Pieces
Newest first. Five formats, in ascending order of how long they take.
- Spot check 1 One published figure, annotated where it stops working.
- Redraw 0 The deposited data behind a figure, replotted, shown side by side with the original.
- Explainer 4 One dataset or one mechanism, walked through step by step as you scroll.
- Interactive 1 A published model you can drive, with the parameters cited.
- Guide 5 Reference for working scientists. What to do, why, and what happens if you do not.
- Volume 1 Three-dimensional and experimental media, where the third dimension carries information.
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Explainer
A third of it is gone, or nine tenths
Three fluorescent labels in one piece of mouse tumour, fading across forty-seven frames. How much the vessels lost depends on whether you subtract the background first, and only one of the two answers is about the dye.
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Explainer
This image has twenty-seven channels and your figure has three
Imaging mass cytometry records one channel per antibody. A page holds three colours before they stop being tellable apart, and even the three that cover the most leave half of what was stained unshown.
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Explainer
The same number twice, and two different cells
Two frames twenty-four minutes apart hold the same amount of condensed chromatin, to within two pixels. One is a cell going into mitosis and the other is a cell coming out of it, and only the picture says which.
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Volume
A third of this image is hiding something behind it
A maximum projection turns 236 optical sections into one picture. Across a third of the area where there is anything to see, it is stacking two separate objects into a single pixel.
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Explainer
What the sentence about an antibody leaves out
An antibody is Y-shaped, with two arms that bind and a stem that signals. Every word of that is true, and the molecule is 69 Å thick in the direction the drawing throws away.
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Spot check
Both ends of this protein are the same colour
The rainbow running along these structures encodes residue number, which really is ordered. Print it in greyscale and the first residue and the last arrive at the same tone.
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Guide
The figure with no text in it
Your plotting tool probably converted your axis labels into drawings of letters. The picture is identical, and nobody can check it any more.
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Guide
SEM or SD?
One of them describes your animals and one describes your confidence in an average. Collecting more animals shrinks only the second.
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Guide
Jet
The rainbow colourmap puts its brightest colour two thirds of the way up, and its top and bottom are nearly the same shade of dark.
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Guide
What your plotting library gives you by default
matplotlib's second and third colours are the same colour to a red-blind reader. Three conditions is the most ordinary figure there is.
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Guide
What your journal checks, and what it does not
Two publishers, the same 300 dpi, and only one of them asks whether anyone can tell your colours apart.
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Interactive
A figure is an instrument
Which chart you choose changes what people take away. That is a measured effect, not a matter of taste.