clock | November 17, 2007Tetrapod Zoology
With all the media circus surrounding Nigersaurus, not enough publicity was given to another cool sauropod described on Thursday - the Xenoposeidon. It is quite amazing what a few years of painstaking study, comparative anatomy and head-scratching can do - reconstruct a large dinosaur from a single remnant: half a vertebra. My SciBling Darren Naish, co-author on the paper, describes it in great detail. I've been waiting for it for about a year or so, since Darren first mentioned it on his old blog in a four-part post about "Angloposeidon". The other co-author, Mike…
clock | November 17, 2007There are 64 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. The anthology should be published in time for the event. There are already 138 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). 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.
Jennifer Dodd is the Senior Manager for Scientific Outreach at Perimeter…
clock | November 16, 2007When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
- Alan Alexander Milne
clock | November 16, 2007Cyclone Sidr has hit Bangladesh. The number of casualties, though not as large as predicted, is still large and growing. More importantly, millions of people are displaced and have lost the sources of their livelihoods. The best way to help is to send money.
Red Cross/Red Crescent is probably in the best position to help fast. Or you may choose some other organization. Track the relief effort on the ReliefWeb. And donate today.
clock | November 16, 2007There are 65 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. The anthology should be published in time for the event. There are already 136 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). 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.
Misha Angrist is at Duke University and he runs Genomeboy.com
Tiffany…
clock | November 15, 2007Oekologie #11 is up on 10000 birds.
I and the Bird # 62 is up on Greg Laden.
Accretionary Wedge #3 is up on The Other 95%.
Change of Shift: Vol. 2, Number 11 is up on Emergiblog.
Friday Ark #165 is up on Modulator.
clock | November 15, 2007What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
- Crowfoot
clock | November 15, 2007
Today is a super-exciting day for me and I hope you will find it exciting as well. Why?
Because today PLoS ONE published a paper I am very hyped about - Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur by Sereno PC, Wilson JA, Witmer LM, Whitlock JA, Maga A, et al.
Simultaneously with the publication of the paper at 10:30am EST today (and such perfect synchrony took a LOT of work, sweat and nail-biting!), the fossil itself will be unveiled at the National Geographic in Washington D.C. (and you'll see some snippets from there on TV tonight - more information on channels and times later).
First,…
clock | November 15, 2007There are 66 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. The anthology should be published in time for the event. There are already 132 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). 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.
Stephanie Holmgren is the Biomedical Science Librarian at the National…
clock | November 14, 2007The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn't know where it was or where it led to.
- Elwyn Brooks White
clock | November 14, 2007The cyclone Sidr looks ominous and scary. It will make landfall tomorrow. More than ten million people live in the river delta of Bangladesh where Sidr is headed. Shelters have a capacity for about half a million. Others are, I guess, evacuating on foot, if there even is a place to go and hide. Some may have decided to stay put beause they cannot travel or there is no place to go. The rains brought by the cyclone are likely to lead to flooding, endangering lives even more. All we can do right now is wait and hope that the cyclone and its aftermath do not kill as many people as some are…
clock | November 14, 2007If scientific papers can be publicly reviewed either pre-publication or post-publication, and if one day soon the public can have a voice on the patents, then why not also grant proposals? Now, Michael does not go that far - he only proposes a more direct communication between the researcher and the reviewer - but, why not? Some people write good proposals. Others can sell them better in a different way: by talking about them. I would certainly like to be able to try to sell my grant proposal by shooting a video and posting it on a site like Scivee.com, where both the reviewers and the…
clock | November 14, 2007Grand Rounds - Volume 4 number 8 are up on Doctor Anonymous
Carnival of Education #145 is up on Edspresso
Homeschooling Carnival: I am Thankful Edition is up on Nerd Family. Pro-Nerd. Pro-Family.
clock | November 14, 2007From California Tech:
Although some radical solutions might lead to growing pains, the present state of the industry is rather like the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" animation in Fantasia: the tools designed to support science have developed a life of their own, and are now draining the system that they were created to support by becoming a self-perpetuating industry that is moving closer to a collapse and further from enabling scientific progress.
Mark Montague B.S. '93 is volunteer staff in computer science.
The next panel discussion in the series "What's Wrong with Scientific Publishing, and How…
clock | November 14, 2007Perhaps you can win one of the Sparky Awards:
SPARC Discovery Awards
SPARC Announces Mind Mashup - A Video Contest to Showcase Student Views on Information Sharing:
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the first SPARC Discovery Awards, a contest that will recognize the best new short videos illustrating the importance of sharing information and ideas.
The contest, details for which are online at www.sparkyawards.org, encourages new voices to join the public discussion of information policy in the age of the Internet. Contestants are asked to submit…
clock | November 14, 2007How Poisonous Mushrooms Cook Up Toxins:
Alpha-amanitin is the poison of the death cap mushroom, Amanita phalloides. The Michigan State University plant biology research associate was looking for a big gene that makes a big enzyme that produces alpha-amanitin, since that's how other fungi produce similar compounds. But after years of defeat, she and her team called in the big guns -- new technology that sequences DNA about as fast as a death cap mushroom can kill. The results: The discovery of remarkably small genes that produce the toxin -- a unique pathway previously unknown in fungi.
Brain…
clock | November 14, 2007There are 67 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. The anthology should be published in time for the event. There are already 127 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). 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.
Patricia Campbell of Campbell-Kibler Associates is a blogger on…
clock | November 13, 2007Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
- Clive Staples Lewis
clock | November 13, 2007There are 27 brand-new articles, just uploaded on PLoS ONE. Here are a couple of titles that drew my immediate attention:
Maternal Enrichment during Pregnancy Accelerates Retinal Development of the Fetus:
Although much is known about the harmful effects parental stress has on offspring, little is understood about how enriching a mother's environment affects fetal development. In this paper, the authors experiment on developing rat embryos and find that an enriched environment speeds up the development of the nervous system. The results suggest that development of the visual system is…