clock | August 21, 2008Working to empower students nationwide to experiment with science and technology, Discovery Education and 3M are hosting the 10th annual Young Scientist Challenge (YSC). Moving closer to recognizing "America's Top Young Scientist of the Year" and "America's Top Science Teacher of the Year," Discovery Education and 3M announce this year's finalists.
See them here.
clock | August 21, 2008The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) announced the winner of its 2008 "Science Idol: Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest," which draws attention to the growing problem of political interference in federal government science.
Justin Bilicki, of Brooklyn, New York has earned the title of America's "Science Idol" with his winning cartoon. It depicts a scientist presenting his research findings that conclude: "We are destroying the Earth." Two government officials look on. The official holding a briefcase with money spilling out of it, says, "Could you kindly rephrase that in…
clock | August 21, 2008The Scientist just won the Azbee Award for Magazine of the Year, awarded by American Society of Business Publications Editors. Congratulations!
clock | August 21, 2008Sure, we've done the high-brow lectures and geek-out tours, but what really gets the old SCONC juices flowing is mingling, meeting new faces and trading some business cards.
Please join us to hob-nob (and maybe find a job) with science writers, museum people, educators and webbies who share an interest in connecting North Carolina's science with the general public and the wider world.
Science Communicators of North Carolina
August mixer
5:30 p.m.
Thursday, August 21
Tyler's Tap Room, American Tobacco Campus, Durham
clock | August 21, 2008Remember when I wrote about Squishables?
They have arrived! Left to right: puppy, panda, penguin and hedgehog (guess what is whose):
clock | August 21, 2008This is big! A new agreement was signed between Max Planck Society and Public Library of Science in which the MPS will pay publication fees for its researchers. Mark Patterson explains:
The MPS is one of the world's leading research organizations whose researchers have an international reputation for scientific excellence. We are delighted to be collaborating with the MPS in this way so that more MPS researchers will be encouraged to publish their work in PLoS journals, and to promote open access to research literature more broadly. For papers accepted in PLoS journals after July 1st, 2008…
clock | August 21, 2008Carrboro Creative Coworking, a brilliant local project spearheaded by Brian Russell, is now a reality. The lease has been signed!
Carrboro Creative Coworking now has a lease for office space at 205 Lloyd Street, Suite 101 in downtown Carrboro! It's 3,049 square feet and has nine small offices, two conference rooms, a kitchen, and public work space. The TARGET opening date for CCC is Wednesday, October 1, 2008. Stay tuned for exact dates and grand opening party info. :)
To launch this business I need your help now. Its essential that I pre-sell as many services as I can. This will fulfill a…
clock | August 21, 2008Tailor-made Functional Garments For Olympic Horses:
When the horses and competitors go through their paces at the Summer Olympics in Hong Kong in 2008, it will be very hot and very humid - just as it is every summer there. Three special blankets will offer the Swiss teams' tournament horses some respite from the elements.
Tracing Origins Of Critical Step In Animal Evolution -- The Development Of Nerves:
University of Queensland researchers have traced the origins of one of the most important steps in animal evolution - the development of nerves.
Future Impact Of Global Warming Is Worse When…
clock | August 21, 2008Change of Shift Vol 3, Number Four is up on Emergiblog
The 138th Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Janice Campbell's blog
There is a new carnival of African skeptics - Carnival of the Africans. Check it out.
clock | August 20, 2008Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
- H. Jackson Brown
clock | August 20, 2008There is this food meme going around everywhere, so I checked out what Chad, Archy, Mark CC and Rev. BigDumbChimp picked. I have to admit I had to use Google for a lot of these, often realizing that I have, indeed, tasted some of these but under a different name. Different people do it differently, i.e., adding comments, or bolding those they tried, perhaps also italicizing those that they tried and spit in disgust. Here is my list with comments:
1. Venison (deer and elk). Yes. Very tasty.
2. Nettle tea. Yes. Not very tasty, but OK.
3. Huevos rancheros. No. Mexican food is too new and…
clock | August 20, 2008There are 12 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. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Seeing without Seeing? Degraded Conscious Vision in a Blindsight Patient:
Blindsight patients, whose primary visual cortex is lesioned, exhibit preserved ability to discriminate visual stimuli presented in their "blind" field, yet report no visual awareness hereof. Blindsight is generally studied in experimental investigations of single patients, as very…
clock | August 20, 2008As I announced this morning, there will be several guest posts here over the next several weeks. The first one, by Barn Owl of the lovely Guadalupe Storm-Petrel blog, is likely to appeal to a lot of my readers as it combines several of my own interests:
====================
In this guest-post for A Blog Around the Clock, I'll combine three things that Coturnix especially likes: horses, circadian biology, and an Open Access research paper. For the equestrian, there are two main seasonal issues, controlled primarily by photoperiod, or day length, which must be considered, especially if one…
clock | August 20, 2008Eva Amsen: How to get scientists to adopt web 2.0 technologies:
Many, if not most, scientists are not in the habit of putting things online. The ones that are might be tempted by the concept of sharing the papers they read, letting everyone look at their lab notebook, joining a forum or writing a blog. If you're reading this in your RSS feed or clicked through from FriendFeed, you're probably one of those people. But think about your friends and colleagues who only turn on their computer for work and e-mail. They're not going to tag their favourite papers or discuss the process of research…
clock | August 20, 2008Jeremiah Owyang: How to Successfully Moderate a Conference Panel, A Comprehensive Guide
Not all of it is applicable to an unconference like ScienceOnline'09, but lots of nuggets of wisdom in there.
clock | August 20, 2008Jessica reminds us that several scientists and geeks (i.e., Web designers and programmers) are running for various political offices this year. Some of them even got together on an ActBlue Geek Page.
Of them all, I particularly like the savvy campaign ways of Sean Tavis who is running for Kansas State House, trying to displace a Creationist, anti-woman Neanderthal from that seat. Both Kevin Z and Ed Cone noted his online savvy and ability to raise funds online by using the Web well. Listen to this NPR story about this and read his XKCD-style stick-figure cartoons.
And if you want to donate…
clock | August 20, 2008You all loved it when my Mom wrote two 5-part series of guest-posts. You remember the exciting reports from herpetology survey by Kevin when he was in China. My friend Heinrich wrote two guest-posts about sleep. And most recently Anne-Marie wrote a guest-post about daily rhythms in bats. As you all appeared to like these posts, I thought I'd ask another 4-5 bloggers to write something and post here. The first one will be posted here in a couple of hours, so stay tuned......
clock | August 19, 2008I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.
- Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx
clock | August 19, 2008Grand Rounds 4.48. are up on Six Until Me
Carnival of the Godless #98 is up on Letters from a broad...
clock | August 19, 2008There are 45 new articles in PLoS ONE 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, including the first one which tests one of Darwin's own hypotheses:
Resource Competition Triggers the Co-Evolution of Long Tongues and Deep Corolla Tubes:
It is normally thought that deep corolla tubes evolve when a plant's successful reproduction is contingent on having a corolla tube longer than the tongue of the flower's pollinators, and that…