October 9, 2007
Why Are Huge Numbers Of Camels Dying In Africa And Saudi Arabia?:
More than 2000 dromedaries -- Arabian camels -- have died since August 10 in Saudi Arabia. Various theories have been put forward to explain the numerous deaths. For several years, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa have also seen…
October 9, 2007
Another thing I will also have to miss - the Inaugural Event of the 2007-2008 Pizza Lunch Season of the Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC), on October 24th at Sigma Xi Center (the same place where we'll have the Science Blogging Conference). Organized by The American Scientist and the…
October 9, 2007
Darn - I'll be out of town on that date, but you make sure to show up! The October meeting of Science Cafe Raleigh will be on the 23rd at my favourite Irish pub in Raleigh, Tir Na Nog, and the speaker is Dr. Mary Schweitzer, the NCSU researcher who discovered and analyzed soft tissues in…
October 9, 2007
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 online pages of Nature. So, as Attila announced today, the contest…
October 9, 2007
Encephalon #33 is up on GNIF Brain Blogger
Grand Rounds Vol. 4, No. 3 are up on Nurse Ratched's Place
Carnival of the Green #98 is up on Planet on a Plate
October 9, 2007
Genetic Dissection of Behavioural and Autonomic Effects of Î9-Tetrahydrocannabinol in Mice and the accompanying editorial Understanding Cannabinoid Psychoactivity with Mouse Genetic Models:
The fact that cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug has motivated a great deal of research aimed at…
October 9, 2007
My former SciBling David Dobbs regularly posts on the SciAm Blog, usually bringing in guest contributors highlighting novel research in neuroscience. Today, he invited Charles Glatt to review an interesting study on the interaction between genes and environment in development of depression. David…
October 9, 2007
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 week, gathered 3 ratings, each accompanied with a short comment, one…
October 9, 2007
The news came from high above that the Seed Media Group Science Literacy Grants program will match your donations up to $15,000. So, at this point in the fundraiser, every dollar you donate is worth two!
So, check out my challenge and check out my SciBlings' challenges as well.
And yes, don't…
October 9, 2007
There are 101 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already many registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to…
October 8, 2007
The curricula were unsophisticated, with a great deal of time wasted on penmanship and geography in the early grades and repetitions of the trivial history of New York City in higher grades.
- Martin Lewis Perl
October 8, 2007
Some good, thought-provoking reads about the Web, social networking, publishing and blogging:
Aggregating scientific activity
Social Networks at Work Promise Bottom-Line Results
Would limiting career publication number revamp scientific publishing?
The Public Library of Science group
The Seven…
October 8, 2007
Genes From The Father Facilitate The Formation Of New Species:
The two closely related bird species, the collared flycatcher and the pied flycatcher, can reproduce with each other, but the females are more strongly attracted to a male of their own species. This has been shown by an international…
October 8, 2007
This is really suspicious - magic perhaps! Every time I make a wish (and whisper it in prayer to the, hushhhhh, super-secret gods of atheists) for a favourite blog to get invited to join Scienceblogs.com, that actually happens in a matter of a few days. Poof! Just like that. Just look at today…
October 8, 2007
You may remember last year's contest, when my SciBling Shelley Batts was a Runner-up for the big prize.
The finalists for this year's $10,000 scholarship have just been announced and Shelley is one of the finalists again. Hopefully, this year she'll win.
And you can help her by voting for her.
October 8, 2007
The first week of the DonorsChoose fund-drive is up and the donations are coming in rapidly to a variety of school projects via my SciBlings' challenges.
You can check out all the projects picked by my SciBlings here and my own here.
You can get to my pledge also by clicking on the thermometer…
October 8, 2007
Kirk Ross in this week's 'Carrboro Citizen':
Jim Neal, a key Democratic Party fundraiser, is on the verge of announcing a run for U.S. Senate, sources close to Neal say.
Neal, a native of Greensboro who now lives in Chapel Hill, will head to Asheville this weekend for the Vance-Aycock Dinner, a…
October 8, 2007
There are 102 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program (now completely reshuffled) is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already 82 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too…
October 8, 2007
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 Nobel Laureates have made a series of…
October 7, 2007
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
- Sydney J. Harris
October 7, 2007
Chris Clarke explains eloquently what is, essentially, my blog commenting policy (though I transgress on other people's blogs...sorry).
The Senate vote on the mandatory free access to NIH-funded research has been postponed, which gives you all a few more days to do your part!
John Dupuis interviews…
October 7, 2007
Chimpanzees, Unlike Humans, Apply Economic Principles To Ultimatum Game:
New research from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany shows that unlike humans, chimpanzees conform to traditional economic models. The research used a modification of one of the most…
October 7, 2007
There are 103 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already many registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to…
October 6, 2007
For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and…
October 6, 2007
OK, I live here, yet I had to learn from Brian that the AMNH dinosaur exhibit is coming to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh. The exhibit will be open from October 26, 2007 till March 2, 2008 and I will make sure to go and see it while it is in town (and take…
October 6, 2007
Jeffrey Pomerantz invited me to give a brownbag lunch presentation on Science 2.0 yesterday at noon at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was fun for me and I hope it was fun for the others in the room, about 20 or so of faculty and…
October 6, 2007
That is one very interesting idea! This provision is usually used for getting medicines to 3rd world countries in times of emergency. So, why not research papers if the emergency warrants it? Gavin writes:
Imagine a scenario in which a developing country is facing a national health emergency,…
October 6, 2007
There are 104 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already 81 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do…
October 6, 2007
The folks at the Journal of Improbable Research have announced this years winners!
This is the first time I have ever blogged about a study before it won an IgNobel!
So cool!
October 5, 2007
Life is a waste of time, time is a waste of life, so get wasted all of the time and have the time of your life.
- Michelle Mastrolacasa
