First Author*

In January 2008, German publication Der Spiegel conducted an interview with Philip Rosedale, the creator of Web 2.0 application Second Life. Rosedale built his first computer as a child and went on to study physics. In 1995, he developed the video- conferencing system FreeVue, which was purchased by RealNetworks in 1996. There, he became vice president and chief technical officer, working on video streaming. In 1999, Rosedale founded Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life, which went online to the public in 2003. Second Life currently has more than 12 million registered users, but only an estimated 1.1 million are currently active within its virtual world.

In the interview, Rosedale discusses topics such as the application of business and marketing in Second Life, competition from similar programmes that have emerged over the last year, and future directions. Further, Rosedale postulates why the sudden burst of interest and growth when Second Life first came onto the scene has subsided. Rosedale’s most immediate goal? ‘To make Second Life crash less’ and to ‘make it more usable.’

A Nature Insight has recently been published on the topic of quantum coherence. Improvements in techniques to manipulate light and matter are facilitating exciting applications of quantum mechanics. Scientists from diverse areas of research are now seeking to harness and exploit quantum coherence and entanglement for quantum simulations and quantum information processing. In light of the new Large Hadron Collider, which will be ready for use at CERN in August, this Nature Insight features an editorial, progress report, and reviews describing the current state of research and implementation of quantum coherence across a range of scientific disciplines.

Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has recently announced the publication of Bioscience Hypotheses, a new journal for radical hypotheses on topics throughout the life sciences.

The aim of the journal is to stimulate innovation by choosing work that is interesting and challenging, and provides a clear and coherent argument with a testable conclusion. Bioscience Hypotheses is edited by Dr William Bains, biotechnology entrepreneur and innovator, and visiting lecturer at the University of Cambridge.

The journal welcomes papers that:
• deliver new insight into the understanding or application of biology that could be of interest to a wide life science readership
• are clear, coherent, and lay out an argument that is easy to follow
• are not incompatible with known fact (although they may contest the interpretation of those facts)
• provide an interpretation, hypothesis or solution that is testable.

Papers that do not provide a means of testing their conclusion, or differentiating their conclusion from other explanations, will be rejected. Papers that provide some preliminary data (itself perhaps not sufficiently robust to be published as an independent paper, but nevertheless rigorously collected) will be welcomed. However, preliminary data are not a requirement for publication, and Bioscience Hypotheses is not a forum for new experimental results unless they are supporting a broader theoretical structure.

Papers are not subject to standard peer review, but are selected by the Editor on the basis of the criteria laid out above. The journal explicitly does not publish papers addressing medical issues, which should continue to be directed to the sister journal Medical Hypotheses.

Stevan Harnad’s blog. Open Access Archivangelism, has posted a very useful Open Access primer to give the uninitiated a detailed introduction into what OA publishing entails, the issues that it faces, and some of the movements to implement OA in a more widespread fashion. First Author would definitely recommend looking into this site!