Search Content

Displaying results 10501 - 10550 of 87950

Extreme Dinosaur: Nigersaurus, the Mesozoic Cow!

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,…

Foreign Accent Syndrome and Different Types of Aphasia

A boy from Britain who had a case of viral meningitis had to undergo surgery to drain the fluid from his brain. When he awoke and recovered, he had a new accent: William McCartney-Moore of York was struck down with viral meningitis last March and needed brain surgery after doctors found he had a rare strain called empyaema. "He lost everything," said his mother, Ruth. "He couldn't read or write, he couldn't recognise things, he had no recollection of places he'd been to and things he'd done and he'd lost all his social skills. He went from being such a bright, lovely, wonderful eight-year-…

Political Science

As a blogger, I usually willfully delineate a giant chasm of non-communication between myself and political issues, preferring to dabble in the absolute: time, space, theoretical technological infrastructures, and, recently, aliens. I wrote one very reticent entry in 2005 about chimeric research, prefacing it with the pronouncement that "this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues," a statement that has proven in the intervening years to be true. However, I can't deny that my love of the sciences has blossomed under the steely wing of one of the most anti-science…

Switching to Linux: One man's personal experience

Photographer Scott Rowed has penned an excellent essay on his experience making the switch to Linux, and he's agreed to place it here as a guest post. Please read it and pass it on to people, school districts, small island nations, and others who may benefit: Switching to Linux by Scott Rowed Changing operating systems is not a task to be taken lightly. I generally follow the philosophy "if it ain't broke don't fix it." A year ago, however, the family notebook was broken, hopelessly crippled by a nasty virus or worm. I'd been regularly updating the virus software and running complete checks…

How to Get a Small College Job

We've been running a search to fill a tenure-track faculty position for next year, and I've spent more time than I care to recall reading folders and interviewing candidates. Now that the process is nearing completion, I'd like to do a quick post offering advice for those thinking about applying for a tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college. Yes, this is too late to do any good for people thinking of applying for the current job, but then, we wouldn't want anybody to get an unfair advantage by reading my blog. The following statements are entirely my own opinion, and should not…

What is there to say about the credit crunch?

(This is sort of a round-up of comment on the economics news. I don't have much to say about it yet.) It would appear that the economy has just gone from bad to really bad, although if you wanted to be technical it was probably bad already. Prices just hadn't fallen to reflect the true magnitude of that badness until recently. Take the now-to-be-bought Bear Stearns. It's price was 70 dollars two weeks ago and about 170 a year ago. Did that market value simply vanish over two weeks? I rather doubt it. (Particularly considering that their New York office building is supposedly worth more…

The Discovery Institute wants my money

I got a begging email from our good friends at the Center for Science & Culture. They're going to have to work a lot harder to persuade me. Dear PZ: Wait. Dear PZ? I'm having a tough time imagining any of those bozos addressing me as dear. But let us continue. Intelligent design is a common sense idea. Research has shown that children intuitively recognize design in the world around them. You and I make design inferences every day. It has taken a long time for the scientific community to catch up with the kids. But that day is coming. Intuitive and "common sense" assumptions are often…

Between Jellies and Stars

The next Scientiae Carnival topic is How We Are Hungry. scientiae-carnival We spent the Memorial Day holiday weekend at Mom's house, so hunger and food are topics much on my mind. Sunday we had a cookout at my brother's house; the weather was perfect, and Brother Zuska was in his element at the grill/smoker, delivering up enough grilled meat to feed at least three times as many people as we had there. Food - feeding each other, sharing meals - has always been a big deal in my family. Are you familiar with the Wedding Song? One time my sisters and I made up parody lyrics to it,…

Woo infiltrates one of the premiere trauma hospitals in the U.S.

