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Some #AltMetrics for a blog post on Canadian science policy

On May 20th, 2013 I published my most popular post ever. It was The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment. In it, I chronicled at some considerable length the various anti-science measures by the current Canadian Conservative government. The chronological aspect was particularly interesting as you could see the ramping up since the 2011 election where the Conservatives won a majority government after two consecutive minority Conservative governments. As an exercise in alt-metrics (and here), I thought I would share some of the reactions and…

A Critical Appraisal of "Chronic Lyme" in the NEJM

The New England Journal has an article on the phenomenon known as chronic Lyme disease. Lyme disease, is a tick-borne infectious disease caused by an bacterium known as Borrelia burgdorferi carried by ticks in certain regions of the United States and Europe in which it is endemic. Here is the US map of cases below. It can result in a fever-like illness with a characteristic rash (although not in all cases) called erythema migrans, and if left untreated, can cause more serious problems like arthritis, and cardiovascular and neurological complications. A small number of people and doctors…

Student guest post: A taste of Lyme

Student guest post by Kyle Malter In many areas of the country there is a vile blood sucker that lurks in our forests, our parks and even our backyards.  What concerns us is not what this creature takes but rather what it leaves in our body after it bites us:  corkscrew shaped bacteria called spirochetes and with the name Borrelia burgdorferi.  When the bacteria invade our bodies and cause problems along the way we call it Lyme disease. It is Lyme, not “Lymes” disease, and here’s how it got that name. In the early 1970’s a large number of cases emerged involving children with a “bulls-eye”…

The Dumbest Thing Worldnutdaily Has Ever Said?

I know, that's like figuring out which day Mike Tyson was the biggest jerk on. But I think it might be true. This story tries to tie every bad guy in their universe together in one single narrative - Bill Clinton, the ACLU, Muslim terrorists and separation of church and state. Here's their claim: A man arrested as a terror suspect for allegedly trying to transport $340,000 from a group tied to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, and who reputedly had connections to Osama bin Laden, helped write the "Religious Expression in Public Schools" guidelines issued by President Clinton during his tenure in…

Liberty Sunday Reports

Yesterday was yet another of those frequent religious right "conferences" - really just a series of ridiculous speeches to fire up the base with rhetorical red meat to get them out to vote in November. This one was disingenuously called Liberty Sunday, following on the heels of the equally misnamed Justice Sunday earlier this year. There are several reports on what was said, all of which was predictable and much of it patently absurd. In keeping with their theme, they used a picture of Boston's famous Old North Church, indicating their metaphor that, like Paul Revere, they were bravely riding…

Neurulation in zebrafish

Neurulation is a series of cell movements and shape changes, inductive interactions, and changes in gene expression that partitions tissues into a discrete neural tube. It is one of those early and significant morphogenetic events that define an important tissue, in this case the nervous system, and it's also an event that can easily go wrong, producing relatively common birth defects like holoprosencephaly and spina bifida. Neurulation has been a somewhat messy phenomenon for comparative embryology, too, because there are not only subtle differences between different vertebrate lineages in…

In Which I Agree With Michael Behe Over Ken Miller

Back in June, Brown University biologist Ken Miller published this review of Michael Behe's book The Edge of Evolution in Nature magazine. Considering the venue, Miller quite appropriately focused on Behe's rather dubious scientific arguments and showed that they were entirely incorrect. Miller has now published a second review (not freely available online), this time in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. The scientific flaws are hardly the only thing wrong with Behe's arguments, it seems. In Miller's view, Behe's arguments have disturbing theological consequences: A hopeful reader…

Ruse on the Pope on Evolution

Update, May 17, 2:35 pm: Many thanks to Jerry Coyne for clearing up the question of Richard Dawkins's views on human inevitability in evolution. As I thought, Dawkins does not hold the view Ruse attributed to him. Coyne has Dawkins's response to Ruse's piece, so follow the link and go have a look. It's been all book, all the time around here. The first draft of the BECB (that's the big evolution/creation book) has benefited mightily from the heroic efforts of a number of proofreaders, but this has meant a certain amount of rewriting to produce the second draft. I'm putting the finishing…

Worst. Defence. Ever.

Howard Nemerov has a post defending Lott and responding to Chris Mooney's Mother Jones article. Unfortunately, he gets his facts wrong, leaves out inconvenient facts and indulges in fallacious arguments. I'll go through his post and correct these, but first some general comments. Even though his article is a response to Chris Mooney's article Nemerov does not link to Mooney's piece. If he did, his reader's might have been able to discover how badly Nemerov misrepresents the article. Nemerov tries to pretend that the dispute is just about politics. He doesn't mention any critic…

Going From Blog to Book

Ever since my first book, Written in Stone, found a home at Bellevue Literary Press I have had a number of people ask me how to publish their own books. How does a book go from being an idea to a real, dead-tree product? I will be discussing some of the details of this process (especially using online resources to write and promote books) with Rebecca Skloot and Tom Levenson in a few weeks at ScienceOnline2010, but I thought I would cover some of the basics here. The first and most crucial step of the process is coming up with a book to write! This is not as easy as it might sound.…

Should parents be allowed to choose whether their child has a genetic disease?

Your gut reaction is probably that the question is irrelevant; what parent would choose for their child to have a genetic disease. That was my reaction. Apparently, however, some parents with genetic diseases that make them lead relatively normal lives but isolate them into special social groups -- such as deafness or dwarfism -- are electing for their children to also have these genetic diseases. As reported in the NYTimes: Wanting to have children who follow in one's footsteps is an understandable desire. But a coming article in the journal Fertility and Sterility offers a fascinating…

Helicos co-founder sequences own genome using single-molecule technology

Pushkarev, D., Neff, N., & Quake, S. (2009). Single-molecule sequencing of an individual human genome Nature Biotechnology DOI: 10.1038/nbt.1561 Yes, it's yet another "complete" individual genome sequence, following on the heels of Craig Venter, James Watson, an anonymous African male (twice, and not without controversy), two cancer patients, a Chinese man, and two Koreans.  There is a new twist, though: this is the first genome to be sequenced using single molecule sequencing technology - also known as "third-generation" sequencing, to distinguish it from first-generation Sanger…

Book Review: Bonobo Handshake

A few weeks ago I emailed Vanessa Woods and asked her pretty please if I could review her book. After reading all of the bonobo and chimpanzee papers written by Vanessa and her husband Brian Hare (both now at Duke) over the years, as well as their research on domesticated dogs and silver foxes (some of which I wrote about on the old blog), I couldn't wait to check out the book. So I was super excited to find it waiting in my department mailbox this past Wednesday morning. By Friday night, I had read the book cover to cover. So, here's the short review: read this book. And, okay, watch this…

"I don't make assumptions" about vaccines and people's motives

Every so often, I like to try to get into the mind of an antivaccine crank, a quack, or crank of another variety, because understanding what makes cranks tick (at least, as much as I can given that I'm not one) can be potentially very useful in my work trying to counter them. On the one hand, it's not easy, because understanding conspiracy theorists, really bad science, and a sense of persecution shared by nearly all cranks doesn't come natural to me, but it's a useful exercise, and I encourage all of you to do it from time to time. While it might not be possible (or even desirable) to "walk…

The Gender Knot: Ch. 1 Discussion - "Where Are We?" Part 1

Welcome to our discussion of The Gender Knot by Allan Johnson. This is the first post in the discussion series. We will be discussing Chapter 1 "Where Are We?" You can find all posts connected to this discussion here. I just noted a potential problem. There is an updated edition of the book now available. Right now I am working with a 1997 edition. I haven't decided if I will purchase the new edition; for now, I am going to keep going with my old one. But, if you are working with a new edition, you may encounter something in the book that I have left out. If so, please feel free to…

Darwin in Serbia

Two years ago, there was quite a brouhaha in the media when Serbian minister for education decided to kick Darwin out of schools. The whole affair lasted only a few days - the public outrage was swift and loud and the minister was forced to resign immediately. I blogged about it profusely back then and below the fold are those old posts: ----------------------------------------------------------------- I Take This Personally (September 09, 2004) Serbia takes a bold step back into the Middle Ages Serbia strikes blow against evolution Creationism put on equal footing with Darwinism Serbia vs…

