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Online Science Discussion

Curtis, one of the founders of JeffsBench wrote a very interesting article comparing JeffsBench to PLoS ONE in their roles in fostering online scientific discussions. Register, look around and comment....

Anthro Blog Carnival

The twentieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to put a spring in your step and a glint in your eye.

Encephalon 52 online now

Encephalon 52 is online now at Ouroboros, and includes entries about grandmother cells, the neurobiology of sleep and the use of transcranial direct current stimulation to improve bad driving.

Etna Images

If you're interested in the latest eruption at Mt. Etna (Italy), here are some great images posted at Stromboli Online. Nothing like some good spatter amongst friends.

There's many a slip 'twixt spit and SNP: errors in personal genomics data

Peter Aldhous has a great piece of detective work in New Scientist, which has revealed a bizarre and sporadic glitch in the online software provided by personal genomics company deCODEme to allow customers to view their genetic data. The glitch appears to be restricted to the display of data from the mitochondrial genome (a piece of DNA with a special fascination for genetic genealogists, since it is inherited almost exclusively along the maternal line). On several separate occasions the deCODEme browser presented Aldhous with a mitochondrial profile that was spectacularly wrong, differing…

Financial Shenanigans: the Repo 105

I'm glad to report that electricity has been restored to the Chu-Carroll household. So now I'm trying to catch up. During the outage, I got a bunch of questions about the latest news coming out of the big financial disasters. A major report came out about the failure of Lehman Brothers, and one thing that's been mentioned frequently is something called repo105. The whole repo105 thing is interesting to me, not so much because of what it actually means, but because of how it's been reported. The term has been mentioned everywhere - but trying to find any information about just what the…

Another Book Meme!

June 07, 2005 and another one of those....had to change all my answers so they differ from the previous one! I got tagged by Revere to do the Book Meme. I did the Other Book Meme recently, which is similar, so this time around I have to make it different - all different titles to double your pleasure. Number Of Books I Own: Last time I was able to estimate the number of books was almost four years ago. They were neatly arranged: fiction by alphabetic order of the author in one room, non-fiction by topic in another room, sci-fi in alphabetical order in our bedroom, kids books in their rooms,…

End of whaling in Iceland

On tuesday Hvalur HF announced that the whaling ship Hvalur 9 was back in harbour and that the fin whaling season is over for the year. Seven fin whales were struck and landed, out of a quota of nine total. I want to provide my perspective on the whaling issue in Iceland and a possible political resolution: to cut a long story short, the whaling quota should be open for bids, and the whale watching companies should buy it and not use it. Whaling in Iceland has an extensive history. In Konungsskuggsj&aacute (Speculum Regale), a 13th century "advice to kings", the expected yield of whale…

A primer on federal gun law

As ScienceBlogs' resident firearms enthusiast (I might own more guns than the rest of the SB writers combined - and I don't own very many), I've occasionally written about gun rights and related issues. One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of people aren't very familiar with what gun laws actually are in the US. Here I'm going to take you on a tour of what's legal and what isn't in the US. I'll try to do so in a mostly neutral way, but for full disclosure I'd generally want to change the law in two directions - fewer restrictions on use, greater penalties for misuse. When my…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. John Hogenesch is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Pharmacology where he studies a topic dear to my heart - biological clocks. I interviewed John a few months ago. At the conference, John will moderate the session on Science in the cloud and do a Demo of Social Networking and performance evaluation in scientific centers.…

Balko on Political Fallout from Gambling Bill

Radley Balko has a suggestion for Democrats on how to exploit the passage of the anti-gambling bill and I think it's sound advice: Over the last week, some 10-15 million Americans who play online poker logged on to their favorite poker sites, only to get a message telling them that, thanks to the U.S. Congress, they're no longer allowed to play. The GOP just politicized a rather large group of people who heretofore were rather apolitical. And they skew rather wealthy. Of course, we run into the same old problem: Are the Democrats any better? They ought to be. If they were smart, they'd carry…

The stupidity of ISP filtering no barrier to its implementation

The Labor government has a policy to force ISPs to filter web requests to prevent child pornography. Sounds nice in theory, but I've been using a filtered ISP at my university (they're running a trial) and what I can do online at home in one minutes takes the better part of fifteen at work. I am doing all work online at home in the mornings before I go to work, because just trying to find images for my slides is grindingly slow. Now a consultant's report gives it a tick (what else? They're being paid to), and no matter what the results, minister for communications Stephen Conroy says it will…

