clock | July 3, 2007Buyer beware! Not everything in science publishing that calls itself Open Access actually is so.
clock | July 3, 2007Wood Ant Queen Has No Egg-laying Monopoly:
The reproductive monopoly of the ant queen is not as strong as is often thought. Dr. Heikki Helanterä and Prof. Lotta Sundström, biologists working at the University of Helsinki, Finland, investigated worker ovary development and egg laying in nine Northern European wood ant species of the genus Formica, and revealed wide spread reproductive endeavours by workers.
City Site Was Dinosaur Dining Room:
A dinosaur bone bed in southwest Edmonton that served as a feeding area for the direct ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex has revealed that two dinosaurs,…
clock | July 2, 2007All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
clock | July 2, 2007Yes, Shakesville is online again, but the new dedicated server (that will repel the future Denials of Service) costs money. You can help it survive with a couple of bucks every now and then.
clock | July 2, 2007The Seed Overlords have put up a survey for our blog readers. You can go here or just click on the green box on the right side-bar and tell them all how you use the site, what you like and dislike, etc., so the improvements can be made in the future.
Do we really need more sly sex on our blogs?
clock | July 2, 2007In all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate alike, one of the defining features of sleep is the "rebound", i.e., the making up for sleep debt after an acute sleep deprivation event. However, the problem of modern society is a chronic sleep loss in humans - when you loos a couple of hours of needed sleep every day.
Now, a team at Northwestern studied the effects of chronic sleep loss and, lo and behold - bad news! There is no rebound after chronic sleep deprivation.
Chronically sleep deprived? You can't make up for lost sleep:
---------snip-------------
In the study, the researchers kept…
clock | July 2, 2007Encephalon #26 is up on Neurophilosophy.
Wait! What's that URL?
Yes, MC is our new SciBling!
He is officially moving (i.e., will be featured on the front page) tomorrow, but he is already all set up with some beautiful banners. So, go say Hello and if by some cosmic mistake you have not been reading his blog before, check his archives on the old address.
clock | July 2, 2007Books: "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge.
It's 2025 - What happened to science, politics and journalism? Well, you know I'd be intrigued. After all, a person whose taste in science fiction I trust (my brother) told me to read this and particularly to read it just before my interview with PLoS. So, of course I did (I know, it's been two months, I am slow, but I get there in the end).
'Rainbows End' is a novel-length expansion of the short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" which he finished in August 2001 and first published in "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge". The novel was written…
clock | July 1, 2007The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
- Anatole France
clock | July 1, 2007Gene Genie #10 (the peer-reviewed carnival of bioinformatics and computational biology) is up on Genomicron.
Paediatric Grand Rounds 2:6 are up on Breath Spa for Kids.
clock | July 1, 2007I am having difficulty understanding what this is about, who is who, what are the institutional affiliations and potential biases, etc. Can someone explain it to me:
Net Neutrality: Undifferentiated Networks Would Require Significant Extra Capacity:
Using computer models, the researchers compared the current "best-effort" approach with a tiered model that separates information into two simple classes -- one for most types of information and another for applications requiring service level assurance for high-bandwidth content like video games, telemedicine, and Voice over Internet Protocol (…
clock | July 1, 2007Festival of the Trees #13 - Putting Down Roots - is up on Wrenaissance Reflections.
clock | June 30, 2007Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.
- Bill Cosby
clock | June 30, 2007OK, I have scheduled to repost automatically some of the best clock-related posts. They will appear every day at 9am and 5pm from July 5th till August 12th. I hope you like them again....
Tomorrow, I'll schedule a bunch of ClockQuotes for the next month as well, every day at 4am.
clock | June 30, 2007While in San Francisco, I'd like to eat at Incanto (look around the site for their menu and progressive food and water policies, and they also have a blog). It is at 1550 Church Street, on the southwest corner of Church and Duncan Streets in San Francisco's Noe Valley. Where is that? Anyone game to go with me?
clock | June 30, 2007The Flying Trilobite
Ljubisa Bojic
1420Mhz
Weird Science
Good Tithings
Curious Expeditions
Dandelion Diva
Cabinet of Wonders
Simplistic Art
Mixotrophy
Offal Good
clock | June 30, 2007Edwards aside, this is an excellent look at the current political landscape in the USA:
John Edwards and Dominant Media's Selective Skewering of Populist Hypocrisy by Paul Street: