ScienceWatch.com from
Clarivate
takes you behind the scenes of highly cited research in these
interviews, essays, and rankings featuring researchers in a variety of
fields. Author commentaries come from all areas of
ScienceWatch.com. There are also interviews with authors
featured within every Special Topic
and corresponding Research Front Map. In addition, there are comments
from authors who have papers featured in
Emerging Research Fronts,
Fast-Moving Fronts,
New Hot Papers,
Fast-Breaking Papers,
Current Classics, and
Top Topics. Search for an author by
year,
month, or
alphabetically.
Many interviews and comments include images of the
authors’ work featured in their papers.
March 2010
Renata Behra; "There is a general lack of
information on the fate and effects of engineered
nanoparticles in aquatic systems. Our study presents first
data on the toxic potential of silver nanoparticles in a
green alga and emphasizes the need to characterize the fate
of particles in experimental media in order to correctly
interpret..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
David J. Brenner; "In the US, the average
radiation dose to which we are exposed has doubled in the
past 30 years. The average dose from natural background
sources has not changed, but what has changed is a more
than six-fold increase in the average radiation dose from
medical imaging. The biggest contributor..."
Featured Paper Interview
March 2010
Robert Brown; "The paper describes a genetic
mutation that can cause ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
or Lou Gehrig’s disease). This is of potential
interest because this is such a devastating disorder. The
finding also incriminated an abnormal protein that is
involved in aspect of a type of genetic material in the
cell known as RNA..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Marcelo Moreira Cavalcanti; "The main focus of
my research is the study of the behavior of the
energy of distributed systems. To explain more
precisely the development of my research, consider a
physical phenomenon which is described by a differential
partial equation and, in addition, we assume that
there..."
Featured Scientist Interview
March 2010
Jeffrey Conn; "G-protein-coupled receptors
(GPCRs) have been among the most successful of drug targets
and are involved, in a fundamental way, in regulating
virtually every cellular or organ system. However, there
has been an impasse for many years in the discovery and
development of highly selective small molecule..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Patrick J. Flynn; "Over the last seven years,
the group has collected in excess of 200,000 images and
videos of faces, irises, and other sites imaged with a
variety of sensors. Much of the data is made available to
other research groups and companies working in the field,
often as part of US government-sponsored..."
Special Topic of Face
Recognition
March 2010
Samuel H. Gellman; "Broad attention to this
paper reflects increasing interest in "foldamers," which
are oligomers that adopt specific biopolymer-like shapes.
The foldamer concept constitutes the basis of a subfield of
chemistry that has germinated and grown over the past 15
years or so. Proteins are natural..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Glenn R. Gibson; "Probiotics are products
containing live microorganisms. Prebiotics are not living
microbes, but rather are specific foods for the gut
microflora, i.e., they enter the gut after digestion and
fortify only the beneficial flora therein. Prebiotics are
not digested by humans because of their structure..."
Special Topic of
Probiotics
March 2010
Tao Han & Bin Zhang; "The recent discovery
of neutrino masses was one of the most significant
developments in physics. The mission of the CERN Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) will be to open up a new era in basic
science. Our paper has relevance in connection to these two
quite important developments..." Fast Moving
Front, March 2010
March 2010
Christopher P. Herzog, Mukund Rangamani, Simon F.
Ross; "There has been considerable excitement
recently about applying techniques from string theory to
condensed matter systems. Our work was a contribution to
this activity, helping to open up a new line of research
involving a new class of symmetries which..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Karyn Johnson; "We found that insects infected
with a very common bacterial endosymbiont
(Wolbachia) are protected from pathogenic viruses.
This finding is both unexpected and has the potential to
influence the outcome of host-pathogen interactions in a
number of ways. I think our paper is highly..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Stefan Leucht; "The meta-analysis showed that
some second generation antipsychotic drugs are somewhat
more efficacious than others. Although the differences were
not very big, this finding challenges a dogma that all
antipsychotic drugs are equally efficacious..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Xiong Wen (David) Lou & Lynden A. Archer;
"Compared to many other types of nanostructures, like
nanoparticles, nanowires, and nanotubes, development of
hollow micro-/nano-structures is still in its very early
stage in terms of both syntheses and applications. Many
novel synthetic methodologies..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Christian Marois & Bruce Macintosh; "The
discovery of the planetary system orbiting HR 8799 (a
nearby star in the constellation Pegasus) is unique in
several ways that have contributed to its high citation
rate. It is one of the first unambiguous direct detections
(actual images) of an exoplanet, and also the first
multi-planet..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010 (Commentary entry for
January
2010.)
