clock | May 28, 2008I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.
- Oscar Wilde
clock | May 28, 2008Or 3.5 Albatross wingspans, or 8.1 Alaskan moose antler spans, or 7.6 standard railway gauges, or 5.5 Kobe Bryants, or 2.5 London buses stacked one on top of another. That is how this site converts 12 yards. Try your own measures....
clock | May 28, 2008Mind Over Matter: Monkey Feeds Itself Using Its Brain:
A monkey has successfully fed itself with fluid, well-controlled movements of a human-like robotic arm by using only signals from its brain, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine report in the journal Nature. This significant advance could benefit development of prosthetics for people with spinal cord injuries and those with "locked-in" conditions such as Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Authentic Viking DNA Retrieved From 1,000-year-old Skeletons:
Although "Viking" literally means "pirate…
clock | May 28, 2008106th Tangled Bank is up on Nobel Intent
173rd edition of the Carnival of Education is up on Bluebird's Classroom
clock | May 28, 2008
The Pterosaur paper is really hitting the media and blogs today. Of course, it is kind of a blogospheric "baby". One of the authors is my SciBling Darren Naish, the other author is Mark Witton, and even the Academic Editor who handled the manuscript is a scienceblogger.
Darren first broached the idea on his old blog two years ago. He got feedback (the modern version of peer review) in the comments of his post and set out to work on it. Two years later, the paper has passed the 'traditional' peer review and got published.
In short, the idea is that gigantic adult pterosaurs did not fly…
clock | May 27, 2008What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live - with your self-respect alive and growing.
- Maxwell Maltz
clock | May 27, 2008Registration now open for the first National Conference on Science and Technology in Out of School Time - Chicago, September 17-19, 2008:
Join us at the first National Conference on Science in Out of School Time, September 17-19, 2008.
Registration is now open at www.scienceafterschoolconference.org
The conference is being organized by Project Exploration and the Coalition for Science After School; it's designed for program leaders, researchers, funders and policy makers. We're putting a particular emphasis on equity and access issues. Conference features include:
- A special welcome…
clock | May 27, 2008The deadline for the Classic Papers Chellenge is looming - the end of May. Submit it to Skulls in the Stars and have it collected here. As I mentioned before, I'd like to see this turn into a monthly blog carnival. It would have some kind of criteria developed, but perhaps those should be flexible. Let's say that a "classic paper" is one that gave birth to a new discipline (or subdiscipline), or rewrote the textbooks, and overturned a long-held pernicious dogma of some kind. And let's say it is more than 30 years old, though this may be waived in cases of really young disciplines.
As I…
clock | May 27, 2008It seems everyone is talking about social networking sites these days. There are interesting thoughts on Richard Grant's and David Crotty's blogs (read the comment threads as well). Many of those sites will die, others will adapt, but most, I think, will play a supporting role in a whole network of services surrounding...the actual scientific papers. For instance, surrounding TOPAZ-based PLoS papers, perhaps organized into Hubs. And papers from other journals that join into the system. Thoughts?
clock | May 27, 2008Encephalon - 46th Edition - is up on Neurocritic
Grand Rounds, 4.36, are up on PARALLEL UNIVERSES
Gene Genie #32 is up on Real Woman Magazine Helper
Carnival of the Green #129 is up on Little Green Secrets
The 92nd Carnival of the Godless is up on Jyunri Kankei
Carnival Of Homeschooling #126 is up on Walking Therein
clock | May 27, 2008First Female DNA Sequenced:
Geneticists of Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) are the first to determine the DNA sequence of a woman. She is also the first European whose DNA sequence has been determined. Following in-depth analysis, the sequence will be made public, except incidental privacy-sensitive findings. The results will contribute to insights into human genetic diversity.
Why Are Some People Unable To Express Their Emotions?:
Italian investigators have published a new study on the neurobiologic correlates of the inability to express emotions (alexithymia) in the third 2008…
clock | May 27, 2008There are 48 articles published this week in PLoS ONE, something for everyone. Read, note, comment, blog about and send trackbacks... Here are some of the titles I found cool:
Evidence of Authentic DNA from Danish Viking Age Skeletons Untouched by Humans for 1,000 Years:
Given the relative abundance of modern human DNA and the inherent impossibility for incontestable proof of authenticity, results obtained on ancient human DNA have often been questioned. The widely accepted rules regarding ancient DNA work mainly affect laboratory procedures, however, pre-laboratory contamination occurring…
clock | May 27, 2008
How Do US Journalists Cover Treatments, Tests, Products, and Procedures? An Evaluation of 500 Stories:
* The daily delivery of news stories about new treatments, tests, products, and procedures may have a profound--and perhaps harmful--impact on health care consumers.
* A US Web site project, HealthNewsReview.org (http://HealthNewsReview.org/), modeled after similar efforts in Australia and Canada, evaluates and grades health news coverage, notifying journalists of their grades.
* After almost two years and 500 stories, the project has found that journalists usually fail to…
clock | May 26, 2008How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
- John Milton
clock | May 26, 2008Climate Change Does Double-whammy To Animals In Seasonal Environments:
Plant-eating animals in highly seasonal environments, such as the Arctic, are struggling to locate nutritious food as a result of climate change, according to research that will be published in the 21 May 2008 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Led by Penn State Associate Professor of Biology Eric Post, the research, which focused on caribou, suggests that not only are these animals arriving at their breeding grounds too late in the season to enjoy the peak availability of food--the focus of…
clock | May 25, 2008No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,
I drew the white sheet over the islands
And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.
- Dylan Thomas
clock | May 25, 2008A couple of days have passed and I had a lot of work-related stuff to catch up with, but I thought I better write a recap now while the iron is still hot and I remember it all. Here we go....
Surprise #1 Last time I went to a SRBR meeting (or for that matter any scientific meeting) was in 2002. I started my first blog in 2004. I started writing about science, specifically about Chronobiology, in January of 2005.
Before last week's meeting I knew of one chronobiologist who reads my blog regularly. I knew of one other chronobiologist who contacted me to ask to use some of the material for…
clock | May 25, 2008While I was gone for 6 days in Florida, my mailbox got choked with books. Some came from publishers, others from friends who hit my amazon.com wish list. Disregard the last ClockQuotes just below - I am excited about these books and intend to read them.
First, and most exciting is Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life by my SciBling Carl Zimmer. Not surprisingly, the book has received glowing reviews everywhere. That will be the first one I tackle next week as soon as I am done with what I am reading right now.
Then, I got The Young Birder's Guide to Birds of Eastern North…
clock | May 24, 2008Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it.
- Moses Hadas