Regular readers know that I've long been dismayed at the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based "alternative" medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). It's gotten such a foothold that it's even showing up in the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one medical school. I've speculated before that academic medical centers probably see alternative medicine as both a marketing ploy to make themselves look more "humanistic" and a new revenue stream, given that most insurance companies won't pay for therapies without solid evidence of efficacy, meaning that…

Open Source Science? Or Distributed Science?

I was asked in an interview recently about "open source science" and it got me thinking about the ways that, in the "open" communities of practice, we frequently over-simplify the realities of how software like GNU/Linux actually came to be. Open Source refers to a software worldview. It's about software development, not a universal truth that can be easily exported. And it's well worth unpacking the worldview to understand it, and then to look at the realities of open source software as they map - or more frequently do not map - to science. The foundations of open source software are…

A month in dinosaurs (and pterosaurs): 1, therizinosauroid fuzz

First of all, many many thanks to everyone (both here and at SV-POW!) for the congrats regarding baby Emma. I am, shall we say, a little tired right now, but as you'll know if you've visited SV-POW! this morning, the good news as goes blogging is that I've been able to get lots of stuff prepared in advance. In theory, therefore, things won't be so different here on Tet Zoo. The one thing I haven't had time to prepare is 'the reveal' on that mystery picture from the other day, but I'll get round to that soon, thanks for your patience. Ok, to business... I think I've said before that I tend…

Dichloroacetate and cancer

So many people have sent me this sensationalistic article, "Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice", that I guess I have to respond. I sure wish it were true, but you should be able to tell from how poorly it is written and the ridiculous inaccuracies (mitochondria are cells that fight cancers?) that you should be suspicious. The radical, exaggerated claims make the truth of the story highly unlikely. Researchers at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada have cured cancer last week, yet there is a little ripple in the news or in TV. It is a simple technique using very basic…

Africa Fighting Malaria's Wedge Document

The wedge document is the Discovery Institute's secret plan to defeat scientific materialism and promote Creationism. Below is Africa Fighting Malaria's wedge document. One part of the wedge is to use a simple message: "banning DDT spread malaria and killed people" to drive a wedge between environmentalists and public health people. The second is a wedge between first world and third world countries by arguing that first world concerns about pollution from DDT were killing people in third world countries. The document is a pitch to Philip Morris to fund their activities because the World…

Where do geoscientists get their ideas?

I've recently submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation, and it's got me thinking about how I find ideas for research. The proposal was for an instrument to enable research*, and that meant that, for the first time in years**, I had to write something that could convince other people that my research is interesting, important, and worth doing. Out of all the things I do in my job, that's the thing that I find the most difficult. I love teaching - teaching is fun, and makes everything worthwhile. (Even grading isn't so bad all the time.) And doing the research itself is fine, too…

Another Week of GW News, January 22, 2012

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsJanuary 22, 2012 Chuckles, Horn of Africa, Keystone XL, WFES, Intimidation, Open Science Subsidies, Global Legal Framework, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Prices, Land Grabs, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs,…

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Bob O'Hara

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Bob O'Hara of the Deep Thoughts and Silliness blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? My name is Bob O'Hara, but I comment on blogs and such places under the absolutely…

Will there be new communication channels in the Obama administration?

There is quite a lot of chatter around the intertubes about changes in the communication environment that happened between the last and this election and how those changes may be affecting the way the new White House communicates to people as well as how the new White House will receive communications from the people. A lot of people are impatient - they want to see everything in place right this moment. Easy, guys! The inauguration is on January 20th. Until that time, Bush is the President and the Obama communications folks have time to think through, design and implement communication…

Unscientific America, the gift that keeps on giving

Mooney and Kirshenbaum have been so stung by my criticisms of their book that they have launched a multi-part rebuttal to my review. Here's my reply to their reply. We didn't get personal, and we didn't attack atheism in general! Hmmm. Here's a sampling of what they do say: "Myers' actions were incredibly destructive and unnecessary". I "set the cause backward". New Atheists believe that "religious faith should not be benignly tolerated". The "New Atheists" are "nasty bullying". They're "shrill". In last year's voting for best science blog, I was the "devil's choice". Blogging brings out…

What is Journalism?