Another Week of GW News, May 11, 2008

Sipping from the internet firehose... 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) Top Stories:Nargis, Melting Arctic, Antarctica, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures, Feedbacks, Paleoclimate, Sea Levels, THC, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Tropical Rainforests, Floods & Droughts Mitigation, Transportation, Buildings, Sequestration Journals, Misc. Science, Schwartz, Pielke, Connolley Kyoto-2, Carbon Trade, Optimal…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 100 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: Circadian Rhythm of Aggression in Crayfish A Blog Around The Clock: Co-Researching spaces for Freelance Scientists? A Blog Around The Clock: The Shock Value of Science Blogs A Blog…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 100 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: Circadian Rhythm of Aggression in Crayfish A Blog Around The Clock: Co-Researching spaces for Freelance Scientists? A Blog Around The Clock: The Shock Value of Science Blogs A Blog…

Doing the TED conference thing (and using Bon Jovi to try and explain it)

Is Bon Jovi an idea worth spreading? Not sure, but it seemed to do wonders with a certain amount of context at a conference I recently attended. This being the TEDactive conference: a satellite event where attendees viewed and immersed themselves in the TED universe at an "off site" locale, all the while taking in an HD video version of the big show that was occurring only 2 hours away in Long Beach. This mention of Bon Jovi is in reference to a bus ride that occurred during the conference, where karaoke was suggested and quickly adopted with great enthusiasm. A great idea right? Well,…

The toll due to secondhand smoke

Given that I've dedicated my life to treating cancer and researching the biology of cancer, the ultimate goal being to use that knowledge of cancer biology to develop ever more effective treatments directed at the specific molecular derangements that lead to cancer, it's not surprising that I'm very much anti-tobacco. After all, arguably there is no known behavior that causes more cancer-related deaths than smoking tobacco. It's not just lung cancer, either. Smoking causes a wide variety of cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and cardiovascular disease, all of which result…

Birds in the News 80 (v3n7)

tags: Birds in the News, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Greater Prairie-chicken, Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus [Bigger image] More Prairie-chickens. The photographer writes; I was lucky enough to be out this morning on Konza Prairie (see the latest National Geographic for some details) photographing the testosterone-fueled antics of Greater Prairie-chickens. We had 13 males and up to 5 females on the lek, and the sky was clear and blue. A bit chilly in the blind, but it was worth it. So here is an image of one of the males, with a soggy bison wallow in the background. Image: Dave…

A Comprehensive Theory of Religious Cognition

This was originally posted on the old blog on 1/5/05. I'm reposting it here, with a few editorial ommissions (contextual; references to things from back then that won't make sense here), because of our recent discussion of religion. Hopefully I'll be able to post about some of the empirical work over the next few days, including a study on memory and religion published by the authors of the theory described in this post and their colleagues. A Comprehensive Theory of Religious Cognition The cognitive science and neuroscience of religion have become hot areas of research over the last several…

2011 Predictions: A Savage Place

This year I have a jump on my predictions - as part of my comparatively new role as Editor of the Peak Oil Review Commentary section, I had the fun of asking a whole lot of smart people what they think is going to happen, and thinking about their predictions first. If you haven't seen them already, you should definitely check them out! Everyone from Ilargi to Jeff Rubin, The Peak Oil Hausfrau to Richard Heinberg to Tad Patzek kicked in, and realistically, you'll probably get a lot clearer view of the future through a lot of eyes than just one. Which leads me to my annual official caveat,…

"Censorship." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

It's rare that I encounter a bit of nonsense that allows me to deploy two of my favorite rhetorical devices. First, it lets me pull out one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, in which the immortal line, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" was first uttered. Second, it lets me repeat once again yet another variation of Inigo Montoya's immortal words. It's a two-fer! Not surprisingly, it's courtesy of the anti-vaccine crank blog we've all come to know and love (well, I love it because it has provided me such a target-rich environment for taking on quackery and woo, although I…

Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace

tags: books, memoir, religion, godlessness, losing faith, William Lobdell Unlike most people who were raised in a religious household and grew up surrounded by religious people, I never experienced a "crisis of faith" since I never believed there was a god any more than I believed there was a Santa Claus or a Tooth Fairy. However, some of my friends are religious and because I value them as people, I have listened to them from time to time as they pondered aloud the deep questions that all of us face in the wee hours or after experiencing a significant loss or other life-changing event -- the…

Pterosaurs, err, indoors (the Summer 2010 exhibition)

In the previous article I discussed the outside section of the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition's pterosaur display (hosted at Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank). The exhibition (which finished on July 4th, sorry) incorporated three flying, life-sized azhdarchids - suspended from the two adjacent building - as well as two walking ones (the latter roughly reproducing Mark's terrestrial stalking scene). But there was much more to the exhibit than this: it also had an indoor component. The main feature was a wall covered with life-sized pterosaur heads: it looked great, sort of…

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Djordje Jeremic

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 Djordje Jeremic (yes, he is the son of Tanja Sova), of the Paper Disciple's 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? Where are you from? What is your interest in science? How about art? Why thank you! I am Djordje…

Introducing PLoS Currents: Influenza

Yesterday PLoS and Google unveiled PLoS Currents: Influenza, a Google Knol hosted collection of rapid communications about the swine flu. In his blog post A new website for the rapid sharing of influenza research (also posted on the official Google blog), Dr.Harold Varmus explains: The key goal of PLoS Currents is to accelerate scientific discovery by allowing researchers to share their latest findings and ideas immediately with the world's scientific and medical communities. Google Knol's features for community interaction, comment and discussion will enable commentary and conversations to…

PH WINS: Largest-ever survey of public health workers highlights gaps, challenges and opportunity

According to a new, first-of-its-kind survey of the nation’s public health workforce, 38 percent of workers are planning to leave their current positions before the next decade. On its face, that’s a deeply worrisome number. But Brian Castrucci is an optimist — “where there is change, there is opportunity,” he says. Castrucci serves as chief program and strategy officer at the de Beaumont Foundation, which along with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, recently released the findings of the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey. The survey, referred to as PH…

ScienceDebate.org: Interview with Sheril Kirshenbaum

In 2008, I was visiting the Nobel Conference held annually at Gustavus Adolphus college in Minnestoa. The conference was on Human Evolution. The college provided space in a large room for people to have their lunch, and while I was having lunch on the first day, I noticed a table off to the side staffed by a serious looking man with a clipboard. The front of his table was adorned with a large “Science Debate 08” banner. Seemed interesting. So I wandered over and had a chat. It turns out the man was Shawn Otto, one of the co-founders of Science Debate. Shawn, a Minnesota resident, is the…

Single Photons Are Still Photons: "Wave-particle dualism and complementarity unraveled by a different mode"

In which we do a little ResearchBlogging, taking a look at a slightly confusing paper putting a new twist on the double-slit experiment. ------------ I'm off to California this afternoon, spending the rest of the week at DAMOP in Pasadena (not presenting this year, just hanging out to see the coolest new stuff in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics). I don't want to leave the blog with just a cute-kid video for the whole week, though, so here's some had-core physics: a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (freely available online), looking at a new sort of…

Can a sniff of oxytocin improve the social skills of autistic people?

The social interactions that come naturally to most people are difficult for people with autism and Asperger syndrome. Simple matters like making eye contact, reading expressions and working out what someone else is thinking can be big challenges, even for "high-functioning" and intelligent individuals. Now, a preliminary study of 13 people suggests that some of these social difficulties could be temporarily relieved by inhaling a hormone called oxytocin. The participants, who either had Asperger or high-functioning autism, experienced stronger feelings of trust, showed stronger social…

O.K. So what is twitter good for? Some thoughts after a 3 week period.

Well, it's been about three weeks since I signed up for a personal account on twitter (you can follow me here if you're interested - my handle is @dnghub), and threw out my first "tweet." Since then, I've found myself fully immersed in the web tool, and feel like I can say a few intelligent things about it, especially if you're reading this as someone who is resisting signing on, or someone who just wants to know a little more about it. It might help if I first start off with a bit of context. For instance, my lab sort of already has a twitter account, listed under @sciencescout. Here…

What to do when the boss says, 'Keep your head down.'

