This editorial considers the value and nature of academic psychiatry by asking what defines the specialty and psychiatrists as academics. We frame academic psychiatry as a way of thinking that benefits clinical services and discuss how to inspire the next generation of academics.

Measuring and attributing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions remains a challenging problem as the world strives toward meeting emissions reductions targets. As a significant portion of total global emissions, the road transportation sector represents an enormous challenge for estimating and tracking emissions at a global scale. To meet this challenge, we have developed a hybrid approach for estimating road transportation emissions that combines the strengths of machine learning and satellite imagery with localized emissions factors data to create an accurate, globally scalable, and easily configurable GHG monitoring framework.

Women in academic publishing and academic psychiatry face many challenges of gender inequality, including significant pay differentials, poor visibility in senior positions and a male-dominated hierarchical system. We discuss this problem and outline how the BJPsych plans to tackle these issues it in its own publishing.

Society is undergoing a shift in gender politics. Science and medicine are part of this conversation, not least as women's representation and pay continue to drop as one progresses through more senior academic and clinical levels. Naming and redressing these inequalities needs to be a priority for us all.

The inverse barometer effect (IBE) is the isostatic response of ocean surface height to changes in atmospheric pressure (P air) at a rate of about 1 cm hPa−1. The IBE is a significant contributor to variability of ice-shelf surface elevation (η ice), as we demonstrate with simultaneous global positioning system measurements of η ice and local measurements of P air from the Amery, Brunt and Ross Ice Shelves, Antarctica. We find that an IBE correction is justified for frequencies (ω) covering the “weather band”, 0.03 < ω < 0.5 cpd (cycles per day). The IBE correction reduces the standard deviation of the weather-band signal of η ice from ∼9 cm to ∼3 cm. With this correction, the largest remaining high-frequency error signal in η ice is the inaccuracy of the present generation of Antarctic tide models, estimated to be of order 10 cm for most of Antarctica.

A series of editorials in this Journal have argued that psychiatry is in the midst of a crisis. The various solutions proposed would all involve a strengthening of psychiatry's identity as essentially ‘applied neuroscience’. Although not discounting the importance of the brain sciences and psychopharmacology, we argue that psychiatry needs to move beyond the dominance of the current, technological paradigm. This would be more in keeping with the evidence about how positive outcomes are achieved and could also serve to foster more meaningful collaboration with the growing service user movement.

A single nucleotide polymorphism rs12807809 located upstream of the neurogranin (NRGN) gene has been identified as a risk variant for schizophrenia in recent genome-wide association studies. To date, there has been little investigation of the endophenotypic consequences of this variant, and our own investigations have suggested that the effects of this gene are not apparent at the level of cognitive function in patients or controls. Because the impact of risk variants may be more apparent at the level of brain, the aim of this investigation was to delineate whether NRGN genotype predicted variability in brain structure and/or function. Healthy individuals participated in structural (N = 140) and/or functional (N = 36) magnetic resonance imaging (s/fMRI). Voxel-based morphometry was used to compare gray and white matter volumes between carriers of the non-risk C allele (i.e., CC/CT) and those who were homozygous for the risk T allele. Functional imaging data were acquired during the performance of a spatial working memory task, and were also analyzed with respect to the difference between C carriers and T homozygotes. There was no effect of the NRGN variant rs12807809 on behavioral performance or brain structure. However, there was a main effect of genotype on brain activity during performance of the working memory task, such that while C carriers exhibited a load-independent decrease in left superior frontal gyrus/BA10, TT individuals failed to show a similar decrease in activity. The failure to disengage this ventromedial prefrontal region, despite preserved performance, may be indicative of a reduction in processing efficiency in healthy TT carriers. Although it remains to be established whether this holds true in larger samples and in patient cohorts, if valid, this suggests a potential mechanism by which NRGN variability might contribute to schizophrenia risk.

Growth rates in shell height on the shore and the number of eggs released in the laboratory during the spawning season were extremely variable among Littorina neritoides from a population on Anglesey, N. Wales. Much of this variability was attributed to the effects of unpredictable weather conditions on feeding activity. Thirtyper cent of the individually tagged snails in the population did not grow during 1976–8. Growth increments of the remaining snails were used to estimate the growth parameter, k, of the von Bertalanffy growth equation, and the asymptotic size, h∞, used in the equation was estimated to be 7·5 mm, corresponding to the largest individual found in the population. The von Bertalanffy equation was then used to construct a growth schedule for L. neritoides from post-settlement to the attainment of the asymptotic size. From this schedule, snails were expected to take at least 9 months to grow to a shell height of 2 mm and at least 5 years to grow to 7 mm. This growth schedule agrees closely with growth rates observed by Lysaght (1941) in a population at Plymouth, but predicts much lower growth rates than those estimated by Daguzan (1976) for a population in Brittany. Eggs were released from March to June in 1977 and from January to June in 1978. The extreme individual variability in egg production largely obscured the underlying relationship between fecundity and body size. The maximum observed fecundity was for a 71 mm snail which released a total of 3866 eggs during the 1978 spawning season. The average fecundity was 22 eggs per day during the 1978 spawning season, or about 300 eggs per season.

The protagonist of Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus (1947) is the composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose Faustian pact with the demonic consists of a long, voluntarily untreated syphilitic infection, which his brain craves as an exhilarating if destructive liberation from its icy germanic discipline. The craving is implanted on the very day on which, having renounced the call to theology, he commits his life to music. Arriving in Leipzig late in 1905 to take up his studies, he has a guided tour of the city, among other things visiting Bach's Thomaskirche. But his guide concludes the tour by dumping him in a brothel. Confused, he heads for the piano and tries to work out a harmonic problem: ‘Modulation from B major to C major, … as in the hermit's prayer in the finale of the Freischütz … on the six-four chord on G’. Then he rushes out, but not before a prostitute has brushed him on the cheek and indelibly fascinated him.