The Rise of Slime

Overfishing, eutrophication, acidification, and climate change are leading to what Dr. Jeremy Jackson describes as the rise of slime in the oceans. For some recent evidence, check out this invasive algae in Crystal RIver or this recent story about increase in jellyfish on the Jersey shores. According to the research published last Friday in Science, there are now more than 400 dead zones worldwide, double the number reported by the United Nations just two years ago. Ugh. A new article by Dr. Jeremy Jackson, Ecological extinction and evolution in a brave new ocean, was published early…

XKCD: the Map

One of three best XKCD ever No, you must click through to enlarge A finite fraction of my online communication now consists of "XKCD:###" where ### gives the appropriate xkcd number.

In the name of balance

I really want Dara O'Briain's sack. P.S. I think we're back online now. P.P.S. Ooops. Comments aren't working. The tech people are trying to turn those back on right now.

Where are we?

I pored over this map of online communities, and couldn't find scienceblogs! I was so disappointed. There's an obvious place for us, though: somewhere down in the bottom left corner, around Sulawesi.

Killer Virus Sequence Published

Within a few days of the completion of the on-line draft of Sungudogo: A Novel, scientists have published the key data describing a killer H5N1 virus. Coincidence? I would assume so. But still....

MORE CONTEXT ON THE INHOFE HYPE: CJR Daily References Framing Science as Source in Reaction to Senator's Attack on the Messenger

Last week, the online news section of the Columbia Journalism Review ran this very useful reaction to Senator Inhofe's attack on journalists covering global warming, referencing the analysis posted here.

Gore's Law

Terence offers a definition of Gore's Law: Gore's Law: As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one.

ScienceOnline NYC: Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils

I'll be speaking at the upcoming Science Online NYC event on September 20th. Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils Tuesday, September 20, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (ET) New York, NY Weiss 305 Rockefeller University E66th and York Ave. New York, NY Enhanced ebooks and tablet apps clearly offer new ways to present material and engage readers. Yet some of the software restrictions and rights deals that these ebooks, apps and their platforms use can make them unfriendly to librarians, archivists, and future users. How can authors, designers, and publishers best exploit these…

Bioinformatics Summit proceedings and Next Generation DNA sequencing

Last spring, I gave my first hands-on workshop in working with Next Generation Sequencing data at the Eighth Annual UT-ORNL-KBRIN Bioinformatics Summit at Fall Creek Falls State Park in Tennessee. The proceedings from that conference are now on-line at BMC Bioinformatics and it's fun to look back and reflect on all that I learned at the conference and all that's happened since. Figure 1. Fall Creek Falls State Park, TN When the conference took place, Geospiza had only just released new versions of GeneSifter Analysis Edition that could do gene expression analysis with Next Gen data. Who…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Salamanders Suffer Delayed Effects Of Common Herbicide: Pollution from a common herbicide might be causing die-offs in stream salamanders, according to biologists who say findings from their long-term study raise concerns over the role of atrazine in global amphibian declines. Experience Affects New Neuron Survival In Adult Brain; Study Sheds Light On Learning, Memory: Experience in the early development of new neurons in specific brain regions affects their survival and activity in the adult brain, new research shows. How these new neurons store information about these experiences may…

Food Preservation and Storage Class

I've had a lot of people ask when I was going to run food preservation and storage again, and ta da! I am. I'm doing it as a six week course, run asynchronously online on from April 15 to the end of May. I'll put material up on Thursdays, but you can participate at your leisure. The class will cover everything from the very basics of setting up a food reserve to more advanced food storage, the reasons for storing food and water, how to handle medications and special diets, deal with kids and elders, and how to save money doing it. We'll also cover all the major food preservation…

Creationists vs. Texas

A while back, the Institute for Creation Research tried to get approval to issue degrees in the state of Texas — they would have used this authority to churn out science teachers whose knowledge would have been derived entirely from the Bible and young earth creationist tracts. Fortunately, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board flatly turned them down, one of the smart moves in which Texas can take some pride. Now, however, the ICR is now suing the THECB. Seriously. Even better, the lawsuit is a dense compendium of concentrated hilarity. The sixty-seven-page complaint teems with…

Star Trek: Discovery Is Smart-Sounding Scientific Nonsense, Season 1, Episode 4 Recap

"You were always a good officer. Until you weren't." -Saru, from Star Trek: Discovery Science is full of great ideas and brilliant discoveries, and some of those more recent ones have made their way into the popular consciousness. TED talks, popular blogs and online magazines, and Facebook pages and internet memes have helped disseminate bits of knowledge to millions. But how much of what's come through is actually worth knowing, versus how much is simply science-sounding buzzwords that's content-free? Outside the event horizon of a black hole, General Relativity and quantum field theory are…

Aard's Second Blogiversary

Today marks Aard's second anniversary. I'm still having fun and hope you are too! Looking at October and November, the blog had about 950 unique readers daily and was ranked #24 out of 74 blogs on Sb. I recently updated the Best of Aard page for those of you who want to check out some past goodies. For much of these two years I have bragged in the left-hand side-bar that Aard had the highest Technorati rank among the net's archaeology blogs. This is no longer so, and the main reason is that I have stopped hosting blog carnivals. Technorati ranks a blog according to the number and quality of…

This Christmas, make it "Moby Duck"

My favorite thing about Christmas is the stories. To me, the holiday comes wrapped in pictures, histories, tales, and yarns just like the gifts setting under the tree. The feast begins after Thanksgiving Day as networks broadcast animated snowmen, elves, and reindeer. Classic stories like Miracle on 34th Street and Christmas Carol make the season great. Even now, when my family gets together, someone brings a Christmas story to read aloud. We tried everything from classics to limericks. It would be nice to tell a Christmas story here at Deep Sea News. Its a challenge if nothing else. I…

Links for 2012-03-02

UPDATED X 6: YOU'RE RUINING NATHAN FILLION FOR ME, NATHAN FILLION. Alternate title: But I forgive you. -- TheBloggess.com Conversation with my friend, Maile... me: Sooo...Nathan Fillion is making me doubt my own existence. Maile: Um...what? me: I've been asking him for a picture of himself holding twine for almost a year now, and he refuses to acknowledge me or the thousands of other people asking for twine pictures. Maile: Why exactly are thousands of people asking him for twine pictures? me: It's sort of a long story. Patriarchy, modesty and training up children: Who are the babies? Â…

Links for 2011-05-01

Acculturating students to science § Unqualified Offerings "A student with a very enthusiastic yet serious demeanor, and very responsible habits, recently asked if he could work in my research group.  He has few relevant skills at this point, and my crew is pretty full, but I want to help him, so we're applying for some programs that support undergrads in research.  He isn't a physics major, but he has broad interests, and I think we need more people like him. In the process of reading drafts of his application essays, he sounded incredibly naive, and his writing skills could stand…

Luskin and the Peer-Reviewed Research Icon - the Saga Continues.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about Casey Luskin's misuse of the ResearchBlogging.org "Blogging about Peer-Reviewed Research" icon. Today, Casey removed the icon from his post, and provided an explanation for his actions. I'm glad that he decided to cease his misuse of the icon, but his explanation leaves a heck of a lot to be desired. He admits no wrongdoing, makes no apology, and presents a series of excuses for his actions that - even if accepted at face value - are weak at best. The first excuse he presents is essentially a claim that he didn't know what he was doing: A co-worker had…

The Chinese "Elephant Man"

This story is a couple of weeks old, but I've only just come across it. It reminds me that there may be some things worse than death, and this is one of them: To see the face of 32-year-old Huang Chuancai is to witness a rare genetic condition in its most terrible form. Chinese doctors say Huang, of China's southern Hunan province, suffers from a disease known as neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder of the nervous system that primarily affects the development and growth of neural cell tissues. For many of its sufferers, the disease means abnormal growth of these tissues and, as a result,…

The Latest Desperate Attack on Gore

Andrew Bolt is still trying to revive the bogus "Gore is a fat hypocrite" story. His main points are: Gore is fat. And: Here he was, receiving film's highest honour for his smash documentary, in which he warns that within a century the seas will rise up to 6m while monster hurricanes tear through what's left of our cities. Gore didn't say that would be 6m of sea level rise within a century. Nobody knows how long it will take, so Gore didn't give a figure. And the scientific consensus is that global warming will likely increase hurricane intensity. And that is Gore buys his offsets…

Catholicism & evolution = something to do with Islam?

Here is a long article titled Catholicism and Evolution which covers a lot of ground and seems pretty accurate. The interesting thing though is that this is published at Islam Online. Weird huh?

Bloggers on CNN

Pam is one of the CNN bloggers tonight. I already saw her on TV a couple of times. Let's see how much time they give them on TV and how much space online.

Science blogs in the news

The Online Journalism Review has an article based on interviews with several of us loudmouths here at scienceblogs.com, if you want yet another look at our perspective on this venture.