For several decades, journalism happened only in the three 'traditional' methods of communication: print, radio and television. The means of production of these is expensive, thus owned only by wealthy individuals or corporations, or heavily subsidized by such (through advertising and such). One unifying trait of the three technical modes of traditional media is that they are all broadcast media: one-to-many. As such a state of things persisted for several decades and journalism got professionalized during this period, a common cultural definition of journalism emerged: whatever is done by…

Energy Dissipation in a Physics Toy

A little while back, I used a photo of SteelyKid's toy Newton's cradle as the photo of the day, with a bonus video: I mentioned that I was going to do some analysis of this at some point, but didn't have time right then. I had a bit of time to poke at this yesterday, though, so here's some physics making use of the normal-speed part of that video (I have another purpose in mind for the high-speed stuff; you'll need to wait for that). The obvious thing to do with this is to plug it into Tracker and measure the position as a function of time. Here's a graph tracking the position of the two end…

The Role of Textbooks

Inside Higher Ed has an op-ed piece up urging faculty to abandon textbooks: Here's a statement with which everyone can agree: College instructors cannot assume that students come to their classes in possession of basic knowledge. Now here's one sure to generate some controversy: In many cases textbooks deter the pursuit of knowledge more than they help it. The sciences may be different, but at least in the case of the humanities, most of us would be better off not assigning a textbook. He goes on to make a strong case for abandoning history textbooks in favor of monographs, based on both the…

Open letters with signatories: Will they help counter the antivaccine movement?

As a "prominent" (as hard as I find it that anyone would apply the word to me) blogger about the anti-vaccine movement, somehow I ended up on the Every Child By Two mailing list. ECBT, as you may recall, is the organization founded by former First Lady Rosalyn Carter and former First Lady of Arkansas Betty Bumpers to promote vaccination against childhood diseases. It's a fine organization, and a much delayed counterweight to antivaccine propaganda mills like Age of Autism, Generation Rescue, the National Vaccine Information Center, and the up and coming antivaccine doctors' website Medical…

Oops, he did it again: Bill O'Reilly defames the victims of the Malmedy massacre

Back in October, Jamie McCarthy and I castigated Bill O'Reilly for implying that at Malmedy in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge U.S. Airborne troops had massacred Nazis soldiers who had surrendered when in fact the Malmedy massacre was perpetrated by SS troops to whom U.S. soldiers had surrendered. Naturally, after ragging on him a bit, we wrote it off as yet another example of Bill O'Reilly's self-confident ignorance. I figured O'Reilly had simply mixed up historical facts in his eagerness to defend the abuses at Abu Ghraib by pointing to supposed atrocities committed by U.S.…

Protecting Your Memory: A Full-time job?

A review of Carved in Sand, by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin I won't lie to you. The press release for Carved in Sand did not inspire confidence. "When journalist Cathryn Jakobson Ramin was in her early 40s, she began forgetting things and was having trouble concentrating," reads the description of the book: Embarrassed, but also concerned, she decided to get to the heart of the question so many people in midlife ask: Is this normal--or am I slowly losing my mind? A veteran reporter with two decades of investigative work under her belt, she decided to become a guinea pig . . . [embarking] on a…

Such blithe liars

I'm not getting a good opinion of people in New Jersey. They've got the awful George Berkin, a cretin who rants on NJ Online, and has a reputation as one of the dumbest jerks in the state. And he has commenters. I want to talk about one of them, Terry Hurlbut, who is a marvelous example of creationist pseudoscience and dishonesty. He's commenting on a Berkin article that is characteristically crazy (it's a defense of Christianity against atheism that cites CS Lewis's trilemma), but Hurlbut goes beyond mere inanity to lie about science. Take a look at this. Creationists only rarely get this…

What Should a 20-year-old Proto-Feminist Guy Be Reading?

