clock | May 24, 2008Before I went back to Belgrade, I did not know if there was a website with information about the racing and equestrian activities there. There used to be one some years ago, but it has not been updated in a very long time. So, I was happy when, while there, I was given URLs of the Belgrade Racecourse website and the Federation for Equestrian Sport of Serbia website. The former looks good and easy to navigate.
The latter is little old-timey in appearance but that may be on purpose, to emphasize the long tradition. It is also a little too PDF-happy for my taste - it is OK to use the…
clock | May 24, 2008...so other smart people are developing new kinds of maps - follow the links within to explore.
clock | May 24, 2008Nature Blog Network has two hubs - the Boston one and the London one. They are planning on adding a third one soon but the question is where? So, they will see where the most people are. There are currently only two people signed up as living in the Triangle, but this can change. If you are already in the network, go and change your profile by adding a North Carolina city and add yourself to the Triangle network (if that is actually true, i.e., you really do live in NC) even if you live in a different part of the state. I know there are many NC folks already on, and new people can always…
clock | May 23, 2008Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
- M. Scott Peck
clock | May 23, 2008Gene Mutations In Mice Mimic Human-like Sleep Disorder:
Mutations in two genes that control electrical excitability in a portion of the brain involved in sleep create a human-like insomnia disorder in mice, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found. The findings may help scientists better understand the disorder and provide an animal model for developing treatments.
Food-related Clock In The Brain Identified:
In investigating the intricacies of the body's biological rhythms, scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have discovered the existence of a "food-related…
clock | May 23, 2008Jean-Claude Bradley and I first met at the First Science Blogging Conference where he led a session on Open Science. We then met at SciFoo and later joined forces on a panel at the ASIS&T meeting and finally met again at the second Science Blogging Conference back in January where Jean-Claude co-moderated a session on Making Data Public. Jean-Claude is famous for being the pioneer of the Open Notebook Science movement. He started posting his daily lab activity and results on his blog Useful Chemistry. Soon, he attracted a lot of feedback and subsequently some excellent collaborators…
clock | May 23, 2008There is Nature Network, there is Jeff's Bench, there is Facebook Scibook, Knowble.com is dead, and people are still building new social networking sites aimed at scientists. There is now SciLink (thanks Alex) and now also ResearchGATE (thanks Bertalan). I am joining everything and watching....one of these days, one of these will win. Nobody can guess which one (or perhaps more than one), but perhaps you can tell me which ones you like and dislike and why?
clock | May 23, 2008You have only a week left to submit your entries for the Blog about a classic science paper challenge. The links to early bird posts are already being collected and I hope there will be more soon. If you intend to write about a paper in the field of psychology, SciCurious discovered an awesome website where you can find all the classic articles in the history of psychology. Just yesterday, I saw the website where there will be such a repository of historical papers (and other materials: photos, anecdotes, etc.) in the Chronobiology field. This will be built over the next few months. I'll…
clock | May 23, 2008Accretionary Wedge #9 is up on Harmonic Tremors
Friday Ark #192 is up on Modulator
clock | May 23, 2008No matter how cutesy the acronim SAD is. Joseph reports on a study that links SAD to serotonin. But serotonin itself may not be necessary to understand how SAD works, though an intimate link between serotonin and melatonin (the former is the biochemical precursor of the latter) suggests that serotonin should be looked at in this context.
Also, if you suffer from SAD you should be very careful preparing for your long-distance travel: getting jet-lagged may trigger a bout of a few days of depression regardless of the time of year.
clock | May 22, 2008When nobody around you seems to measure up, it's time to check your yardstick.
- Bill Lemley
clock | May 22, 2008Inferring Human Colonization History Using a Copying Model:
Humans like to tell stories. Amongst the most captivating is the story of the global spread of modern humans from their original homeland in Africa. Traditionally this has been the preserve of anthropologists, but geneticists are starting to make an important contribution. However, genetic evidence is typically analyzed in the context of anthropological preconceptions. For genetics to provide an accurate and detailed history without reference to anthropology, methods are required that translate DNA sequence data into histories. We…
clock | May 22, 2008Some Like It Hot! Structure Of Receptor For Hot Chili Pepper And Pain Revealed:
You can now not only feel the spicy kick of a jalapeno pepper, you can also see it in full 3D, thanks to researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Early Life Exposure To Cats May Reduce Risk Of Childhood Allergies And Asthma Symptoms:
A study released by researchers at the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health (CCCEH) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, shows that cat ownership may have a protective effect against the development of asthma symptoms in young children…
clock | May 22, 2008Grand Rounds Volume 4, No. 35 are up on Musings of a Dinosaur
Carnival of Space #55 is up on Catholic Sensibility
The 87th Skeptics Circle is up on Action Skeptics
Carnival of the Liberals #65 is up on Neural Gourmet
This week's 172nd edition of the Carnival of Education is up on Teacher in a Strange Land
Carnival of the Green #77 is up on Natural Collection
The 125th Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Po Moyemu--In My Opinion
clock | May 22, 2008The websites/wikis of the first two conferences appear to be down. We will move all of those archives to a new site soon, and very soon the website for the third ScienceOnline conference (formerly known as Science Blogging Conference) will be filled with more information. But for now, you can start using the brand new logo if you want to advertise the event:
clock | May 22, 2008
If you are one of the few of my readers who actually slogged through my Clock Tutorials, especially the difficult series on Entrainment and Phase Response Curves, you got to appreciate the usefulness of the oscillator theory from physics in its application to the study of biological clocks. Use of physics models in the study of biological rhythms, pioneered by Colin Pittendrigh, is an immensely useful tool in the understanding of the process of entrainment to environmental cycles.
Yet, as I warned several times, a Clock is a metaphor and, as such, has to be treated with thought and caution…
clock | May 22, 2008From November 01, 2005, a review of a review...
Here is a nice article in Washington Post - Ecological Niche May Dictate Sleep Habits - about the adaptive function of sleep.
It addresses some of the themes I am interested in.
First, the unfortunate fact is that sleep was initially defined by researchers of humans, i.e., medical researchers. Inevitably, the (electrophysiological) definition of sleep was thus saddled with unneccessary anthropocentric elements that for decades hampered the study of evolution of sleep.
I was present at the meeting (here in Biotechnology Center in RTP) several…
clock | May 21, 2008People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong.
- Bill Vaughan
clock | May 21, 2008 (First posted on February 5, 2007) Last week I asked if you would be interested in my take on this paper, since it is in Serbian (and one commenter said Yes, so here it is - I am easy to persuade):
Stankovic Miodrag, Zdravkovic Jezdimir A., and Trajanovic Ljiljana,
Comparative analysis of sexual dreams of male and female students (PDF). Psihijatrija danas 2000, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 227-242
Here is the English-language Abstract:
The subject of research is analysis of connection between sexuality as instinctive function and dreams with sexual content as cognitive function. The sample consisted…