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I am the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science). My job is to try to motivate you to comment on the papers there. My scientific specialty is chronobiology (circadian rhythms and photoperiodism), with additional interests in comparative physiology, animal behavior and evolution. You can contact me at: Coturnix@gmail.com

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Science Practice:

What makes a memorable poster, or, when should you water your flowers?

Being out of the lab, out of science, and out of funding for a while also means that I have not been at a scientific conference for a few years now, not even my favourite meeting of the Society for...

The Scientific Paper: past, present and probable future

A post from December 5, 2007: Communication Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors -...

NIH public access law is now being implemented

As many of you may be aware, yesterday was the first day of the implementation of the new NIH law which requires all articles describing research funded by NIH to be deposited into PubMed Central within 12 months of publication....

Science in the 21st Century

Bee and Michael and Chad and Eva and Timo and Cameron will be there. And so will I. And many other interesting people. Where? At the Science in the 21st Century conference at the Perimeter Institute (Waterloo, Ontario) on Sep....

Science and Congress

The Science Communication Consortium presents: Science and Congress: The Role of Think Tanks and Congressional Science Committees Thursday, April 24, 2008 7:00-8:30pm CUNY - 365 Fifth Avenue, NY NY (directions below) Recent years have seen a rise in prominence of...

NIH getting serious about brain doping

There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of...

Yes, we need more scientists in office, and they need to know how to run

SEA will train scientists to run for office: SEA is holding a workshop to train scientists to run for office on May 10th at Georgetown University. If you are a scientist or engineer and have been considering running for office...

WiSE pictures

The WiSE panel earlier today was fun and informative. On the content - later. Perhaps two other SciBlings who were in the audience will have better renditions anyway. The panel was recorded and once the recording and other blog posts...

I'll try to say something WiSE tomorrow

WiSE, a network of Women in Science and Engineering at Duke University is hosting a panel Shaping the world, one job at a time: An altruistic/alternative career panel tomorrow, Friday, at noon in Teer 203. If you want to show...

AAAS and NSF Communicating Science Workshop - April 3 - Raleigh, NC

Got an e-mail from AAAS and will try to go if at all possible: The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and North Carolina State University, will be holding a...

The so-called Facebook Scandal

[rant]So, if you organize a study-group online instead of in meat-space, the old fogies who still remember dinosaurs go all berserk. A student is threatened by expulsion for organizing a Facebook group for studying chemistry. Moreover, as each student got...

Jane - the Journal/Author Name Estimator

Jane is the cool new tool that everyone is talking about - see the commentary on The Tree of Life, on Nature Network and on Of Two Minds. In short, the Journal/Author Name Estimator is a website where you can...

Books on careers in science

Anne-Marie reviews two books that appear to be useful in thinking about one's career in science: The Beginner's Guide to Winning a Nobel Prize, by Peter Doherty, and The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology, by Chandler,...

How to have your papers deposited into PubMed Central

Are you confused with the new NIH Policy and unsure as to what you need to do? If so, Association of Research Libraries has assembled a very useful website that explains the process step by step. But the easiest thing...

Open Access Beer!

What is the difference between Free Access Beer and Open Access Beer? You go to a bar to get your Free Access Beer. You sit down. You show your ID. The barista gives you a bottle. You don't need to...

Open Students

Open Students is a new blog for students about open access to research. It is run by Gavin Baker (who also recently joined Peter Suber at Open Access News - Congratulations!) and sponsored by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic...

Who's scooping whom and why this matters?

Aetosaurs. No, I have not heard of them until now. But that does not matter - the big story about them today is the possibility - not 100% demonstrated yet, to be fair - that some unethical things surround their...

Cool new Open Access Journal

From Sage Ross, via John Lynch come exciting news about a new Open Access Journal - Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science Spontaneous Generations is a new online academic journal published by graduate students at...

Life Sciences in North Carolina

OK, this may not be very new, but for all of you taking a look at science in North Carolina next week due to the focus on the Science Blogging Conference, The Scientist has published a number of essays looking...

Grapevine Genomes

Two grape genomes were published this year, one in Nature, the other in PLoS ONE. Larry Moran explains the methodologies and results of both and discusses the trustworthiness of each. The Nature paper is explained in The Grapevine Genome, and...

New on.....Publishing

In the wake of the signed omnibus bill that funds NIH and ensures open deposition of NIH-funded research, here are some thoughtful questions: Why the NIH bill does not require copyright violation: The great advantage of the requirement to deposit...

Theory and Practice

First: the difference between theory and practice. Second: the theory. Third: still to come, I hope, a YouTube video of Steinn demonstrating the practice of parallel parking....

The Impacted Factor in need of Cleansing

I buried this among a bunch of other cool links yesterday, but there was a study the other day, in the Journal of Cell Biology, that seriously calls in question the methodology used by Thompson Scientific to calculate the sacred...

New on.... Open Access and Science 2.0

Subscription-supported journals are like the qwerty keyboard: Are there solutions? One reason for optimism is that changing how we pay the costs of disseminating research is not an all-or-nothing change like switching from qwerty to Dvorak keyboards. Some new open-access...

The Scientific Paper: past, present and probable future

Communication Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I...

Zotero Translator for PLoS Articles

Zotero is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to manage and cite research papers. They just announced that Zotero now works with PLoS papers. If you have no idea what I am talking about, Rich Cave explains....

Science Videos

JoVE, SciVee, LabAction and DnaTube are mentioned in this nice article, also found in a number of other newspapers, e.g., USA Today and Seattle Times....

How to Think About Science

CBC has started a series of interviews (later available as podcasts) with scientists and others about the nature of science, the public undrestanding of science and related issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to blog about...

Don't go near that empty beer bottle if your metabolism is fast!

That is, if you are a shrew and do not want to be just a dead data-point for some ingenious young ecologists....who at least clean up the tricky trash left by drunk drivers....

Boston - Part 2: Publishing in the New Millennium

It's been a while since I came back from Boston, but the big dinosaur story kept me busy all last week so I never managed to find time and energy to write my own recap of the Harvard Conference. Anna...

On my last scientific paper, I was both a stunt-man and the make-up artist.

Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry. But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science...

I Wish I Could Be There

The fifth Science Festival is going on right now in Genoa, Italy. It is a longish affair, from 25th October till 6th November, so if you just happen to be in the area you can still make it. They have...

Links and files from ConvergeSouth and ASIS&T

My brain is fried. My flight home was horrifying - the pilot warned us before we even left the gate that the weather is nasty and that he ordered the stewardess to remain seated at least the first 30 minutes...

Felice Frankel wins The Lennart Nilsson Award for science photography

Nobel Prizes are not the only awards given in Stockholm these day. Karolinska Institute also gives an annual Lennart Nilsson Award for photography. This year's prize has just been announced and I am happy to report that the recepient is...

A Global Slant On Nobel Prizes

So far this week, my blogging had a distinctly local slant on Nobel Prizes, so now I want to do something different. Quite a lot of people have noticed how many science prizes this year went to Europeans. Read the...

How To Cite a Blog Post Properly in your List of References

A couple of years ago, a blog post of mine appeared in the List of References of a paper. Unfortunately, the form in which it was cited was this: #16 Zivkovic B. Clock tutorial #6: To entrain or not to...

A Local Slant On Nobel Prizes, Again.

Smithies is not the only winner of this year's Nobel Prize with a local connection. The Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded this morning and one of the recepients is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The chair of...

How much does pharmaceutical industry control what appears in medical literature?

Of course they fight against Open Access Publishing - too much sunshine scares them and would make them scurry away in panic...

Laboratory Web Site and Video Awards

You may remember, from several months ago, that Attila started a contest for the best designed lab web page. Soon, the project became too big for a lone blogger to tackle. Especially after an article about this appeared on the...

Journal Clubs - think of the future!

The recent return of Journal Clubs on PLoS ONE has been quite a success so far. People are watching from outside and they like what they see. The first Journal Club article, on microbial metagenomics, has already, in just one...

UNC researcher wins a Nobel for the Knock-Out Mouse

Dr. Oliver Smithies, the Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA, together with Mario R. Capecchi and Martin J. Evans, won this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine: This year's...

World Health Organization breaks embargo and messes up.

Before two papers passed the peer-review and got published, WHO (which was given the data) made its own interpretation of the findings and included it in its press kit, including the errors they made in that interpretation. A complex story...

Science 2.0 at SILS

Yes, I'll be there this Friday. Come by and say Hello if you are in the building or close at lunchtime....

Help make NIH-funded research findings freely available to everyone!

Back in July, the House of Representatives passed a bill that requires all the NIH-funded research to be made freely available to the public within at most 12 months subsequent to publication. The equivalent bill has passed the Senate Appropriations...

Computational Biology around the world

Johanna Dehlinger writes: In September, PLoS Computational Biology begins a series entitled "Developing Computational Biology" about the pursuit of scientific endeavors in computational biology around the world. Each country has unique features in areas from educational programs, types of research...

Ethics Code for Scientists?

BBC reports that scientists working in the UK government have adopted a Scientific Ethics Code, written by Professor Sir David King. Here is the Code: Act with skill and care, keep skills up to date Prevent corrupt practice and...