In the midst of a vigorous discussion on my last post, reader Deatkin expressed his frustrations as to how he might engage in a positive manner in a discussion of feminist issues. In this case, it was not the hairy-legged man-hating feminazi Zuska who was intimidating; it was Comrade Physioprof. Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that the problem lies with me on this... In sum, I may simply be too immature (I'm 20 and a mere undergraduate) to think broadly and imaginatively enough on feminist issues in order for me to reach a conclusion that somebody such as [Comrade Physioprof] would find…

Male Barbary Macaques Like Their Lovers Loud

Barbary Macaques (an adult male and an infant). Via Wikipedia. Part of the experience of living in an apartment involves occasionally being subjected to the sounds of members of our own species mating. While the torrid love affairs of our neighbors might keep us up at night, though, there's a good reason why they do it (just as there's a good reason why there's a whole business based upon the proclivity of some men to drop loads of cash to listen to a woman pretend to have orgasms over the phone), at least if we're anything like Barbary Macaques (Macaca sylvanus). In a new study published…

CHOMP!

Tyrannosaurus rex is by far the most famous of dinosaurs, a creature that looms large in the field of paleontology as well as in the media. This amount of attention has caused plenty of controversy but it has also resulted in many studies of various aspects of one of the largest and most well-known extinct carnivores ever to have lived, and a new paper in the journal Paleobiology by Snively and Russell examines the prospect of "inertial feeding" in this titanic terror. Tyrannosaurus and its close relatives (i.e. Tarbosaurus, Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, etc.) were definitely…

Cooperation and multilevel selection

A few days ago I introduced how higher levels of selection could occur via a "toy" example. Obviously it wasn't realistic, and as RPM pointed out a real population is not open ended in its growth potential. I simply wanted to allude to the seeds of how Simpson's Paradox might occur, where population structure is needed to explain overall trends. Now I'm going to dive into a somewhat more complicated model, one which Martin Nowak published last year in PNAS, Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection. The paper is free, so if this post piques your interest I recommend you dive straight…

American psychologists do the right thing

Hats off to fellow blogger Stephen Soldz and his colleagues, leaders of a coalition within the American Psychological Association that campaigned to put the APA on record declaring participation in torture interrogations at US prisons at Guantanamo Bay and similar prison camps an unethical breach of professional standards. The referendum victory (59%) comes after previous failures to ban professional complicity by APA members in interrogations where there is good reason to believe international law is being violated. The ban means those who are American Psychological Association members can't…

What do we do?

Not infrequently, I get asked what it is I do, anyway, as a scientisty sort of person. I blogged it, of course, but that was a "typical day" - during term time and filled with paperwork and class prep and general rushing about. This morning I woke up and found the Sb Overlords had frontpaged this quote: "I think I need to go back and think about adaptive load balancing block solving of sparse, nasty almost diagonal matrices; that and whether kinetic energy turbulence really affects sound wave propagation (duh, of course it does, but how much...)?" Huh? Ah, Particle Physics snark... So, how…

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with GrrrlScientist

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked my SciBling GrrrlScientist of the Living the Scientific Life blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? I write the blog, Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted), under…

Ebola, for your kids! Interview with Tara Smith

Dr.Tara C. Smith is one of the original Gang Of Four(teen) here at Scienceblogs.com. She blogs on her Aetiology as well as contributes to Panda's Thumb and Correlations group blogs. At the 2nd Science Blogging Conference last month Tara moderated the session on Blogging public health and medicine. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job? Well, let's see. Working backwards, I'm an assistant professor; my field is infectious disease epidemiology.…

Why teach biology?

I've been tagged with a teaching meme: I'm supposed to answer the question, "Why do you teach and why is academic freedom critical to that effort?". We science types are late to the game; there are already several examples online, mostly from those humanities people. First, I'll be forthright in one thing: teaching was not my initial goal, nor was there anything in my training to encourage teaching. Especially if you get into a program with biomedical funding, there's active dissuasion from pursuing teaching: I was a TA for 3 quarters in my first year of graduate school, and then got put on…

Fair and Balanced

A couple weeks ago, I was chided by a couple of readers for only attacking rightwing lunacy and leaving leftwing lunacy alone. Let me rectify that for the moment with a look at this amusing bit of balderdash from Leonard Shlain, a professor of surgery from UCSF. It's an excerpt from his book The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. As a general rule, I think it's safe to say that if you come across a book title that invokes the Goddess, there's some major league flatulence on the way. This is no exception. His book begins: Of all the sacred cows allowed to roam…

Advice to my young self on my one-year-Con-niversary

"A lot of mothers will do anything for their children, except let them be themselves." -Banksy One of the great joys I got to experience came last year, when for the very first time, I was invited to be a guest of honor at a most fabulous convention: MidSouthCon 30! Image credit: MidSouthCon XXX, originally from http://www.midsouthcon.org/. I went into it not knowing what to expect, and I wound up having one of the best times I could have asked for. I met some of the kindest, most interesting people I've ever met in my life, and I felt like everyone there immediately accepted me into their…

Election Liveblogging

This election day post is going to be continuously updated until the winner becomes more-or-less official. Tomorrow we'll have one more politics post as something of a benediction, and then mercifully back to the physics. Updates will appear at the top of the post, so feel free to refresh throughout the night. I'm writing in the central time zone, so timestamps on this post will reflect such. 11:39 Well, the Minnesota mess is still a mess though Coleman has pulled ahead by a hair. Looks like the result will be Obama without a filibuster-proof majority. As such, I'm going to bed. Good…

Carrots trump sticks for fostering cooperation

When it comes to encouraging people to work together for the greater good, carrots work better than sticks. That's the message from a new study showing that rewarding people for good behaviour is better at promoting cooperation than punishing them for offences. David Rand from Harvard University asked teams of volunteers to play "public goods games", where they could cheat or cooperate with each other for real money. After many rounds of play, the players were more likely to work together if they could reward each other for good behaviour or punish each other for offences. But of these two…

"When Britney Spears Comes to My Lab"

Although I'm starting to suspect the Talk of the Town will not be noting our stunning performance, and Publisher's Weekly made not give us a starred review, I will still admit that Dave and I gave the best performance --the best performance? -- the best performance of our lives at the Cornelia St. Cafe a few weeks ago. Vince LiCata was the instigator of the whole to-do, in league with Roald Hoffmann. While Vince will no doubt soon be most known for the prize-winning choreography that has just netted him top honors by the AAAS for dancing his research, I'll also make him known here for one…

Causation in Brain Disease: A Lesson from Vietnam Veterans and PTSD

One of the practical issues in doing neuroscience in humans is that you have a problem determining causation. Say I do an imaging study with a neurological disease and find that the activity in a certain brain region is consistently lower. Do I know whether that reduced activity is causing the disease or whether it is just secondary? It is often really hard to tell in humans. If it were an animal study, we could just lesion the area in experimental animals and see if they were still capable of getting the disease. However, there are diseases where good animal models are lacking, and…

Comps readings this week

And now for something a little different. I'm continuing my preparations for comprehensive exams from my old blog.  There will be some test essays and also some continuing notes on readings.  Typically, I don't mark my notes on readings as "Research Blogging" because the articles are some what older, and some of my notes are very brief although they are on peer-reviewed research. I would be interested in feedback on that - if you think I should mark them research blogging, let me know! Quan-Haase, A., & Wellman, B. (2005). Local Virtuality in an Organization: Implications for Community…

Someone has taken the Coulter Challenge!

