clock | March 4, 2008Jane is the cool new tool that everyone is talking about - see the commentary on The Tree of Life, on Nature Network and on Of Two Minds.
In short, the Journal/Author Name Estimator is a website where you can type in some text and see which scientific Journal has the content closest to the text you input, as well as people who published on similar topics. If you click on "Show extra options" you can narrow your search by a few criteria, e.g., you can search only Open Access journals.
The idea is to discover journals to which you can submit your work. Most people know the journals available…
clock | March 4, 2008Giant Fossil Bats Out Of Africa, 35 Million Years Old:
When most of us think of Ancient Egypt, visions of pyramids and mummies fill our imaginations. For a team of paleontologists interested in fossil mammals, the Fayum district of Egypt summons an even older and equally impressive history that extends much further back in time than the Sphinx.
Are Wolves The Pronghorn's Best Friend?:
As western states debate removing the gray wolf from protection under the Endangered Species Act, a new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society cautions that doing so may result in an unintended decline in…
clock | March 4, 2008Grand Rounds Vol. 4 No. 24 are up on ChronicBabe
Mendel's Garden #24 is up on Bayblab
clock | March 4, 2008That is what Anne-Marie asked after a week with seven mid-term exams. In a few weeks, she'll have another bunch of exams all at the same time. And then a finals week in May.
This is, obviously, not the most efficient system. So, have you, as a student or a teacher, encountered a better system?
clock | March 4, 2008News from SCONC:
Linda Buck is the Nobel-Prize winner that may live farthest from NC (but still in the U.S.). She will give a seminar Monday, March 10 at 4 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom of the Talley Center at NCSU. Buck won the Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004 for the discovery of olfactory receptors and subsequent work on the neurobiological basis for smell. The title of her talk is "Olfactory Sensing in Mammals." Buck is based at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. This seminar is part of a series put on by the W.M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at NCSU.
clock | March 3, 2008You may search my time-worn face, You'll find a merry eye that twinkles. I am NOT an old lady, just a little girl with wrinkles.
- Edythe E. Bregnard
clock | March 3, 2008Go say Hello to Josh Donlan, the new co-blogger on Shifting Baselines who will add a terrestrial component to the marine stuff already there. Josh's arrival is also bound to provoke some interesting blogging around the scienceblogs.com, as his ideas of 'rewilding' the American West are greeted with a whole spectrum of responses by our resident bloggers and comenters (see this, this and this for some examples). This is going ot be fun!
clock | March 3, 2008Last week's crop of PLoS ONE articles enjoyed quite a nice buzz in the media and on the blogs. But today is a new week, and we start, as always with new articles in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology - here are some of the article that caught my attention:
Could an Open-Source Clinical Trial Data-Management System Be What We Have All Been Looking For:
In Europe, it is a legal requirement to conduct clinical trials in accordance with the International Conference on Harmonisation's guidelines on good clinical practice (see http://www.ich.org/). A recent editorial reported that this directive has…
clock | March 3, 2008Ah, the quirky world of science! Archy gives us a tour of history of how various objects in the Solar System got named, and the intrigue and politics around it.
clock | March 3, 2008Retrospectacle and Omni Brain, as of now, have officially fused into the new, double-headed scibling - Of Two Minds. Go say Hello!
clock | March 3, 2008Encephalon #40 is up on Mind Hacks
Carnival of the Green #117 is up on Confessions of a Closet Environmentalist
clock | March 3, 2008Get yourself free PDFs of old biology/taxonomy books and papers courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library:
Ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions have joined to form the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project. The group is developing a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature of biodiversity held in their respective collections. This literature will be available through a global "biodiversity commons."
Participating institutions:
* American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY)
* The Field Museum (Chicago…
clock | March 3, 2008News from SCONC:
Oliver Smithies is the Nobel-Prize winner next door. A professor at UNC for almost 20 years, Smithies got the nod from Stockholm last fall. He will give a seminar at the Friday Center on Thursday March 6 at 6:30 p.m. in a lecture hosted by the Carolinas Chapter of the American Medical Writers Association.
Along with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, Smithies was recognized for his research on embryonic stem cells and DNA recombination in mammals. Their work on gene targeting in mice made it possible to study individual genes in health and disease--a fundamental breakthrough…
clock | March 2, 2008Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
- Eliezer Wiesel
clock | March 2, 2008Under the fold, as the movie appears to slow down loading of my front page:
(Hat-tip)
Related: Wiki for beginners
clock | March 2, 2008Wow! This is nuts! And this is nuts in a different way! Fortunately, Scott McLemee, Chad Orzel, Josh Rosenau and Brian Switek bring in some reality to the topic: what goes on the living-room bookshelf? Commenters chime in. Good stuff. Read it.
So, what are "rules" in the Coturnix house?
First, the house is too small to allow too much fine planning as to what the guests will see.
Second, we do not have guests very often (again, lack of space), so the bookshelves are not aimed at them.
Third, we have about 5000 books and they have to be stored somewhere, in some fashion.
Fourth, we have…
clock | March 2, 2008Perusing Science
Perusing Aardvarks
Adaptive Complexity
Exsisto Sane
Chimpanzees are not Monkeys
Mystery Rays from Outer Space
PTET
Exploring Our Matrix
clock | March 2, 2008
The 11th Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms will be held in Sandestin, FL on May 17th-21st, 2008. And I'll be there. This meeting occurs every two years (on even-numbered years, the International Congress and the Gordon Conference are in odd-numbered years). I attended three or four of these when it was down on Amelia Island, FL. Then I skipped the one in Whistler, Canada, four years ago as I had no money to go, and the one in Sandestin two years ago as I was out of science. But I'll be going back - with a mission: to explain Open Access to my colleagues…