clock | November 5, 2007Dum loquimur invida aetas fugerit. (While we talk, hostile time flies away)
- Horace
clock | November 5, 2007Circadian Disorders And Adjusting To The Night Shift: Guide For Professionals:
Practice parameters are a guide to the appropriate assessment and treatment of circadian rhythm sleep disorders (CRSDs). The standards will have a positive impact on professional behavior, patient outcomes and possibly health care costs.
Sleep-related Breathing Disorder Linked To Increased Heart Rate Variability:
A sleep-related breathing disorder, common in heart failure, increases one's heart rate variability. Further, central sleep apnea (CSA) and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) produce different patterns of heart…
clock | November 5, 2007I would like to use this occasion to thank all the people, anonymous and otherwise, who donated to my challenge on DonorsChoose last month. You donated a total of $1,518 affecting the math and science education of 471 students in schools with high proportions of kids on free lunches.
Unlike some of my SciBlings who garnered lots of small donations, I am like Hillary - getting most of my funding from a few big donors (bundlers) ;-) Anyway, big or small, all your donations are greatly appreciated. Seed Media Group will add matching $15,000 and DonorsChoose will add 10% to each completed…
clock | November 5, 2007My friend Franz, who runs a delightful blog Mikrob(io)log (in Slovenian) alerted me that the team of undergraduates from the University of Ljubljana won the iGEM 2007 at MIT the other day. They did it for the second year in a row (all brand new students, of course). The Ljubljana team won in the Health & Medicine category for their work on HIV-1 virus. One member of the team is Franz's student. Congratulations to the Slovenian team!
clock | November 5, 2007Back at Scifoo I met Anna Kushnir. And then we met again. And then, inspired by the conversations at Scifoo, Anna decided to organize a day-long, student-hosted conference about the future of scientific publishing - Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences. And she decided to invite me to appear on one of the panels.
So, later this week, I will be in Boston, more precisely Cambridge MA, discussing Open Access and Science 2.0. I am arriving on Thursday in the early afternoon and leaving on Saturday in the early afternoon, so there is plenty of opportunity…
clock | November 5, 2007Encephalon #35 is up on The Primate Diaries
Gene Genie #19 is up on ScienceRoll
Carnival of the Green #102 is up on Natural Collection
Carnival of the Blue #6 is up on Cephalopodcast
Grand Rounds are up on Counting Sheep
The Carnival of Mathematics #20 is up on squareCircleZ
clock | November 5, 2007Go say Hello to Greg Laden, the latest acquisition by the ever-expanding Scienceblogs Empire.
clock | November 5, 2007There are 75 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. There are already 116 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.
Karen James (aka 'Nunatak') of the Beagle Project and the Beagle Project Blog (and the Project Beagle Store) is coming as well.…
clock | November 4, 2007Yes, Weblog Awards are up again. Not everyone's favourite (as opposed to the Koufaxes), as they are easily freeped and one can find candidates who should not be there, i.e., blogs that have not written anything factual in years, e.g., right-wingers in political categories, pseudoscientists in science categories, medical quacks in medical categories, etc. So, the voting at Weblog Awards (which you can do daily) is more voting against than for in many categories. But there are certainly worthy finalists in many categories so it's worth your time to try to remember to vote. Here are my…
clock | November 4, 2007Plano teen wins regional science award, moves on to national competition:
The awards, which recognize exceptional achievement in science, were announced Saturday at the University of Texas at Austin.
Alexander, who won a $3,000 scholarship, was honored for developing a realistic mathematical model detailing how biological clocks work.
"This is publishable, graduate-level work," said Claus Wilke, an assistant professor of Integrative Biology Section at UT.
He called Alexander's entry -- "Mathematical Modeling of a Eukaryotic Circadian Clock" -- a key component in understanding jet lag and…
clock | November 4, 2007November issue of the Mendel's Garden is up on VWXYNot?
Pediatric Grand Rounds 2.11 are up on Aetiology
Friday Ark #163 is up on Modulator
The 143rd edition of The Carnival of Education is up on What It's Like on the Inside.
clock | November 4, 2007There are 76 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. There are already 114 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.
I heard that herding cats is difficult. Managing people who write the 64 scienceblogs is perhaps impossible as cats, at least,…
clock | November 3, 2007Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
- Guy Davenport
clock | November 3, 2007Michael Pollan has the goods:
However many worthwhile programs get tacked onto the farm bill to buy off its critics, they won't bring meaningful reform to the American food system until the subsidies are addressed -- until the underlying rules of the food game are rewritten. This is a conversation that the Old Guard on the agriculture committees simply does not want to have, at least not with us.
In other words, contact your Senators today!
clock | November 3, 2007November is a National Novel Writing Month. Not all bloggers write novels, though, so some people proposed alternatives:
National Blog Writing Month (also known as National Blog Posting Month) and the International Dissertation Writing Month. The former is easy - post at least once a day throughout November (easy for me to say with my 8.2 posts per day average). The latter involves posting one's thesis-writing (or manuscript-writing or grant-writing) progress on the blog.
Anyone interested? Follow the links and sign up.
And to get your juices flowing, there is yet another debate about…
clock | November 3, 2007I was fantastically busy this past week, so I failed to alert you to new articles published in PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. I have posted my picks from the latter one. This week, my pick is this one, of course, as I have watched the previous microarray studies come out one by one, each identifying a different set of genes:
Meta-Analysis of Drosophila Circadian Microarray Studies Identifies a Novel Set of Rhythmically Expressed Genes:
Circadian genes regulate many of life's most essential processes, from sleeping and eating to…
clock | November 3, 2007Flying Lemurs Are The Closest Relatives Of Primates:
While the human species is unquestionably a member of the Primate group, the identity of the next closest group to primates within the entire class of living mammals has been hotly debated. Now, new molecular and genomic data gathered by a team including Webb Miller, a professor of biology and computer science and engineering at the Penn State University, has shown that the colugos -- nicknamed the flying lemurs -- is the closest group to the primates.
Anne-Marie has more.
Fossil Record Reveals Elusive Jellyfish More Than 500 Million Years…