July 13:

The latest incident, disclosed in letters to the editor and a correction in Wednesday’s journal, involves a study showing that pregnant women who stop taking antidepressants risk slipping back into depression.

Most of the 13 authors have financial ties to drug companies including antidepressant makers, but only two of them revealed their ties when the [...]

Nature’s experiment with ‘open’ peer review

Nature, a leading science journal, is conducting an interesting experiment wherein a paper’s authors can have it reviewed ‘openly’ — like comments in a blog! This would be in addition to the regular (anonymous) review process.

While I haven’t given it much thought, others have. Arunn Narasimhan (Mechanical Engineering, IIT-Madras) has a link-ful post examining [...]

Academic papers in Open Access journals receive better recognition

Here’s the abstract of the paper by Gunther Eysenbach.

Open access (OA) to the research literature has the potential to accelerate recognition and dissemination of research findings, but its actual effects are controversial. This was a longitudinal bibliometric analysis of a cohort of OA and non-OA articles published between June 8, 2004, and December 20, 2004, [...]