A lovely article about ScienceOnline'09

Written by Allen Dodson in ASBMB Today: Communicating Science in an Online World. The PDF does not allow me to copy and paste a quote, so just click and read for yourself.

Online publishing and networking tools for kids and their teachers

Classroom 2.0: ...the social networking site for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education. NoodleTools: Basic Language Literacy: Online Opportunities for Young Writers - Publications Which Accept Student Submissions

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifteenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to move you and soothe you and treat you right, baby.

Wikipedia Eight Years Old

Today's the eighth birthday of that excellent open on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Let's all celebrate by going there and contributing some information! Even if it's your first time -- it's easy.

Beyond Belief 3 - Candles in the Dark

You can watch Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark online (Chris & Sheril have two segments). Unfortunately the neat Flash interface means you can't just load an audio file into your ipod....

Around the Web: Resources on academic blogging and social media use

I'm doing a short presentation tomorrow on blogging for researchers as part of a day-long communications workshop for faculty here at York. And since a few months back I created a reading list for a social media presentation for grad students, I thought I'd expand that list in this post and add some more specifically blogging-related resources. Enjoy! Our Blogs, Ourselves (Paul Krugman) The Power of Blogs in Forming New Fields of International Study Should you enter the academic blogosphere? A discussion on whether scholars should take the time to write a blog about their work Social media…

Using Vegetable Power to File Your Taxes Online

tags: taxes, online tax filing, humor, satire, streaming video This amusing video tells us how to rely on a "green" solution to powering our laptops while figuring and filing our taxes [1:29]

Help Laelaps

Dinochick says that one of our own is up for a blogging scholarship: Brian Switek of Laelaps. All you need to do to pick a winner is … vote in an online poll. Ironic, I know.

Have you been missing it?

The talkorigins domain has been inaccessible for some time now…but no more. All the problems have been resolved and you can now find all the content back online at talkorigins.org.

Now, those are some molecules I can relate to!

Made With Molecules online store is expanding its offerings. Sure serotonin earrings are cool, but nothing beats the familiar and soothing effects of theobromine and caffeine. Check them out! (Hat-tip: Vaughan

They Eyes Have it. Actually, You have The Eyes

as in ... The most recent issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach is now available free online. This is a special issue devoted to the evolution of eyes. Enjoy. CLICK HERE for details.

What 'Bout Them Libertarians?

This is an old anti-Libertarian screed (from December 2004) that is bound to attract trolls (and traffic).... Much of the stuff on this blog is based on the bimodal (bipolar?) view of the world: there are Conservatives and there are Liberals, and that's it. Lakoff, Ducat, Frank and the like spend much time explaining the two, or just trying to explain the strange Conservative animals to the Liberals. But, as I stated before, only about a third of Americans are core Conservatives and another third are core Liberals. What about the remaining third? Also, as only about a half of Americans vote,…

Blogger to Lead OSHA

We got some very exciting news today! The Pump Handle has obtained an email sent to OSHA staff announcing that Jordan Barab will be Deputy Assistant Secretary for OSHA and Acting Assistant Secretary.  Blog readers may be familiar with Jordan because his Confined Space blog was for several years the number-one online source of news and opinion about worker health and safety. Of course, Jordan also lots of work experience not directly related to his blogging: He spent 16 years running AFSCME's health and safety program; served as a Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for OSHA; was a…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Birds Can Detect Predators Using Smell: Many animal species detect and avoid predators by smell, but this ability has largely been ignored in the study of birds, since it was traditionally thought that they did not make use of this sense. However, it has now been discovered that birds are not only capable of discerning their enemies through chemical signals, but that they also alter their behaviour depending on the perceived level of risk of predation. Help For Insomnia Patients? Different Processes Govern Sight, Light Detection: A Johns Hopkins University biologist, in research with…

Trouser snakebitten

Rosen T. Penile ulcer from traumatic orogenital contact. Dermatol Online J. 2005 Aug 1;11(2):18. I love how even something like 'dude gets his dick bitten by someone and the bite turns into an gross infected sore' can be transmuted into an almost pleasant and innocuous jargonistic title such as this. I ought to do a whole post on this kind of thing. --- Behar DM, Edelshtein S, Ben-Ami H, Mansano R, Edoute Y. Human bite on penile shaft from oral sex as a portal of entry for streptococcal toxic shock syndrome. Isr Med Assoc J. 2000 Dec;2(12):945-7. No abstract available. Jesus fucking Christ…