It only took five years. Remember, my Coulter Challenge was for someone to take any of Coulter's paragraphs about evolution from her book Godless, and cogently defend its accuracy. It's been surprising how few takers there have been: lots of wingnuts have praised the book and said it is wonderful, but no one has been willing to get specific and actually support any of its direct claims. Until now. It takes that special combination of arrogance and ignorance to think anything Coulter said is defensible, so I suppose it's not a huge surprise that our brave foolhardy contestant is Michael Egnor…

New Cognitive Science Books

Over the next few months, several cognitive science books will be coming out that look really interesting. I thought I'd list a few of them, in case you're interested in checking them out once they're published. The Prehistory of Cognitive Science - Andrew Brook, Editor Description Featuring contributions from leading figures such as Noam Chomsky, Don Ross, Andrew Brook and Patricia Kitcher, this book traces the philosophical roots behind contemporary understandings of cognition, forming both a convincing case for the centrality of philosophy to the history of neuroscience and cognitive…

A Necessary Twist (Values, part IV)

Why can't we picture a fifth dimension? One, two, and three seem so easy to grasp. We can even see how one leads to the next: a line, composed of points, is a component of a shape on a plane, which in turn is a component of a spatial object. Consider that object with an additional aspect, enduring through time, and you can almost envision a fourth--a curving sense of endurance, relative to our space. So, why not imagine another dimension, not just curved, but twisted or spun, which consists of the aspects of time, present, future and past, relating to one another? Ok... don't picture it too…

Pharyngula on STRIKE

ON STRIKE! It's come to this. We've been facing a steady erosion of talent here at Scienceblogs, with the loss of good people like Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong a while back, and with the very abrupt departure of 15 bloggers after the recent PepsiCo debacle — an event that damaged the reputation of this place. And now just yesterday we lost PalMD and Bora. Something is going rotten here. What could it be? I don't think it's ultimately an ethical problem. I have every confidence that the management at Seed Media Group wants to do the right thing, and I think they have gotten many things exactly…

One More Reason Why Letting Iowa and New Hampshire Go First Is Stupid: Florida

I've described how the Iowa caucus voting procedure is a ridiculous way to decide how might be the next president, but Iowa's and New Hampshire's insistence on being the first states might have cost the Democrats Florida. Here's what the Democrats did: Fearing likely attempts by big states like Michigan and Florida to disrupt the parties' primary calendars with early dates in 2008, Republicans and Democrats ruled at their 2004 conventions that states trying to butt in before Iowa and New Hampshire would lose half their delegates. The Republicans left it there. The Democrats decided to try…

Open Science Digital Computation Research

Two recent announcements that are worth noting here. The first is for Digital Science, a Macmillan / Nature Publishing Group project involving some of the usual science online suspects like Timo Hannay and Kaitlin Thaney and some others in a really dynamic-looking multi-disciplinary team. The press release is here and the about page here. Digital Science provides software and information to support researchers and research administrators in their everyday work, with the ultimate aim of making science more productive through the use of technology. As well as developing our own solutions, we…

Surgical masks versus respirators for flu protection

We only just got to the surgical/N95 mask article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). We've been traveling and haven't been able to keep up with what others were saying, but we're sure it's been well covered by the usual suspects. So we'll just add our take here, for what it's worth. As most readers here know, what kind of mask (if any) will best protect a health care worker or anyone else at high risk of exposure to people infected with influenza virus is a difficult question. We still remain unsure whether flu is transmitted mainly by large or small droplets. If most…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: I treat myself for a condition for which The Literal Word of God can work

I recently had a medical condition that is the only one I know of where the Literal Word of God actually is effective treatment. However, as an atheist I didn't have access to the Literal Word of God (the online version isn't effective) so I asked one of my colleagues, a licensed physician, to treat me, using a modality in which I had faith: heavy science. Unfortunately my faith was misplaced. The treatment failed after three tries (he insisted on using Harrison's Textbook as his treatment source, when I would have used Cecil and Loeb). Desperate, I finally took matters into my own hands in a…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 19 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: What You See Is What You Get? Exclusion Performances in Ravens and Keas: Among birds, corvids and parrots are prime candidates for advanced cognitive abilities. Still, hardly anything is known about…