Search Content

Displaying results 5551 - 5600 of 87947

Updates, updates

A bunch of updates are in store. First the DonorsChoose update. Let's look at the whole SEED scienceblogs action first (thanks Janet for all the information): Total raised so far: 13,535.14 Total donors so far: 170 Excluding Pharyngula (because Pharyngula is done), the top 5 in terms of ... Amt/donor: Stranger Fruit ($132.64) A Blog Around the Clock ($116.50) Good Math, Bad Math ($110.34) Terra Sigillata ($86.35) The Scientific Activist ($86.25) Donors per 1000 hits: Terra Sigillata (4.96) Evolgen (2.35) Stranger Fruit (2.02) Afarensis (1.89) The Questionable Authority (1.74) $ raised per…

Iranian HIV doctors victims of witch hunt

Last week we alerted you to a gross miscarriage of justice involving two doctors in Iran. Many of you responded by calling the Mission of Iran at the UN and signing a petition. I wish I could report good news in this update, but so far what we have heard is not encouraging. From an email from Physicians for Human Rights USA: I wanted to send you an urgent update on the case of Drs Kamiar and Arash Alaei. We still do not have a verdict in the case, but have released a press statement this evening in response to reports out of Iran today that are very troubling. A spokesperson for the Iranian…

So, just inject the humans right away and see what happens?

Just How Useful Are Animal Studies To Human Health?: Animal studies are of limited usefulness to human health because they are of poor quality and their results often conflict with human trials, argue researchers in a study online in the British Medical Journal. Before clinical trials are carried out, the safety and effectiveness of new drugs are usually tested in animal models. Some believe, however, that the results from animal trials are not applicable to humans because of biological differences between the species. So researchers compared treatment effects in animal models with human…

Friday Blog Roundup

One of the great things about the blogosphere is that even when several bloggers are writing about the same story, theyâre covering different angles. Here are a couple of examples of posts that complement our posts from the past week: As a complement to Revereâs post on the FDAâs cefquinome decision, check out The Olive Ridley Crawl for a list of five reasons the approval is unnecessary and Mike the Mad Biologist to learn why cefepime-resistant salmonella is only the tip of an infection iceberg. As a complement to David Michaelsâs post on antioxidants and cancer, learn how antioxidants might…

Triangle Tweetup

You know I went to the #TriangleTweetup last week at @Bronto, an Email Service Provider in Durham, NC, with an inflatable brontosaurus as its mascot: Apart from searching Twitter for TriangleTweetup, you could also follow @triangletweetup for updates. At one point during the event, the hashtag was 'trending' but I don't know how high it got. There were about 250 people there, mostly programers, web developers and PR folks. Reminds me of the old bloggercons. Will tweetups also evolve over the years to attract more people who are using it and less people who are designing it? A first Science…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Young Dinosaurs Roamed Together, Died Together: A herd of young birdlike dinosaurs met their death on the muddy margins of a lake some 90 million years ago, according to a team of Chinese and American paleontologists that excavated the site in the Gobi Desert in western Inner Mongolia. Female Birds 'Jam' Their Mates' Flirtatious Songs: When a single female is nearby, female antbirds will sing over the songs of their male partners in an apparent attempt to keep their messages from getting through, according to a new report published online on March 12th in Current Biology. Males respond to…

March Appearances

I've been really, really bad about using this blog to promote stuff I have coming up, but I'll be doing two public-ish appearances in the month of March, and I probably ought to announce those here: 1) Next week, on Wednesday, March 2, I'll be giving the Physics Colloquium at the University of Illinois, on public communication stuff: "Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science" Modern social media technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to engage and inform a broad audience about the practice and products of science. Such outreach efforts are…

PNAS: Brandon Bartell, Business Analyst

I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track. The twelfth profile of this round (after a short hiatus for relentless book promotion) features a distinguished Union Physics alumnus, now a business analyst in New Jersey. 1) What is your non-academic job? I work at the Princeton, NJ office of ZS Associates, a company that describes…

