Tweet Tweet! PCR Cloning's Complete

The Albion Café in London alerts its patrons to "every fresh-baked tray of cakes and pastries ... so you'll know when to show up" via Twitter. Cameron Neylon at Science in the Open says that although the "lab is slightly more complex than a bakery," researchers could build upon this concept to record and share scientific data. "A little more sophistication could go a long way," Neylon says. By building upon this basic framework, shared data "could be processed downstream into a more directly useable record," he adds. As researchers often neglect to record the small details of their work, Neylon suggests that a modified Twitter model would allow "the potential for capturing a lot of the detail of what is happening in a lab, as it happens." Though he notes that "Twitter is often derided as trivial," Neylon says at the very least it shows that "starting with identifying the simplest things … that are also useful to the scientist on the ground seems like a viable route forward."