clock | June 1, 2008More and more societies are compiling their 'classical' papers.
Here is another one.
And here I wrote, among else:
"In discussions of Open Access, we always focus on brand new papers and how to make them freely available for readers around the world as well as for people who want to mine and reanalyse the data using robots. But we almost never discuss the need to make the old stuff available. Yet we often lament that nobody reads or cites anything older than five years. Spending several years reading everything published in the field in the 20th century up until about 1995 (as well as some…
clock | June 1, 2008Yes, there is a new blog around here - The ScienceBlogs Book Club - where the author of a book and invited guest bloggers will discuss the book. You are invited to join the discussion in the comments and we, the rest of the sciencebloggers, may add to the cacophony on our blogs as well.
The first book in this series will be Microcosm by our own Carl Zimmer. The invited bloggers are John Dennehy, PZ Myers and Jessica Snyder Sachs, and all of you, of course....
Fortunately, I recently got my copy of the book, so I may push it to the top of my reading list and join in the discussion myself.
clock | June 1, 2008More from SCONC:
Tuesday June 17 at 6:30-8:30 pm
Science Café - A 'One Medicine' Approach to a Changing World
NC State's Barrett D. Slenning MS, DVM, MPVM will share with us the view that knowing about diagnoses and treatments of animals can benefit humans. The opposite is also true, given the fact that about 60 percent of all human pathogens are zoonotic diseases, transmissible between animals and people. Join us to learn how human and veterinary medicine can join forces to protect us with rapid responses to the outbreak of disease.
Location: The Irregardless Cafe, 901 W. Morgan Street,…
clock | June 1, 2008Living Fossils Have Long- And Short-term Memory Despite Lacking Brain Structures Of Modern Cephalopods:
Robyn Crook from the City University of New York reports that Nautilus, the ancient living ancestors of modern cephalopods, have both long and short-term memory, despite lacking the brain structures that modern cephalopods evolved for long-term memory.
Slide Rule Sense: Amazonian Indigenous Culture Demonstrates Universal Mapping Of Number Onto Space:
The ability to map numbers onto a line, a foundation of all mathematics, is universal, says a study published May 30 in the journal Science,…
clock | May 31, 2008The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
- Sir William Bragg
clock | May 31, 2008Bouphonia: The Conservatism to Come.
SciCurious: Weird Science: it's Friday!. Since I do not have time and energy for my Friday Weird Sex Blogging series, I am glad that someone picked up on it. This post is about condoms and why they break.
Echidne: He Loved Horses
Two excellent posts and comment threads - I wish these guys were blogging back when I was in grad school: PhysioProf: Strategic Planning: How To Complete Fascinating Projects And Publish Them In Top Journals and DrugMonkey: Strategic Planning: How to Secure Funding in a Climate of Arbitrary Selection
Anna Kushnir wrote a…
clock | May 31, 2008Classic Science Papers: The 2008 'Challenge', what will hopefully turn into a carnival, is up on Skulls in the Stars and it if full of really cool posts.
Friday Ark #193 is up on the Modulator
clock | May 31, 2008News from SCONC (Science Communicators of North Carolina):
On Thursday, June 5 at 7 p.m. in the Banquet Hall of the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, NC:
Public Lecture:
The Beautiful Mind: Breakthroughs and Breakdowns of the Brain,
with Dr. Ayse Belger.
clock | May 31, 2008Have you been to Pandagon lately? Have you seen the brand new look, design and layout? Cool!
Which reminds me that I have read Amanda's book, It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, on my first 2-3 flights in Europe last month. I left it with my cousin - let's spread the new, fun kind of feminism to the Balkans!
