clock | January 14, 2010There are 20 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Spiny Mice Modulate Eumelanin to Pheomelanin Ratio to Achieve Cryptic Coloration in 'Evolution Canyon,' Israel:
Coat coloration in mammals is an explicit adaptation through natural selection. Camouflaging…
clock | January 13, 2010Nothing of importance is ever achieved without discipline. I feel myself sometimes not wholly in sympathy with some modern educational theorists, because I think that they underestimate the part that discipline plays.
- Bertrand Russell
clock | January 13, 2010
A couple of last-minute cancellations allowed us to bring in a few more people from the (enormous!) waitlist. Here are the lucky, under-the-wire, last-day registrants:
Chris Mooney is a science journalist and writer. He blogs on The Intersection and tweets.
Anne Frances Johnson is a Freelance Science Writer, a graduate of the The Medical and Science Journalism Program at UNC.
Kevin Smith is the Scholarly Communications Officer at Perkins Library at Duke University and he blogs on Scholarly Communications @ Duke.
Jennifer Brock is a science teacher at Martin Middle School in Raleigh.
Susan…
clock | January 13, 2010
Of course, our conferences always attract a nice contingent of physicians, nurses, medical journalists, biomedical researchers and med-bloggers, so it is not surprising that ScienceOnline2010 will also have sessions devoted to the world of medicine. Check them out:
Medicine 2.0 and Science 2.0--where do they intersect? - Walter Jessen
Description: Medicine 2.0 applications, services and tools are defined as Web-based services for healthcare consumers/patients, health professionals and biomedical researchers that use Web 2.0 technologies and/or semantic web and virtual reality approaches to…
clock | January 13, 2010There are 42 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
DNA from the Past Informs Ex Situ Conservation for the Future: An "Extinct" Species of Galápagos Tortoise Identified in Captivity:
Although not unusual to find captive relicts of species lost in the wild…
clock | January 12, 2010Whenever people say we mustn't be sentimental, you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, we must be realistic, they mean they are going to make money out of it.
- Brigid Antonia Brophy
clock | January 12, 2010The time has come....the moment many of you have been waiting for, for months!
The most amazing 2009 guest editor Scicurious and I are ready to announce the 50 posts that have made it through a grueling judging process to emerge as winners to be included in the Open Laboratory 2009, the anthology of the best writing on science blogs of the past year.
Out of 760 posts, all of amazing quality (we could have collected something like ten anthologies, all good), the survivors of all the rounds, the posts that will actually get printed on physical, dead-tree paper, are:
Breastatistics, by Dr.…
clock | January 12, 2010
Of course, this conference would not be itself if it was not full of Open Access evangelists and a lot of sessions about the world of publishing, the data, repositories, building a semantic web, networking and other things that scientists can now do in the age of WWW. This year, apart from journalists/writers, the largest cohort appear to be librarians and information scientists. So it is not surprising to see a number of sessions (and several demos) on these topics, for example:
Repositories for Fun and Profit - Dorothea Salo
Description: Why are my librarians bothering me with all this…
clock | January 12, 2010Evolving Towards Mutualism:
Plants, and all other living things, require nitrogen for growth; it is an essential component of nucleic acids and proteins. Although air is mostly nitrogen, this gaseous form is inaccessible to plants and must be fixed into ammonium to render it biologically relevant. Soil bacteria called rhizobia fix nitrogen, but to do this they must first take up residence inside the roots of legumes like pea, alfalfa, clover, and soybean.
Experimental Evolution of a Plant Pathogen into a Legume Symbiont:
Most leguminous plants can form a symbiosis with members of a group of…
clock | January 11, 2010Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.
- Brian Tracy
clock | January 11, 2010Two more 3-D articles were published in PLoS ONE today, as a part of our Structural Biology and Human Health: Medically Relevant Proteins from the SGC Collection. Check them out:
Structural Biology of Human H3K9 Methyltransferases:
SET domain methyltransferases deposit methyl marks on specific histone tail lysine residues and play a major role in epigenetic regulation of gene transcription. We solved the structures of the catalytic domains of GLP, G9a, Suv39H2 and PRDM2, four of the eight known human H3K9 methyltransferases in their apo conformation or in complex with the methyl donating…
clock | January 11, 2010There will be about 25 SciBlings (i.e., people who blog on scienceblogs.com) at ScienceOnline2010 later this week. And all of us have been given the keys to a brand new super-special blog - ScienceOnline 2010: The Blog! So we'll post there or cross-post both there and on our own blogs, throughout the meeting and beyond.
I already cross-posted a few (some are up, others are scheduled to show up later), so all the important information is there. But I expect a lot of my SciBlings to add their posts to this blog as well.
clock | January 11, 2010Go say Hello to Christina Agapakis, a synthetis biology blogger on Oscillator (also check out the archives of her old blog to see more what it is all about).
So, my blog is now not the only one here with a title that has something to do with oscillations....
clock | January 11, 2010
The conference is starting in just a few days. Overwhelmed yet? Here are some tips - what to do while at the conference, as well as what to do if not physically present but interested in following virtually.
Unless a few more waitlisters manage to squeeze in at the last moment, this post will be the last post introducing the participants - we expect as many as 275 people in one place during some events!
Morgan Giddings is a Systems Biology Professor at UNC Chapel Hill. She blogs on Morgan on Science and is writing a book on Marketing Your Science. She is also on Twitter.
Bill Cannon works at…
clock | January 11, 2010
Every year, we pay special attention to sessions that explore the use of the Web in science education. This year is no different - there are several sessions to choose from:
Citizen Science and Students - Sandra Porter, Tara Richerson (science_goddess), and Antony Williams
Description: Students are a great resource for projects that require large numbers of volunteers. We will discuss examples of projects that combine student learning with authentic research and the power of blogs to connect students with projects. Discuss here.
Science Education: Adults - Darlene Cavalier
Description: "…