April 24, 2008
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of workers in the world, the people who do all the work, and the people who think they do all the work. The latter class is generally the busiest, the former never have time to be busy.
- Stella Benson
April 24, 2008
Nurture Over Nature: Certain Genes Are Turned On Or Off By Geography And Lifestyle, Study Suggests:
Score one for the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, as North Carolina State University geneticists have shown that environmental factors such as lifestyle and geography play a large role…
April 24, 2008
Skeptic's Circle #85 is up on Andrea's Buzzing About
Carnival of Space #51 is up on Astro Engine
April 24, 2008
This post (click on the icon) was originally written on May 07, 2005, introducing the topic of neuroendocrine control of seasonal changes in physiology and behavior.
So far, I have directed all my attention to daily - circadian - rhythms, and pretty much ignored other rhythms that correspond to…
April 23, 2008
OK, I posted a lot of pictures of Belgrade and my Mom's food so far, but the real business was on Tuesday, when I gave two talks about Open Access, PLoS, Science 2.0, the future of the scientific paper, Open Notebook Science and science blogging.
In the morning, I gave a talk in the gallery of the…
April 23, 2008
The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English. Then I'd be able to charge you an upgrade fee every time I add new letters like N and T.
- Scott McNealy
April 23, 2008
Museum of Natural History in Belgrade is 113 years old. Tomorrow, I will go to the main building to talk to people and perhaps check the library and some specimens - there is no real exhibit there. But today I went to the ancient and tiny exhibit building, all the way out on Kalemegdan (the old…
April 23, 2008
There are 41 new articles published this week in PLoS ONE. A always, make comments and ratings while browsing and reading the articles. Here are just a few picks - titles I found interesting - but you should go and check all the others as well:
Nutrition or Detoxification: Why Bats Visit Mineral…
April 23, 2008
From January 20, 2006, on the need to check the model-derived findings in non-model organisms.
There are pros and cons to the prevalent use of just a dozen or so species as standard laboratory models. On one hand, when a large chunk of the scientific community focuses its energies on a single…
April 23, 2008
Food is probably the most nostalgia-inducing facet of life....
Tuesday breakfast - prosciutto sandwich (right) and rosehip jam sandwich (left):
Poppyseed (left and center) and Walnut (right) roll:
Wednesday breakfast - cream and cheese and prosciutto and hot pepper and coffee:
Home-made,…
April 23, 2008
The Tar Heel Tavern was the first blog carnival that focused on a geographical region instead of a topic. It was going strong for about two years, but I could not find enough time to manage it any more, so it went extinct.
But now that blogging in North Carolina has grown so much and got well…
April 23, 2008
Cathedral of Saint Sava:
Kalemegdan:
Chestnut puree:
Scenes from Knes Mihailova street:
A comic strip for kids, explaining what to do and what not to do if stuck inside the elevator:
April 23, 2008
Life Expectancy Worsening Or Stagnating For Large Segment Of U.S. Population:
One of the major aims of the U.S. health system is improving the health of all people, particularly those segments of the population at greater risk of health disparities. In fact, overall life expectancy in the U.S.…
April 23, 2008
Sheril Kirshenbaum will be on a panel on Science and the New Media at the AAAS Forum On Science And Technology Policy on May 9th and, as bloggers tend to do, she is asking for questions, comments and ideas from the readers. If you have some thoughts on the topic - science on the Web, etc., - go and…
April 23, 2008
Grand Rounds 4.31, the medical blog carnival, is up on Dr. Val and The Voice of Reason
The newest edition of Gene Genie, the human genetics blog carnival, is up on My Biotech Life.
The Boneyard - Edition #18 - is up on Archaeozoology
Accretionary Wedge #8 is up on Andrew's Geology Blog
The 39th…
April 23, 2008
Nothing better than coming back home after a long time (13 years since my last visit), seeing my family and eating Mom's food:
Matzo-ball soup for Passover:
Beef and bone marrow - I dug it out of the bone and salted it:
Spinach&cheese pie:
Around the dinner table:
Grandpa:
The best…
April 23, 2008
This is the sixth post in a series about mechanism of entrainment, running all day today on this blog. In order to understand the content of this post, you need to read the previous five installments. The original of this post was first written on April 12, 2005.
A Phase Response Curve (PRC) can…
April 22, 2008
A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you're in deep water.
- Sidney Goff
April 22, 2008
The second science blogging anthology, the Open Laboratory 2007 is now up for sale on Amazon.com. As the profits will go towards the organization of ScienceOnline'09, it is the best if you guide your readers to buy it directly from Lulu.com. However, it would be really nice if some of the readers…
April 22, 2008
Mutations in a Novel, Cryptic Exon of the Luteinizing Hormone/Chorionic Gonadotropin Receptor Gene Cause Male Pseudohermaphroditism:
A person's sex is determined by their complement of X and Y (sex) chromosomes. Someone who has two X chromosomes is genetically female and usually has ovaries and…
April 22, 2008
Neanderthals Speak Again After 30,000 Years:
Dr. Robert McCarthy, an assistant professor of anthropology in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University, has reconstructed vocal tracts that simulate the sound of the Neanderthal voice.
Slowly-developing Primates…
April 22, 2008
Niyaz Ahmed's Blog
Worst Result Ever
Tomorrow's Table
Stimulating Aliquot
Little Grassroots
A Baltimore Block
Via Ginnastica
April 22, 2008
I think I have a profile on Friendster - I don't know, I haven't checked since 2003. I have bare-bones profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn and Change.Org and I will get an e-mail if you "friend" me (and will friend you back), but I do not have time to spend on there. I refuse to even look at all the…
April 22, 2008
This is the fifth post in a series about mechanism of entrainment. Originally written on April 11, 2005.
If you look at the Phase Response Curve you made you see that, as you follow the curve through the 24-hour cycle, you first encounter a dead zone during the subjective day (VT0 - CT 12) during…
April 21, 2008
The other day I put instant coffee in my microwave oven ... I almost went back in time.
- Steven Wright
April 21, 2008
Do you remember when Mitch Waldrop wrote a draft of an article about Science 2.0 and asked for community feedback? He got 125 comments. Using them, he has now finalized the text and it appears in today's edition of Scientific American: Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future? Is posting…
April 21, 2008
This is a summary of my 1999 paper, following in the footsteps of the work I described here two days ago. The work described in that earlier post was done surprisingly quickly - in about a year - so I decided to do some more for my Masters Thesis.
The obvious next thing to do was to expose the…
April 21, 2008
The fourth post in the series on entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005, explains the step-by-step method of constructing a PRC.
After months of applying light pulses to your animals you are ready to analyze and plot your data. You will print out the actographs (see how in the post "On…
April 20, 2008
One must learn a different ... sense of time, one that depends more on small amounts than big ones.
- Sister Mary Paul
April 20, 2008
In the end, late at night, I had dinner (goulash - excellent) with the Director of FEST and a bunch of young science journalists, all graduates (Masters) of the Trieste program in Science Communication (SISSA) and most of them involved in some way in the organization of FEST:
