clock | October 25, 2007Via Russlings (here, here and here so far), information about the effects of San Diego wildfires on the San Diego Zoo:
San Diego zoo ordered closed, Wild Animal park in immediate danger
Fire Update from the Panda Station from a blog by a zoo researcher, and Fire Update from the Wild Animal Park from the Zoo public relations person.
Finally, the oft-updated fire page of the San Diego Zoo blog: October 2007 Fire Updates
Apparently, the zoo was quite threatened, but survived OK and will re-open soon after a big clean-up. Some of the employees were affected by the wildfire, though, and some…
clock | October 25, 2007Travelling delayed me a little bit, but as you already learned to expect by now, new articles get published on PLoS ONE on Tuesday afternoons. Before I showcase the papers I personally find interesting, first let me remind you to join in the discussion on our ongoing Journal Club on the article Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation: read, rate, annotate, comment, blog about and send trackbacks if your software supports them. Now, to this week's wealth of papers - 24 appeared this week and here are those I like the best:
Analysis of the Trajectory of Drosophila…
clock | October 25, 2007There are 86 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 105 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.
Science is not just physics, chemistry and biology. There are also psychology, anthropology, archaeology, economics, etc. And…
clock | October 25, 2007Apparently some computer geeks at Carnegie Mellon came up with a complicated mathematical formula to decide which blogs should one read to be most up to date, i.e., to quickly know about important stories that propagate over the blogosphere?
Bloggersblog comments.
OK, the fact that Don Surber is #2 is not too way off mark (surely in the top 100, if not exactly #2). Scienceblogs.com is in the 98th spot and should be way higher, I think.
But what is Instapudding doing in the Top Spot? If you want disinformation, sure. Likewise for Michelle Malkin, Captains Quarters and Powerline. And…
clock | October 24, 2007Always have some project under way . . . an ongoing project that goes over from day to day and thus makes each day a smaller unit of time.
- Dr. Lillian Troll
clock | October 24, 2007There is less than one week left and my challenge is still at 45% (just 5 donors!). All the relevant information is here.
The other day, Janet and I participated in a silent auction at the ASIS&T meeting. You go around the tables and write down your bids. You offer a dollar or two. Someone else adds another dollear or two on top of your bid. You go back and add some more. Little by little, all the items were sold, and lots of money was collected for a worthy cause.
DonorsChoose is just like that. No need for you to throw hundreds of dollars for a single proposal there. Just add…
clock | October 24, 2007St. Bernard Study Shows Human-directed Evolution At Work:
The St Bernard dog - named after the 11th century priest Bernard of Menthon - is living proof that evolution does occur, say scientists. Biologists at The University of Manchester say that changes to the shape of the breed's head over the years can only be explained through human-directed evolution through selective breeding, an artificial version of natural selection.
Humans And Monkeys Share Machiavellian Intelligence:
When it comes to their social behavior, people sometimes act like monkeys, or more specifically, like rhesus…
clock | October 24, 2007Being out of town and all, I missed it, but NYTimes published a whole lot of articles about sleep yesterday.
Of course, as I enjoy poking around bird brains, the article by Carl Zimmer - In Study of Human Patterns, Scientists Look to Bird Brains - was the one most interesting to me personally. But you may find the other articles interesting as well:
From Faithful Dogs and Difficult Fish, Insight Into Narcolepsy
At Every Age, Feeling the Effects of Too Little Sleep
In the Dreamscape of Nightmares, Clues to Why We Dream at All
An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play
The…
clock | October 24, 2007I am sure I have ranted about the negative effects of DST here and back on Circadiana, but the latest study - The Human Circadian Clock's Seasonal Adjustment Is Disrupted by Daylight Saving Time (pdf) (press releases: ScienceDaily, EurekAlert) by Thomas Kantermann, Myriam Juda, Martha Merrow and Till Roenneberg shows that the effects are much more long-lasting and serious than previously thought. It is not "just one hour" and "you get used to it in a couple of days". Apparently it takes weeks for the circadian system to adjust, and in some people it never does. In this day and age of…
clock | October 24, 2007If you go here:
http://getyourwebsitehere.com/jswb/text_to_ascii.html
and type in your email address, it will convert it to ASCII, thus making it harder for bots to pick up the address, while making it easier for readers to copy and paste without having to remove 'AT' and "DOT'. Hat-tip: Soni Pitts, my new Converger friend.
clock | October 24, 2007The Banana Peel Project
MOMocrats
BioBlog (NZ)
The Divinely Guided Boot of Upward Inspiration
ChemSpider Blog
clock | October 24, 2007Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development (which I mentioned a few days ago here) was a great success. You can see all the articles associated with it here.
PLoS has collected all the poverty-related articles from its Journals on this nifty collections page.
A PLoS Medicine article - Food Insufficiency Is Associated with High-Risk Sexual Behavior among Women in Botswana and Swaziland - was one of the few that were highlighted at the event at NIH. Gavin has the details. Nick Anthis gives his angle.
clock | October 24, 2007This is where I will be next:
"Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences"
Friday, November 9, 1:00 - 6:00 pm
TMEC Walter Amphitheater, Harvard Medical School
260 Longwood Ave, Boston, MA 02115
www.harvardpublishingforum.com
This is a student-organized conference that will convene experts from across the world to discuss the state of publishing in the biological sciences.
If you are coming, let us know through Facebook. Or e-mail me and let's get together on that day, or the previous afternoon, or the following morning.
clock | October 24, 2007No time to dig into this deeper myself, so check out what others are saying about the shennanigans at the American Chemical Society:
Alex Palazzo has two posts.
Revere also has two posts.
And then there is PZ Myers and his commenters.
Follow their links for more....
clock | October 24, 2007I know I've done it before, about a year ago, but meeting Roch at ConvergeSouth the other day reminded me that I should do this again - ask you to put up your blog for aggregation on We101.
The only piece of information you need to give is your blog URL and the city you are in (so if your anonymity requires that you do not want people to know where you live, this is not for you). The site aggregates blogs by location. It is all explained here.
For instance, there are, for now, only a few Chapel Hill bloggers on there and I would love to see more. The largest number so far is on the…
clock | October 24, 2007My brain is fried. My flight home was horrifying - the pilot warned us before we even left the gate that the weather is nasty and that he ordered the stewardess to remain seated at least the first 30 minutes of the flight. Did the warning make the experience more or less frightening? I think it made it more so. Yes, the wind played with our airplane as if it was a toy, but knowing that the pilot thought it was nasty made it less comforting that he is confident himself in his abilities to keep us afloat. The scariest was the landing - we were kicked around throughout the descent until the…
clock | October 24, 2007Tangled Bank #91 is up on The Radula
Four Stone Hearth #26 is up on Primate Diaries
Encephalon #34 is up on Distributed Neuron
Gene Genie #18 is up on Eye on DNA
Grand Rounds Vol 4, No 5 are up on Pallimed
Carnival of Math: The Spam Edition is up on Good Math, Bad Math
Carnival of the Liberals #50 is up on That Is So Queer....
142nd Carnival of Education is up on History is Elementary
Carnival of the Green # 100 is up on The Good Human
The 46th Carnival of Feminists is up on Cubically Challenged
Friday Ark #161 is up on Modulator
Carnival of Homeschooling #95 is up on At Home With Kris