clock | July 5, 2008Agriculture Linked To Frog Sexual Abnormalities:
A farm irrigation canal would seem a healthier place for toads than a ditch by a supermarket parking lot. But University of Florida scientists have found the opposite is true. In a study with wide implications for a longstanding debate over whether agricultural chemicals pose a threat to amphibians, UF zoologists have found that toads in suburban areas are less likely to suffer from reproductive system abnormalities than toads near farms -- where some had both testes and ovaries.
Music Went With Cave Art In Prehistoric Caves:
Thousands of years…
clock | July 5, 2008Thursday, July 10
6:00 - 8:00 PM
With support from our friends at Burroughs Wellcome Fund, SCONC (Science Communicators of North Carolina) is hosting an introduction to podcasting (think of it as radio over the Internet). National authority Ryan Irelan of Podcast Free America will lead a two-hour session at Sigma Xi on NC 54 in the Research Triangle Park. (click here for directions) Please RSVP to Ernie Hood no later than Tuesday, July 8, or you might go hungry. (bkthrough AT earthlink DOT net)
clock | July 5, 2008Last night I thought I had fun, hearing both thunder and fireworks, but these guys could not just hear but also see not two but three spectacular things simultaneously - fireworks (left), comet McNaught (center) and lightning (right). And this was all captured in one of the most exciting photos I have seen recently, bound to win all sorts of "Picture of the Year" contests come December:
Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning, picture taken by Antti Kemppainen:
Click here to see it really big!
Explanation:
In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky…
clock | July 5, 2008As expected, most of them are free to download. Peter Suber has all the relevant links:
Open Access Opportunities and Challenges: A Handbook (PDF) by Barbara Malina (ed.).
Science Dissemination using Open Access by Canessa and Zennaro.
Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors (PDF) by Kylie Pappalardo.
I also have Scholarly Journals Between the Past & the Future by Martin Rundkvist.
clock | July 5, 2008Heather Morrison just finished teaching her class on Open Access and the student projects are now all online for you to see.
clock | July 5, 2008That is, in a nutshell, the conclusion of this study. If you have free access to a lot of literature, you are much more likely to click on links and download PDFs (which hopefully means you will read the papers, learn from them, improve your science, and cite them when writing your own manuscripts). If you know that most of the time you will see a "pay $60" page instead, you don't bother clicking anyway.
Also, this mainly applies to the new papers - the older papers are rarely looked at - so there is no real need to keep archives TA for any lengthy periods of time.
Peter Suber comments.
clock | July 5, 2008Thanks to Heather for the heads-up:
Instructions for NIH-funded authors have been prominently placed on the PubMed home page.
There is a link to a list of journals that will manage the submission process with the NIH guidelines on behalf of authors - very handy! - as well as instructions for authors who publish in journals that do not provide this service.
clock | July 5, 2008Last night, the skies opened. And that sky-opening business is always kinda tricky - the sky-trap-door engineer has to make sure that everything goes well. And last night, as Jesse Helms was going up in the sky to meet his Maker, the trap-door kinda got stuck. Or perhaps ol'e Jesse wanted to send one last fart at 'Liberal Zoo' as he used to call Chapel Hill.
The thunderstorm was very sudden and powerful and much of the area lost electricity. We were without power for about 5 hours - from 8:30pm till 1:30am.
So, we lit up the candles. Kids played Monopoly. I, being offline, read a book -…
clock | July 4, 2008If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
clock | July 4, 2008Edwards, Rove to face off in UB debate:
Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain might not burn up the campaign trail around Western New York this election year, but the University at Buffalo may have scheduled the next best thing.
GOP strategist Karl Rove and former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards will debate the issues of the presidential campaign Sept. 26 as part of the university's Distinguished Speakers Series, The Buffalo News has learned.
As surrogates for the parties' standard bearers, the two also could square off more than once at other locations around the nation.
[…
clock | July 4, 2008Body's Own 'Cannabis (Marijuana)' Is Good For The Skin, Scientists Find:
Scientists from Hungary, Germany and the U.K. have discovered that our own body not only makes chemical compounds similar to the active ingredient in marijuana (THC), but these play an important part in maintaining healthy skin.
Experimental Philosophy Movement Explores Real-life Dilemmas:
Imagine a business executive who thinks: "I know that this new policy will harm the environment, but I don't care at all about that -- I just want to increase profits." Is the business executive harming the environment intentionally?…
clock | July 4, 2008There is no need to say anything at this moment because it is not nice to say ugly stuff about the dead.
Before coming to the US, as a kid not interested in politics, and certainly not in US politics, Helms was one of the rare American politicians I have heard of - mostly as an example how the US electoral system sometimes enables utterly unfit people to reach high levels of power. We laughed.
Ten years ago, one of the questions I had to answer when becoming a US citizen, was "who are the current US senators representing NC?" I said "Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, hopefuly not for much…
clock | July 4, 2008Four Stone Hearth #44 is up on Greg Laden's blog
The 90th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is up on The Millenium Project
Friday Ark #198 is up on Modulator
clock | July 3, 2008Secret Of The Sweet-Sounding Stradivarius: Wood Density Explains Sound Quality Of Great Master Violins:
The advantage of using medical equipment to study classical musical instruments has been proven by a Dutch researcher from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). In collaboration with a renowned luthier, Dr. Berend Stoel put classical violins, including several made by Stradivarius, in a CT scanner. The homogeneity in the densities of the wood from which the classical violins are made, in marked contrast to the modern violins studied, may very well explain their superior sound…
clock | July 3, 2008Happy birthday to Elizabeth Edwards, the most inspiring person on the US political scene since I started paying attention a couple of decades ago....
clock | July 3, 2008I know that you know that I work for PLoS. So, I know that a lot of you are waiting for me to respond, in some way, to the hatchet-job article by Declan Bucler published in Nature yesterday. Yes, Nature and PLoS are competitors in some sense of the word (though most individual people employed by the two organizations are friendly with each other, and even good personal friends), and this article is a salvo from one side aimed at another. Due to my own conflict of interest, and as PLoS has no intention to in any official way acknowledge the existence of this article (according to the old…
clock | July 2, 2008All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne