Get up!

If you spend too much of your day sitting down, you are likely to have a shorter life span than if you sit less. Thorough research from a long-term (12 year) study of 17,013 Canadians showed that mortality rates increase with higher level of daily sitting time, independent of leisure time physical activity. In other words, the bad effect you get from sitting down for most of the day is not eliminated by increased exercise in your spare time. So get up from that chair!

Read the original research paper from Katzmarzyk et al.
Illustration courtesy: AdjustableBeds.com

BMC good initiative

I would like to draw attention to this new electronic scientific journal by BioMedCentral:

"The aim of BMC Research Notes is to reduce the loss suffered by the research community when results remain unpublished because they do not form a sufficiently complete story to justify the publication of a full research article. A key objective of the journal is to ensure that associated data sets are published in standard, reusable formats whenever possible. Data sets published in the journal will be made searchable and easy to harvest for reuse."

In my opinion it is an excellent initiative, both to encourage publishing incremental and 'negative' results, as well as the focus on open and easy access to data sets and results.

Read more about BMC Research Notes.

New Center for Protein Research

In the news: The Novo Nordisk foundation has given a grant of 600 million Danish Kroner (approx 80,5 m) to the establishment of a new Danish centre for protein research. The new centre will be placed within the Panum Institute in Copenhagen. The first two scientific leaders of the centre have been appointed: Matthias Mann, a world leader in Mass Spec research, currently positioned at the Max Planck institute in Munich and Søren Brunak, the current leader of the bioinformatics facility CBS at DTU.

The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research is now in the news worldwide. Read the article in Nature News.