Thomas Hesselberg's blog

Some of you probably know it. It is a lovely day, warm with the sun shining from a blue sky, but then suddenly out of blue you sneeze violently for one or two times. I have experienced it often when going out in the sun or sitting in the bus when it turns and exposes me to direct sunlight. I wondered if I suffered from some kind of sun allergy, but on the other hand I only sneezed a couple of times max and was then fine. What could possibly be the reason?

As a child many of us dreamt of becoming an astronaut, but alas that was before the internet, when such dreams were difficult to realise in the real world.

However, for the youth of today this dream may become easier to fulfil. At least the European Space Agency (ESA) uses new methods to recruit suitable candidates for their new astronaut programme.

Today ESA has opened up for online applications from prospective astronauts on their website.

In the past years it has become very popular to use metric data to evaluate the quality of science. England, for instance, has for several years used a complicated RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) system, where an expert panel evaluate the quality of a research institution (typically on the department level) based on the number of publications, citations and the quality of the publications.

Oxford University Press together with a consortium of UK academics has launched a new journal, BioscienceHorizons, which is unique among scientific journals in that they publish exclusively papers by undergraduate students about their own final year projects.

All British and Irish universities can nominate their best final year projects. The student then rewrites his thesis into the format of a scientific paper and submits it. The paper will be reviewed by academics in the field and the best papers will be published.

Only a few select students become enrolled and can attend lectures at the top universities in the world, where either very good grades or very good connections are required. However, a Danish student from the University of Aarhus has set about to change that so everybody can attend lectures from all over the world – via the computer.

Jakob Sandvad is the student behind Public University Online - a kind of Youtube for lectures, where you can up- and download links to lectures made public on their university homepages.

There are already more than thousand lectures online and although the majority are in arts and philosophy related areas, there are already many science lectures online.

We are probably a few who, during searches of papers from specific researchers in Web of Science or Google Scholar, have experienced the frustration of getting 100s of papers listed from different subjects and clearly different authors. This problem of course arises when we search for scientists with common last names. Often the only solution is to either browse through all the papers or alternatively go in search of the scientist’s own homepage to view his publication list there.