Botanists' blues

Proposals by Czechoslovak Botanists

Historicism Blues

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

Summertime blues

A successful honey bee forager tells her nestmates the location of good nectar and pollen with the waggle dance, a symbolic language that communicates a distance and direction. Because bees are adept at scouting out profitable forage and are very sensitive to energetic reward, we can use the distance that bees communicate via waggle dances as a proxy for forage availability, where the further t...

Summertime blues

Previous studies have shown that children's blood lead concentrations tend to increase during hot summer months. In this issue, Lih-Ming Yiin and colleagues from the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey, explore whether some of this elevation can be explained by seasonal increases in t...

Reproducibility blues.

Research findings advance science only if they are significant, reliable and reproducible. Scientists and journals must publish robust data in a way that renders it optimally reproducible. Reproducibility has to be incentivized and supported by the research infrastructure but without dampening innovation.