Seriously, though

Apologies for posting here so much; I'm on the last few days of winter break and have the time to do so, I suppose and I'm going a little stirr-crazy.

I was wondering if there are better RSS feeds than the one I have for PNAS, Nature, and Science. All of my ACS journal feeds are quite nice; it gives a full abstract as well as a graphical abstract and makes browsing really easy. And I recently managed to dig up a better feed for Angewandte Chemie (mostly due to reading chemistry blogs of other science people who spend far too much of their life on the interwebs). But I can't find an RSS feed for Cell, and Nature, PNAS and Science suck. No abstract, no nothing but the title and authors. Do biologists spend less time dicking around on the internet? I doubt it. There is way too much down time in molecular biology for that to be true. I gotta do some surfing around to find them.

Unrelated, but I also found it interesting that there was an extensive review article about RNA interference in Angewandte Chemie the other day. The borders of biology and chemistry are becoming very fuzzy indeed.

On Reading the Lit

I don't read journal articles for fun the way I do for class--where I sit down and try to understand as much as I can, devoting hours to reading a single article. I read them just to be swept in awe by the overwhelming amount of fantastic science being done right now, browsing through, clicking around, mostly skimming abstracts and figures. Mostly I find myself reading biological chemistry and organic chemistry. And lately biophysics (mostly just the abstract and introduction because I really don't understand the math behind it). Some of the biophysical techniques that are going on...I can't even imagine how fantastic the scientific world is going to be in 10 or 20 years. For example, they can do NMR imaging of a virus now.

I read a review of total synthesis in the last hundred years and how far it has advanced. And docking carbohydrate synthesis on DNA as a way to functionalize microchips. And each leads to references to wander to, letting my mind wander and skim and wander and skim.

I'm realizing that it's now getting to be time to start actually keeping up with the lit--even if it is just skimming every few weeks, or even if it's just reading C&E News and/or review journals. Since there's so much out there and no one can read everything, my professors are reading the same journals, they've just been doing it for longer and with more specialized interests.

I finally have the background to get a vague sense of what articles in the current lit (at least in organic chemistry, biological chemistry, some of the more qualitative aspects of biophysics, biochemistry, and cellular & molecular biology) are about, even if I don't fully understand them, and learning about science isn't going to be spoon-fed to me through assignments for the rest of my life. It's time to start getting into the habit of reading journals like it's time to get in the habit of reading the newspaper. Not cover to cover, not necessarily every day (or even every week--after all, I still am a student), but as something I do periodically.