March 2010
Chad A. Mirkin; "This manuscript describes a
way of making a new class of nanoparticles with properties
that can be tailored through a choice of readily accessible
ligand and metal ion building blocks. The strategy involves
controlled polymerization, where the reaction is stopped
before the particles become..." Fast Moving
Front, March 2010 (Commentary entry for
November
2009.)
March 2010
Andras Nagy; "The era of induced pluripotent
stem (iPS) cell has empowered the stem cell research field
on a scale never before seen. A vast number of laboratories
all over the globe are now feverishly working toward the
future application of these cells to treat a range of
devastating conditions. Our paper has..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010 (Commentary entry for
January
2010.)
March 2010
Camille Parmesan; "the biologists at the
IPCCC—about four of us total—wanted to come out
with a statement that we had high confidence that wild
plants and animals have responded to 20th-century climate
change. But then the economists at the meeting—four
or five of them—thought we were making too strong a
claim..." Science Watch® Newsletter Interview
March 2010
Andrew H. Paterson; "As the second
fully-sequenced cereal genome (rice being the first),
sorghum permitted us to compare these divergent lineages in
the flowering plant group (grasses) that provides humanity
with most of its food and feed, and a growing share of its
fiber and fuel. Sorghum also added..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Sunil V. Rao; "...for the first time in
patients with heart disease, blood transfusion may not be a
benign treatment. Previously, blood transfusion was looked
at as an "insurance policy" against the risks of our
traditional treatments which place patients at risk for
bleeding. I think it's important to not overinterpret our
results..." Fast Moving
Front, March 2010
March 2010
Ole Seehausen; "Speciation research is
currently one of the most active fields in evolutionary and
ecological research. The cichlid fish of African lakes are
textbook examples of rapid speciation but the mechanisms of
rapid speciation remain elusive. Our work on cichlids in
Lake Victoria demonstrates the..." Fast Moving
Front, March 2010
March 2010
Kenneth Söderhäll; "This paper is a
review summarizing the research on one important innate
immune process in invertebrates, namely the so-called
melanization reaction, which involves the synthesis of
melanin to encapsulate pathogens. This reaction in
invertebrates has received interest because..." Fast Moving
Front, March 2010
March 2010
Susan Solomon; "The paper showed that the
climate changes that take place due to human-caused changes
in carbon dioxide should be considered irreversible for at
least a thousand years, even if we stop emitting this gas,
and it discussed some of the impacts that this will lead
to—unless we develop some kind..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Ayalew Tefferi; "TET2 mutations are previously
undescribed novel mutations whose clinical and pathogenetic
relevance is actively being investigated. As such, many
investigators are naturally interested in the subject
matter and are working on it as well. TET2 mutations were
first described by a group in France led..." Fast Moving
Front, March 2010
March 2010 Jørgen
Vestbo; "A lot of what we know about the
natural history of COPD and the identification of risk
factors for disease progression has come from epidemiology.
Apart from obtaining information that can be used for
planning health care, both for the individual and
generally, prognostic factors also..."
Special Topic of
Chronic Obstructive
Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
March 2010
Jian Wang & Jun Wang; "This paper is one
of the representative papers which first demonstrated the
application of next-generation sequencing technology to
decipher a human genome. In addition, the paper studied an
Asian genome, which is of interest for the community and
also greatly expands..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010
March 2010
Paul Williams; "This paper focuses on a "hot
topic" in microbiology, namely 'quorum sensing,' i.e., the
extraordinary capacity of unicellular microorganisms to
behave socially by coordinating gene expression at the
population level through the deployment of small diffusible
signal molecules. It provides a perspective
primarily..." Fast Moving
Front, March 2010
March 2010
Younan Xia; "Our paper provides a
comprehensive review and critical assessment of research
activities centering on the syntheses and applications of
metal
nanocrystals with well-controlled
shapes and facets. This article is highly cited simply
because it touches upon an extremely important subject
that is being..." Fast Moving
Front, March 2010
March 2010
Qingzhu Yin; "The existence of the short-lived
radioactive nuclide 26Al (half-life 0.73 million
years, Myr) at the beginning of the solar system 4.567
billion years (Gyr) ago, has been known since the
mid-1970s. Recently, the amount of radioactive
26Al relative to the stable 27Al in
the early solar system was revised..." New Hot Paper,
March 2010 (Commentary entry for
January
2010.)
March 2010
Guido Zacchi; "The paper shows that great
progress has been achieved within the development of
individual steps in the process for the production of
ethanol from cellulose-containing materials, such as wood
residues, straw, bagasse, etc. It also presents the
authors' ideas about what remains to be done..." Fast Moving
Front, March 2010