I have been reading Amanda Marcotte online since before she joined the crew at Pandagon and I have to say that, as a white, middle-aged, middle-class man, I learned from her blogging a lot about things I used to take for…
clock | May 31, 2008Why Are Computational Neuroscience and Systems Biology So Separate?:
Despite similar computational approaches, there is surprisingly little interaction between the computational neuroscience and the systems biology research communities. In this review I reconstruct the history of the two disciplines and show that this may explain why they grew up apart. The separation is a pity, as both fields can learn quite a bit from each other. Several examples are given, covering sociological, software technical, and methodological aspects. Systems biology is a better organized community which is very…
clock | May 30, 2008Every public action which is not customary either is wrong of if is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.
- Francis MacDonald Cornford (1874-1943)
clock | May 30, 2008Sukhdev in Web Land
Hog Foot Holler
Psychedelic Research
Open Access Anthropology
Evolutionary Novelties
clock | May 30, 2008Today in PLoS Genetics: a nice review of some interest to my readers: When Clocks Go Bad: Neurobehavioural Consequences of Disrupted Circadian Timing by Alun R. Barnard and Patrick M. Nolan:
Progress in unravelling the cellular and molecular basis of mammalian circadian regulation over the past decade has provided us with new avenues through which we can explore central nervous system disease. Deteriorations in measurable circadian output parameters, such as sleep/wake deficits and dysregulation of circulating hormone levels, are common features of most central nervous system disorders. At…
clock | May 30, 2008Kevin Zelnio and Alex Wild note that PLoS ONE published its first Taxonomy paper this week - A Revision of Malagasy Species of Anochetus Mayr and Odontomachus Latreille (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) by Brian Fisher and Alex Smith. Kevin explains the paper in detail and explains why this brave move by PLoS is good and important especially considering how many new species are discovered and described each year.
clock | May 30, 2008In the Journal of Circadian Rhythms:
A new approach to understanding the impact of circadian disruption on human health (pdf):
Background
Light and dark patterns are the major synchronizer of circadian rhythms to the 24-hour solar day. Disruption of circadian rhythms has been associated with a variety of maladies. Ecological studies of human exposures to light are virtually nonexistent, however, making it difficult to determine if, in fact, light-induced circadian disruption directly affects human health.
Methods
A newly developed field measurement device recorded circadian light exposures…
clock | May 29, 2008Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.
- Groucho Marx
clock | May 29, 2008U.S. Reporters Often Do A Poor Job Of Reporting About New Medical Treatments, Analysis Finds:
Most medical news stories about health interventions fail to adequately address costs, harms, benefits, the quality of evidence, and the existence of other treatment options, finds a new analysis in this week's PLoS Medicine. The analysis was conducted by Gary Schwitzer from the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Sedentary High School Girls Are At Significant Risk For Future Osteoporosis:
Significant numbers of female high school athletes and non-athletes suffer from…
clock | May 29, 2008I and the Bird # 76 is up on Wanderin' Weeta
The new edition of the Change of Shift is up on Miss-Elaine-ious RN (temp)
clock | May 29, 2008I was wondering what to do about the Classic Papers Chellenge. The deadline is May 31st, and I am so busy (not to mention visiting my dentist twice week which incapacitates me for the day, pretty much), so I decided to go back to the very beginning because I already wrote about it before and could just cannibalize my old posts: this one about the history of chronobiology with an emphasis on Darwin's work, and this one about Linnaeus' floral clock and the science that came before and immediately after it.
In the old days, when people communed with nature more closely, the fact that plants and…
clock | May 29, 2008Every now and then I have some fun and LOL-cat-ize an image from a PLoS ONE paper. See, for instance, LOLdinosaur, LOLtortoise, LOLtasmaniantiger and LOLpterosaur. Folks at the mothership love these. So, if a number of you are up to this I'll make a Flickr set or Facebook group, or a linkfest. Pick your favourite PLoS papers, grab images, LOLcatize them (here) and send them to me, or give me the links. Ideally, if you post these on your blogs, provide also a link to the paper itself or at least let me know which paper they came from.
This is not what I have in mind, but it is a LOL and a…