Announcing Unscientific America

Yesterday, many among us were aghast to learn that yet another major news outlet is eliminating its science coverage. In this case it was CNN, which decided to nix its seven-person unit on science, the environment, and technology--including six producers and veteran space correspondent Miles O'Brien. It's a growing trend around the country as science journalism is dropping out of style; newspapers are hemmhoraging science sections and reporters, and cable news was already pretty science anemic and is just getting worse. The irony, as Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review online…

Lithgow Gingrich Proxy

Online social media played a major role in the 2008 Presidential election and is already looming large in the early stages of the 2012 Presidential bid. Newt Gingrich made a dramatic statement recently about Paul Ryan's Medicare proposal: "I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate," he said when asked about Ryan's proposal. Such a provocative statement created a media firestorm, begging for a press release from Mr.…

If itâs Thursday, Lott must be cherry picking

Lott has an article in the National Review Online where he claims that the Washingtonian DC handgun ban caused crime increases: Crime rose significantly after the gun ban went into effect. In the five years before Washington's ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. During this same time, robberies fell from 1,514 to 1,003 per 100,000 and then rose by over 63 percent, up to 1,635. I've graphed the homicide and robbery rates for the ten years on either…

Anthropology and the Military

This seems like a really good thing: In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy. Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team's ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations -- in one case…

Broccoli, Coercion, and Severability: Three days of SCOTUS arguments on the Affordable Care Act

Unless they've deviated from their normal procedure, the Supreme Court justices have now decided on how they'll rule on the Affordable Care Act - but, as the Washington Post's Robert Barnes points out, we'll have to wait until late June to hear their verdict. In the meantime, this is a good opportunity to recap the key issues in the case and highlight some of the more insightful commentary about them. The first issue on which the Court heard arguments was whether it could rule on this case to begin with, since it involves a tax on people who don't have health insurance coverage (or a hardship…

How to build your own computer

Almost every resource on the Internet on building your own computer is oriented towards building a gaming computer. The second most common discussion is how to build a "budget PC." When I sought out the latest information on building a computer a few weeks ago, I did not like either of these two options. A "gaming computer" is oriented towards two features: a) overclocking your processor and b) having one or two mondo power-hungry and gigunda graphics cards. A "budget PC" is an under powered machine that replicates what I could have purchased in many forms for less than the cost of a build…

Why it is important for media articles to link to scientific papers

You may be aware that, as of recently, one of my tasks at work is to monitor media coverage of PLoS ONE articles. This is necessary for our own archives and monthly/annual reports, but also so I could highlight some of the best media coverage on the everyONE blog for everyone to see. As PLoS ONE publishes a large number of articles every week, we presume that many of you would appreciate getting your attention drawn to that subset of articles that the media found most interesting. So, for example, as I missed last week due to my trip to AAAS, I posted a two-week summary of media coverage this…

Friday Random Ten, December 19

Olivier Messiaen, "Turangalila - Symphonie: II. Chant d'amour 1": This was an unexpected wonderful surprise. A few years ago, my older brother gave me a book on Stockhausen, who is a fascinating guy on an intellectual level, but whose music I find absolutely unlistenable. The book talks about Stockhausen's period studying with Messiaen. I was expecting Messiaen to be another one of "those 12-tone guys"; I've never been able to develop an ear for 12-tone. But I decided to give Messiaen a listen, and was amazed. He's not exactly an easy listen, but it's beautiful music. It's very dissonant,…

Practicing safe salads

Spring harvest is over so it is almost Tomato Safety Initiative time. Seems like just yesterday it was Leafy Greens Safety Initiative. I was younger then. My salad days. But now it's Tomato Initiative: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will begin a Tomato Safety Initiative in the Summer of 2007. The Initiative is a collaborative effort between FDA and the state health and agriculture departments in Virginia and Florida, in cooperation with several universities and members of the produce industry. FDA developed the Tomato Safety Initiative in response to recurring Salmonella outbreaks…

Benzene in soda: progress but still some way to go

News on the benzene-in-softdrinks front (for background see here, here, here, here, here and the Environmental Working Group site). The dominoes are starting to fall and the first was a big one, Coca Cola: Consumer lawyers and The Coca-Cola Company announced today a legal settlement involving Fanta Pineapple and Vault Zero products. "We are very pleased to join with The Coca-Cola Company in announcing this settlement," said Boston attorney Andrew Rainer and Florida attorney and Northeastern University Law and Policy Professor Tim Howard, who represented the consumers. Although the FDA and…

Why are manhole covers round? The sequel.

