March 12, 2009
So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS Pathogens this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:…
March 12, 2009
Isn't it?
I know John would love one, but a hundred bucks is a lot. They seem to be a dynamic and responsive company - perhaps if a bunch of us ask they will start making a miniature version as well, one that can fit in one's traveling bag and is not as costly?
March 12, 2009
From SCONC:
Tuesday, March 17
7 p.m.
"Hope, Hype and Communicating Climate Change" The Asheville SCONCs welcome nationally prominent science writer Rick Borchelt to speak on making climate change information intelligible to the lay public. This is the first in a series of three public education…
March 12, 2009
The Two Cultures in the 21st Century:
A full-day symposium sponsored by: Science & the City, ScienceDebate2008, Science Communication Consortium
At the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture on the importance to society of building a bridge between the sciences and humanities, this…
March 12, 2009
Sorry, Nina, but I think I need to copy and paste the entire thing here:
Spring is here and it's time to talk to strangers. On Sunday April 5, I'll be conducting a collaborative experiment with 15 intrepid University of Washington graduate students, and I'd like to invite you to join in from your…
March 12, 2009
...but Creationists cannot:
Anyone who knows me at all knows that I break down creationist biology into four main components: design, natural evil, systematics, speciation, and biogeography.
Hat-tip: Pharyngula, where you will find the relevant link to the rest of this ingenious "college course".…
March 12, 2009
Wow! This is massive!
From Anesthesiology News:
Scott S. Reuben, MD, of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., a pioneer in the area of multimodal analgesia, is said to have fabricated his results in at least 21, and perhaps many more, articles dating back to 1996. The confirmed articles…
March 12, 2009
Joshua Davis wrote an amazing article for Wired - The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist - about the biggest successful bank robbery in history: how was it accomplished, why the perpetrators got caught in the end, and how come nobody still knows all the details (including the Big…
March 12, 2009
There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one…
March 12, 2009
It is:
SciCurious!
March 12, 2009
Circadian rhythms: Of owls, larks and alarm clocks in Nature News (download PDF while the article is still freely available), written by Melissa Lee Phillips is an excellent overview of the current state of knowledge about human circadian rhythms, underlying genetics, and circadian disorders.
I get…
March 12, 2009
On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting:
Even a few years ago the word "blog" inspired that peculiar mix of derision and dismissal that seems to haunt new media innovations long after they're proven. A blogger was a lonely, pajama-clad person in a dark room, typing out banal musings he…
March 12, 2009
Carnival of the Liberals #86 is up on The Greenbelt
Carnival of the Green # 170 is up on The Natural Patriot
Grand Rounds Vol. 5 No. 25 are now up on Doc Gurley
The 107th edition of The Skeptics' Circle is up on The Skeptic's Field Guide
March 12, 2009
First Right Whale Sedation Enables Disentanglement Effort:
For the first time ever, rescuers used a new sedation delivery system to help free an entangled North Atlantic right whale. The new system was developed at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in collaboration with NOAA and the Univ. of…
March 11, 2009
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)
March 11, 2009
Check out the SEEDMAGAZINE.COM. W00t! Looks nifty!
What they say:
Our online magazine team has been hard at work creating a new look for SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, the magazine's homepage. As you'll see, it has a ton of new features and pretty new colors.
The content of the site is now divided into four…
March 11, 2009
Last week, I conducted an e-mail interview with one of the PLoS ONE most frequent authors, Professor Seyed Ehtesham Hasnain . The interview is now live on the PLoS Blog
March 11, 2009
There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one…
March 11, 2009
It appears that the Beagle Project crew will have a trial run on the Brazilian ship Tocorime - not a replacement for building the Beagle, but getting the feet wet, seeing what is involved, learning from the experience, before the Real Deal.
Funded by the British Council, they will circumnavigate…
March 11, 2009
Notice the Darwin drum in the background....
March 11, 2009
From Sigma Xi:
NCSU molecular biologist Jorge Piedrahita has cloned pigs and explored why they are not carbon copies despite sharing the same DNA. Now he is trying to crack puzzles that could result in transgenic animals useful in human and veterinary medicine. His studies in cloned pigs led him to…
March 11, 2009
Corporate journalists are, apparently, constitutionally incapable of escaping the 'false balance', i.e., "he said, she said" mode of writing. So they are trying mightily to equate Obama with Bush in any way they can. It doesn't matter if one is a pragmatic who is trying to do the best he can, is…
March 11, 2009
Darwin issue of a magazine is banned in Turkey:
The title summarizes all the lunacy at once. After all the censorship towards evolution (and many other things), Turkish government finally took a giant step -backwards- for all mankind and blocked the whole issue of a scientific magazine.
Darwin is…
March 11, 2009
Les Lang at the UNC Medical Center News Office now writes a blog - Hard Science. One recent post immediately caught my eye - Clocking Cancer:
You might say that Dr. Aziz Sancar is trying to clock cancer.
In a nifty double play involving a pair of recent publications in the Proceedings of the…
March 11, 2009
Cameron comes up with several persuasive reasons in Why good intentions are not enough to get negative results published:
The idea is that there is a huge backlog of papers detailing negative results that people are gagging to get out if only there was somewhere to publish them. Unfortunately there…
March 11, 2009
Bill decided to take a look:
Fooling around with numbers:
Interesting, no? If the primary measure of a journal's value is its impact -- pretty layouts and a good Employment section and so on being presumably secondary -- and if the Impact Factor is a measure of impact, and if publishers are making…
March 11, 2009
American Carnivores Evolved To Avoid Each Other, New Study Suggests:
How do the many carnivorous animals of the Americas avoid competing for the same lunch, or becoming each other's meal? A possible answer comes from a new study by a pair of researchers at the University of California, Davis. Their…
March 10, 2009
Don't watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.
- Sam Levenson, 1911 - 1980
March 10, 2009
Dave Winer interviews Jay Rosen about "curmudgeons, then on to rebooting journalism, Meet The Press, the broken government, and everything related...."
Listen to the podcast here
March 10, 2009
Because they write lies?
Bill Clinton actually used signing documents way more than George W. Bush. But No. 42 is a Democrat and his wife currently works for Obama. So No. 44 is on a big tear right now to distance himself instead from No. 43, the Republican, who's back in Texas and doesn't care but…
