clock | April 18, 2008One of the highlights of the visit to Trieste was the opportunity to finally meet an old blog-friend of mine. Franc Nekrep is a professor of Mikrobiology in Ljubljana, Slovenia and we have been reading each others blogs for a couple of years now. It was so much fun to finally meet in person. He came to the Open Access session and then we went out for lunch and had a great time. Check his blogs (as much as you can understand Slovenian): MIKROB(io)LOG and LiLoLe:
Oh, and for my foodblogging friends who would chastise me if I missed posting pictures of the food we had, here they are -…
clock | April 18, 2008Here are, quickly for now, some pictures from the yesterday's panel "Open Access; let's do it: top down, bottom up or both?" Stevan Harnad did his presentation first via Skype (from Montreal) which was, unfortunately, not recorded. The rest of the session was recorded and at some time in the future will become available online - I will let you know when this happens.
Since most of the panel discussed institutional library repositories, I felt I needed to focus entirely on the "other Open Access", i.e., the OA journals, especially PLoS. More later....(also it seems that the wifi at the hotel…
clock | April 18, 2008To Hell with Expelled! a special, one-time carnival is up on Dinosaurs and The Bible: A Creationist's Fairy Tale
Change of Shift: Volume Two, Number 21 is up on Nurse Sean (dot) com
I and the Bird #73 is up on A Snail's Eye View
Friday Ark #187 is up on Modulator
clock | April 18, 2008Politicians are quite unfit for government. They are however very useful for ceremonial banquets, official openings, launchings, unveilings, and greeting foreign delegations, leaving more time for the genuine work of government to those of us who have the proper training and experience.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby
clock | April 18, 2008It's nice to get to know your fellow panelists REALLY well over a dinner and wine the night before the event. So we got together and had great fun: Sely Costa from Brasil, A.R.D. Prasad from India, Derek Law and his wife from Scotland, Stefania from Italy and myself.
Warning - marine biology bloggers should not look under the fold.
Warning 2 - those offended by the idea that a Kinder-egg contains a winged Barbie look-alike as a toy should not look under the fold. Also, do not try to imagine the double- and triple-entendres and innuendo as I was trying to put her together and find the…
clock | April 18, 2008Trieste at night. Smell of the Adriatic sea, in which I learned to swim some decades ago, just two towns (and two border crossings) away from here. Ponte Rossa, where I got my first jeans, back in 1970 or so. Nostalgia.
clock | April 18, 2008How birds know when and where to migrate (from April 03, 2006)
I've never ever expected to see the word "Zugunruhe" in New York Times! But here it is. It is one of my most favourite words of all times (right after "elusive"), and is even described pretty accurately:
Zugunruhe brooks no confusion. It has a Germanic certainty, and there can be no doubt what it means, once you know what it means. I confess that I only learned the word this week. If I understand the paper about it by Barbara Helm of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Andechs, Germany, and the late Eberhard Gwinner in…
clock | April 18, 2008Going into more and more detail, here is a February 11, 2005 post about the current knowledge about the circadian organization in my favourite animal - the Japanese quail.
Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica), also known as the Asian Migratory Quail, are gallinaceous birds from the family Phasianidae, until 1960s thought to be a subspecies of European migratory quail (Coturnix coturnix coturnix), but now considered to be a separate species, designated as Coturnix japonica. The breeding range of the wild population encompasses Siberia, Mongolia, northeastern China and Japan, while the…
clock | April 17, 2008Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
- Sir John Lubbock
clock | April 17, 2008I am having a blast in Trieste - FEST is fantastic, people friendly, program interesting, the smell of Adriatic evokes nostalgia (I learned to swim in the northern Adriatic), but I am really pissed with the Jolly Hotel I am in. Room is fine. But they charge wifi at exorbitant prices.
About a year ago, there was an outrage in the USA about hotels not providing internet access. But then, market forces kicked in as all the high-powered travellers started choosing those hotels that do provide free access. This forced most other hotels to do the same. Some still charge - but those charges are…
clock | April 17, 2008
A January 20, 2006 post placing a cool physiological/behavioral study into an evolutionary context.
There are two main hypotheses - not mutually exclusive - for the adaptive value of having a circadian clock. One is the Internal Synchronization hypothesis, stating that the circadian clock serves to synchronize biochemical and physiological processes within the body. The second is the External Synchronization hypothesis, stating that the circadian clock serves to syncronize the physiology and behavior to the natural environment.
The prediction from the Internal Hypothesis is that circadian…
clock | April 17, 2008As traveling is not conducive to vigorous blogging (apart from posting travelogue pictures), I have asked a couple of friends to write guest posts here. The first to step up to the plate is Anne Marie who put together her passion for bats and my passion for biological clocks and wrote this fascinating post:
Casinos on the infamous Vegas "strip" spare no expenses when it comes to extravagant decorations and architecture. You can find everything from indoor gondola rides to full-sized pirate ships that are sunk in mock-battles multiple times each day. One thing that you might notice,…
clock | April 17, 2008Professor Steve Steve went to FEST with me today and saw some impostors that came all the way from China, some nice FEST employees (good - I realized I did not do enough teasing of Mrs.Coturnix by posting pictures of beautiful people of the XY karyotype lately), cool Italian science journalists and bloggers like Elisabetta Tola and Marco Boscollo, and had a real Italian pizza for lunch:
clock | April 17, 2008Peter Suber wrote the most clear, brief and to-the-point explanation of the new law (PDF). Worth reading and bookmarking. Along with the explanation of how it works, Peter also provided this handy table of myths about the new law that some of the dinosaur publishers are trying to push - save it, print it out and have it in your pocket when you go to meetings:
clock | April 17, 2008 This post was originally written on February 11, 2005. Moving from relatively simple mammalian model to more complex systems.
I have previously described the basic properties of the circadian organization in mammals. Non-mammalian vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds) have more complex circadian systems than mammals. While the suprachiasmatic area remains a site of circadian pacemakers, it is, unlike in mammals, not the only such site.
The pineal organ, which in mammals is a purely secretory organ, is directly photosensitive in other vertebrates (with the exception of snakes)…
clock | April 16, 2008The entire thing is happening in a large building on a pier (Molo IV). I was impressed by the crowds on the first day. I also got vouchers for four nice restaurants in town for meals. Last night I went to a nice pizza place and had spaghetti with tomato&eggplant sauce and veal in wine sauce - delicious: real Italian food! Tonight, I will also be interviewed for the radio - there will be a podcast online so I will link to it later. Pictures under the fold:
clock | April 16, 2008Today is the second day of the Science FEST in Trieste. Yesterday, I went around, looked at everything and took a lot of pictures (under the fold). Later today, I will see some more specific sessions and will let you know more about the whole thing. The main focus are science books - thousands of books, from highly technical to popular, from books for children, to old historical books. And around that wealth of books, they built an interesting program of events, demonstrations, movies, plays, panels, hands-on exploration for kids, etc.
clock | April 16, 2008Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
- Sir William Haley
clock | April 16, 2008In this post from April 06, 2006, I present some unpublished data that you may find interesting.
Understanding the role of serotonin in depression has led to development of anti-depressant drugs, like Prozac. Much of the research in this area has been performed in Crustaceans: lobsters and crayfish. The opposite behavioral state of depression, something considered a normal state, could possibly best be described as self-confidence.
Self-confidence is expressed differently in different species, but seems to always be tied to high status in a social hierarchy. In crayfish, self-confidence is…