Word of the Day

Copyfraud...

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research (in Medicine and elsewhere)

In a commentary and a blog post, the editors of PLoS Medicine ask: ....is there still a reluctance to accept that anything useful can be learned from research without numbers? An old question that tends to generate a lot of...

MS Excel is the tool of the Devil!

There is a good reason why scientists in general despise MS Excel. It is cumbersome, non-common-sensical, and the stats cannot be trusted. The graphs are ugly. I am sure it took a lot of hard work to design Excel (and...

What is an "Author"?

There are some die-hards in the comment thread of this post on Evolgen who assert that the only thing that makes one an author of something is the act of writing, i.e., using writing materials to commit language to paper....

Nature mission (sic) statement

Maxine Clarke: In printing the statement verbatim every week as we have done, making it clear when it originated, we have hitherto assumed that readers will excuse the wording in the interests of historical integrity. But feedback from readers of...

Alone in the lab...and you get hungry!

So, you look around to see if there is anything edible! Of course, it's easy if you work with tasty animals....(just ask the guys in the next door lab who work on lobsters, crayfish and oysters...or wait until you get...

Who is Eva Vertes?

I have linked to and posted pictures of Eva Vertes from SciFoo before and you may ask: "Who is she? Why was she invited there?" The Wikipedia page I linked to earlier is a short stub and full of errors....

The 7 Most Exciting Moments in Science

Ruchira comments on the article in the Discover Magazine and their choice of seven most magical eureka moments in the history of science. They are: * Otto Lowei: discovering the chemical transmission of nerve impulses * Rene Descartes: developing the...

Does tenure need to change?

There is a long and interesting comment thread on this article on The Scientist blog. What do you think? (Hat-tip: Tanja)...

Science Envy

I missed this by weeks, but Dave asked a set of questions that I was pondering on, but found no time and energy to answer until now. PZ, Janet, Martin, Chad and RPM responded (I am assuming some people outside...

Obligatory Readings of the Day - competition vs cooperation in science

Four excellent, thought-provoking articles all in some way related to the idea of Open Science. One by Bill Hooker: Competition in science: too much of a good thing and three by Janet Stemwedel: Clarity and obfuscation in scientific papers Does...

Exclusive: Interview with Senator John Edwards on Science-Related Topics

I had a great pleasure recently to be able to interview Senator - and now Democratic Presidential candidate - John Edwards for my blog. The interview was conducted by e-mail last week. As I am at work and unable to...

World 2.0 at Rainbows End

Books: "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. It's 2025 - What happened to science, politics and journalism? Well, you know I'd be intrigued. After all, a person whose taste in science fiction I trust (my brother) told me to read this...

Geography of Science

Stem-Cell research is easier in some places than others. Help us locate exactly where. When is the North Carolina/Triangle community going to try to push hard for state funding of stem-cell research? Or have I missed something?...

Prometeo Network

Nature News just had an article announcing a new social networking site for physicians and biomedical scientists called Prometeo Network. Another one to check out and add to the ever-growing list of such new sites....

Bisphenol A - the epicenter of politicized science

Here is some chemistry of bisphenol A, but what is really interesting is this article about Fred vom Saal. It is quite revealing about the way industry produces bad science in order to protect its financial interests: "The moment we...

Science Cartoon Contest

The Union of Concerned Scientists has picked the 12 finalists in their cartoon contest and it is now your turn to vote for the best one. While I personally prefer the TomTomorrowesque #9, I think that the simpler cartoons, e.g.,...

Nature Precedings

A few days ago, Nature launched its newest Web 2.0 baby, the Nature Precedings. It is very interesting to see the initial responses, questions and possible misunderstandings of the new site, so browse through these posts and attached comments by...

So, why did the mammoths REALLY go extinct?

A paper in press in Current Biology (press release here) looks at mitochondrial DNA of mammoths and advances a primarily environmental cause for the mammoth extinction. Razib explains why such a black-and-white dichotomy is unhealthy. Looking at a different hypothesis,...

PLoS 500

Yesterday, PLoS-ONE celebrated the publication of the 500th paper (and additional 13). Here are some quick stats: 1,411 submissions 513 published paper 360 member editorial board and growing 19 day average acceptance to publication 600+ post publication comments posted I...

Hooray for Open Science

Social Science and Humanities bloggers have been doing it for quite a while, but natural scientists have largely been very reluctant to do this. Now, with approval of his PI, Attila Csordas will start posting parts of his Dissertation on...

Lab Action!

Remember back in November, when everyone got excited about JoVe (the Journal of Visulized Experiments)? Well, it is not alone in its niche any more. There is now another site similar to that: Lab Action. Of course I homed in...