One of the interesting developments within the tribe of science is the way that blogs, email lists, and things of that ilk have made public (or at least, more public) conversations within a field that used to happen only in private. The discussions of Aetogate on the VRTPALEO list are just one notable example, but email lists and blogs also host discussions in the wake of retractions of journal papers, investigations of allegations of scientific misconduct, and other sorts of professional shenanigans. While some of the people in these conversations cloak their identities in pseudonyms,…

Another irony meter blown: Dr. Oz to testify in front of the Senate's Consumer Protection panel about weight loss scams

I've never made it much of a secret that I don't much like "America's doctor," Dr. Mehmet Oz. Just enter his name into the search box of this blog, and you'll find quite a few posts in which I deconstruct some bit of quackery that Dr. Oz has promoted on his show, be it his promotion of faith healing and even psychic medium quackery from the likes of John Edward and Theresa Caputo (a.k.a. the Long Island Medium, who was—surprise! surprise!—recently reported to be a fraud); his fear mongering over the non-existent link between cell phone radiation and cancer; regular promotional visits by über-…

Hooked into the Matrix again!

I'm baaack. Well, thanks to free WiFi at Panera's, I was never really truly away. Thanks to Comcast, I was away longer than usual. In any case, although between waiting for Internet access, running errands, and doing some snowblowing last night, I didn't have time to do the usual epic substantive posts that I'm known (and either loved or hated) for. That's unfortunate, because it figures that when I go three or four days without any Internet access other than that I can manage to find by having lunch or getting coffee at a place with free WiFi, lots of things that I would have liked to…

Medical wiki revisited

Last week, I wrote a rather lengthy (or, as my detractors would probably call it, "long-winded") post about the concept of a medical wikipedia. As you may recall, I expressed considerable skepticism about whether the wikipedia concept could work as well as its boosters claim it could. Even though others have clarified what a medical wikipedia could and could not do, I still can't help but worry that activists and alties would hijack the wiki for their own purposes. Now I've found an actual example to consider, although it's not quite what I warned about. It turns out that there is an AIDS…

Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America—and Found Unexpected Peace, by William Lobdell

Originally posted by Grrlscientist On March 30, 2009, at 2:55 PM Unlike most people who were raised in a religious household and grew up surrounded by religious people, I never experienced a "crisis of faith" since I never believed there was a god any more than I believed there was a Santa Claus or a Tooth Fairy. However, some of my friends are religious and because I value them as people, I have listened to them from time to time as they pondered aloud the deep questions that all of us face in the wee hours or after experiencing a significant loss or other life-changing event -- the same…

Deepak Chopra castigates Donald Trump for not being reality-based. Another irony meter explodes.

I’m sure that most of you watched the Presidential debate on Monday night, just as I did. Over the years, these debates have always always painful for me to watch, given the candidates’ tendency to answer the question they want to answer rather than the question actually answered; to find ways to spew prepackaged talking points into answers, whether they’re related to the question or not; and, above all, to see how much spin they can get away with. Particularly annoying is when they pander to their base with particularly brain dead bon mots. Candidates from both parties do it, of course, but…

Basics: Making graphs with kinematics stuff part II

**pre-reqs**: [kinematics](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-kinematics.php) *I don't think you need [part I of this](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-making-graphs-with-ki…) if you don't want* So, you still want to make a graph with that kinematics data? You think that graphs on paper are too barbaric? Well, if you are ready, you can use a spreadsheet. But be careful. If you don't know what you are doing, you can cause some damage (much like flying a 747 after reading a blog about it). Spreadsheets allow you to do a couple of things. make pretty graphs…

Sexism survived the rapture

I mentioned before that last weekend I was going to a post-Rapture party/conference thrown by local atheists, and I did, and it had its definite moments. I wasn't there on Rapture day itself (I was at Maker Faire then), but the crowd the following Sunday was undiminished, and the talks were generally good (a low point for me was Greta Christina's New Atheist rant about the wonders of getting angry, a talk that ran too long, thus preventing anyone from asking questions afterwards or being able to challenge any of the ways she characterized critics of this angry style). David Eller opened the…

