Near the end of September, MDPI released a new functionality: the commenting and endorsement system. It allows researchers to endorse and recommend articles among each other – enabling ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ to infiltrate the academic sphere. Why an endorsement system? The commenting and endorsement system stems from the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), […]

27 September 2019 marked the kick-off to the countdown of the 1st World Sustainability Week (WSW). For this occasion, Matthias Burkhalter (who initiated the idea) and the two chairs of WSW, Professor Max Bergman and Professor Ed Constable, came together with Dr Heiner Vischer, President of Basel’s Grand Council, to plant a 20-year-old oak tree […]

On May 15–17, 2019, the journal Molecules organized its second Symposium of Medicinal Chemistry “Facing Novel Challenges in Drug Discovery” in Barcelona. It was a three-day event, with more than 180 attendees from 36 countries. The symposium, chaired by Professor Diego Muñoz-Torrero and Professor F Javier Luque, brought together renowned experts from all around the […]

The Fourth Basel Sustainability Forum: Health (BSF 2019) took place in the Aula of the Kollegienhaus of the University of Basel, Switzerland, on 3 June 2019. The forum kicked off with opening statements by three young climate activists from the Klimastreikbewegung Basel, reminding everyone that there is no alternative to climate action but to act […]

Prof. Dr. Max Bergman seeks answers to key questions on the challenges set out by the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). He is one of the Chairs of the 8th World Sustainability Forum (WSF) that will take place 14–19 September 2020 in Geneva, Switzerland. The WSF is an event that “encourages participants to go beyond […]

This is thanks to a new sequencing workflow presented in a recently published paper in Genes which removes some steps from traditional sequencing, and this results to a smaller loss of DNA. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute (University of Cambridge), and Pacific Biosciences have read the whole genetic code of a single tiny mosquito […]