clock | January 9, 2008Members of the Rodriguez lab and the Otero lab, both of Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante (CSIC-Universidad Miguel Hernandez. Spain) have just posted their first Journal Club commentary on the PLoS ONE article High-Pass Filtering of Input Signals by the Ih Current in a Non-Spiking Neuron, the Retinal Rod Bipolar Cell.
Check their discussion and join in - respond to their comments or post your own discussions, annotations and ratings and keep the conversation going!
Also, it is never too late to add your thoughts to the previous Journal Clubs.
clock | January 9, 200824 new article got published on PLoS ONE last night. Here are some interesting titles for you to check out (and then look around at others, add comments, annotations and ratings, and blog about them):
Self Assessment in Insects: Honeybee Queens Know Their Own Strength:
Contests mediate access to reproductive opportunities in almost all species of animals. An important aspect of the evolution of contests is the reduction of the costs incurred during intra-specific encounters to a minimum. However, escalated fights are commonly lethal in some species like the honeybee, Apis mellifera. By…
clock | January 9, 2008So far, Obama has a 1st and a 2nd, Clinton a 1st and a 3rd, and Edwards a 2nd and a 3rd. In terms of delegates they are all three very close (25 Obama, 24 Clinton, 18 Edwards). All the candidates have spent most of their money and their big donors have all maxed out, so they are all strapped for cash and all three have roughly equal amounts of money to go on.
Now that the phase of retail politics is pretty much over, the national polls are starting to be important as indicators how Super Tuesday may work out. Here is the latest summary of the Rassmussen tracking national poll:
The…
clock | January 9, 2008Size Doesn't Matter To Fighting Fiddler Crabs:
A person's home may be their castle and in the world of the fiddler crabs having the home advantage makes it a near certainty that you'll win a battle against an intruder - regardless of your opponent's size. That's one of the findings of a new study by a research team from The Australian National University. The team, working from the University's Darwin research station, set out to discover why male fiddler crabs have an 'owner advantage' when defending their burrow that equates to a 92 per cent success rate.
Related
Researchers Use Magnetic…
clock | January 9, 2008Carnival of the Blue #8 is up on I'm a chordata, urochordata!
Tangled Bank #96 is up on Aardvarchaeology
Carnival of the Liberals #55 is up on The Greenbelt
The 153rd edition of the Carnival of Education is up on Columbus Education Association
clock | January 8, 2008Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
- Hector Berlioz
clock | January 8, 2008Following his (excellent) article in Seed on the topic, my SciBling Chris Mooney blogs about the future of the position of the Science Advisor to the President, suggesting some potential names, and Matt Nisbet, RPM, Blake Stacey, Brian Switek, Scott Hatfield, Lila Guterman, Larry Moran, Mike Dunford, Flavin, c4chaos, Gordon Watts and PZ Myers chime in with their own opinions on the potential candidates.
For some reason, all the bloggers are focusing on popularizers of science and charismatic figures. But the job of a Science Advisor to the President is not really that public (unless the next…
clock | January 8, 2008Gene Genie #23 is up on ScienceRoll.
Grand Rounds - Vol 4., No. 16 are up on Pathtalk
Carnival of the Godless is up on Axis of Jared
Carnival of the Green #109 is up on eBike blog
The Carnival of Homeschooling is up on Red Sea School.
clock | January 8, 2008Thanks to John Wilkins, I want to point you to an excellent review on the current state of research (both scientific and philosophical) in Animal Cognition.
clock | January 8, 2008 JoVE blog
Science Based Medicine
Talking Science
Errol Morris - Zoom
The Open Source Paleontologist
clock | January 8, 2008The panel discussion from the 'Waking Up To Sleep' (February 9th and 10th, 2007) conference has been filmed and the video is now online. A very interesting discussion on the evolution and adaptive function of sleep. Watch it here.
More videos of individual talks are here (hat-tip to reader NBM)
Related: (Non) Adaptive Function of Sleep
clock | January 8, 2008Obligatory Reading of the Day, by Glenn Greenwald:
"Do they ever think about anything without reference to some high school cliche?"
clock | January 8, 2008PLoS ONE is the first and (so far) the most successful scientific journal specifically geared to meet the brave new world of the future. After starting it and bringing it up from birth to where it is now one year later, Chris Surridge has decided to move on.
Do you think you have the skill and experience to pick up where he leaves off? Do you want to be at the cutting edge of scientific publishing? If so, take a look at the new job ad for the Managing Editor of PLoS ONE:
The overall responsibility of this position, which will be located in the San Francisco office, is to lead the…
clock | January 8, 2008There are 13 days until the Science Blogging Conference. We have 220 registered participants and the registration is now closed.
The anthology should be published in time for the event. Between now and the conference, I am highlighting some of the people who will be there, for you to meet in person if you register in time.
Frank Bell of Bell Associates Inte4rnational Llc, Rayetta Henderson, a toxicologist and journalist and John White of NC will be there.
If you are registered, you will get to meet them in person very soon.
Now is the good time to:
Find and exchange information about…
clock | January 7, 2008These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget. But they have no slow, big ideas.
- Brenda Ueland
clock | January 7, 2008
I had no time to read this in detail and write a really decent overview here, perhaps I will do it later, but for now, here are the links and key excerpts from a pair of exciting new papers in PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE, which describe the patterns of expression of a second type of cryptochrome gene in Monarch butterflies.
This cryptochrome (Cry) is more similar to the vertebrate Cry than the insect Cry, also present in this butterfly. The temporal and spatial patterns of expression of the two types of Cry suggest that they may be involved in the transfer of time-information from the…