After SB 277, medical exemptions for sale, courtesy of Dr. Bob Sears and other antivaccine quacks

I realize that it's a cliché to say so, but some clichés are true. Time really does fly. It's hard to believe that a year ago California—and, by proxy, the rest of the country—was in the throes of a major political war over the bill SB 277. SB 277, you will recall, was a bill introduced into the California Assembly in the wake of the Disneyland Measles outbreak in early 2015 that eliminated non-medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates beginning with the 2016-2017 school year. Ultimately, SB 277 passed and was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown last July. It was an uncommon victory…

Lost in the translation: The ozone-climate connection

Kate at Climate Sight remind us this week of just how challenging it can be for a mainstream media outlet to accurately report on climatology. Even when the reporter gets it right, a headline-writing editor can inject just enough obsfucation to leave readers puzzled or misinformed. This particular piece of evidence attesting to the need for all journalists to possess more than just a passing knowledge of the field in question involves a new paper in Nature, "Unprecedented Arctic ozone loss in 2011." The implication of the authors' finding is that the Arctic's UV-radiation-blocking ozone…

CDC's new flu website

Somewhere around mile 500 of the Revere tribe's 1000 mile trek to the beach for an alleged vacation -- long digression that interrupts the clear meaning of the sentence: if I'm on vacation, what am I doing writing about it? That's what Mrs. R. asked, as she headed to the beach, leaving me in air conditioned online splendor in a rented condo that could have been anywhere in the world, as long as it had high speed internet connection -- as I was saying, around mile 500 driving our new-ish car journey, CDC went live on a completely redesigned website for its novel H1N1 (aka swine flu) info. I'…

On the Comments Problem

So I've been offline a lot the last few weeks - as you know we had 10 kids in our house for a couple of days the week before Thanksgiving, and I was out of town until yesterday. While a few posts have gone up, I've spent absolutely no time on anything other than absolute necessities online. So it was something of a shock to me to find in my comments thread a bunch of accusations that I'd been removing comments.due to my disagreement with them. This frankly pissed me off, since I absolutely do not censor or remove comments routinely - or generally at all. Despite a general tendency of…

Darwinopterus and mosaic, modular evolution

It's yet another transitional fossil! Are you tired of them yet? Darwinopterus modularis is a very pretty fossil of a Jurassic pterosaur, which also reveals some interesting modes of evolution; modes that I daresay are indicative of significant processes in development, although this work is not a developmental study (I wish…having some pterosaur embryos would be exciting). Here it is, one gorgeous animal. (Click for larger image)Figure 2. Holotype ZMNH M8782 (a,b,e) and referred specimen YH-2000 ( f ) of D. modularis gen. et sp. nov.: (a) cranium and mandibles in the right lateral view,…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 16 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: A Standard System to Study Vertebrate Embryos: Staged embryonic series are important as reference for different kinds of biological studies. I summarise problems that occur when using 'staging tables' of '…

SciBlogs > Virginia Heffernans livejournal NYT article

I think its pretty obvious to even the most casual observer of this blog, I am not a professional writer. I am a scientist-in-training who is madly in love with viruses, and wants the general public to understand how cool viruses are too, so I write this blag. While I have been coaxed into writing a for realsies science article before, that was a laborious process for me and the editors, cause me no rites gud. I can write like a scientist, or write like an lolcat. Not 100% useful for an article aimed at mainstream audiences. So its with some surprise that I am now writing a blog post…

Parallel Search in Rule Space Enabled By Prefrontal Hierarchies

Hierarchical views of prefrontal organization posit that some information processing principle, and not just task difficulty, determines which areas of prefrontal cortex will be recruited in a given task. Virtually all information processing accounts of the prefrontal hierarchy are agreed on this point, though they differ in whether the operative principle is thought to be the temporal duration over which information must be maintained, the relational complexity of that information, the number of conditionalities necessary to consider in behaving on that information, or the inherent…