My post on "Why are manhole covers round" was made in all innocence. I'm interested in sewers and long ago someone had mentioned this little factoid to me and I thought it was interesting. Little did I know. Little did I know, what? First, that this is a notorious question. Allegedly it came to notoriety because this was a question asked by Microsoft on job interviews. In addition it is supposedly a Mensa question (couldn't find the cite) and some companies claim to have used it before Microsoft (McKinsey & Co). Wikipedia has a good entry on manholes with 11 good reasons they are round (…

The scientist as high class hooker and gigolo

The Conflict of Interest talk these days is all about doctors and medical school lecturers who are in bed with Big Pharma, but the bed is pretty crowded. Researchers are there, too. Not that this hasn't been a topic of conversation. And not that researchers aren't conscious of it and frantically trying to distance themselves from it. But it's nice and warm under the covers and its a friendship with benefits, as the younger generation likes to put it: As accusations of undisclosed financial conflicts among university researchers swirl, drug makers and academics are entering a new stage of…

What is health care like in France?

Here it comes. How dare I suggest the US could learn anything from France? By most assessments France provides the best health care in the world, with excellent life expectancy, low rates of health-care amenable disease, and again, despite providing excellent universal care, they spend less per capita than the US. Using about 10.7% of GDP and about 2000USD less per capita than the US they are providing the best health care in the world. To top it off, France's system isn't even socialized. That's right. It's yet another system that is a mixture of public and private funding that, if…

Giant Ants and Illegal Acts

A month or so back, when I went to Vanderbilt to give a talk, I met Robert Scherrer, the department chair down there, who mentioned he was starting a blog soon. That blog is Cosmic Yarns, and has now been live for a while, but I've been too busy to do a proper link. He's using it to look at the science of science fiction, and has a bunch of nice posts up, including a good explanation of why you don't need to worry about giant ants: Has this ever happened to you? While you are enjoying a relaxing picnic in the New Mexican desert, your lunch is overrun by ants: not ordinary ants, but 12-foot…

Hardcover BECBs Now Available!

The official publication date for the BECB (that's the big evolution/creationism book for those not up on the local slang) was April 10. Alas, as the tenth drew near I was dismayed to find that the book was only available for pre-order. My previous two books were both available two to three weeks prior to their official release date, you see. Then the tenth arrived, and I found that Amazon had the book listed as out of stock, with an estimated delivery time of one to three weeks. Drat. I sent an e-mail to my publisher, but, alas, have not yet received a reply. Today, however, I see…

Humanity's Map

This morning the New York Times reported that the National Geographic Society has launched the Genographic Project, which will collect DNA in order to reconstruct the past 100,000 years of human history. I proceeded to shoot a good hour nosing around the site. The single best thing about it is an interactive map that allows you to trace the spread of humans across the world, based on studies on genetic markers. I'm working on a book about human evolution (more details to come), and I've gotten a blinding headache trying to keep studies on Y-chromosome markers in Ethiopian populations and…

Alliance for Science Announces Winners of National High School Essay Contest

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Mary Detweiler, The Alliance for Science info@allianceforscience.org Falls Church, VA -- May 17, 2008. The non-profit Alliance for Science announced the results this week of its second annual National High School Essay Contest. Students were asked to write a 1,000 word essay on either "Agriculture and Evolution" or "Climate and Evolution". Neal Desai, a 10th grader at the Pembroke Hill School in Kansas City, Missouri won the top prize. Neal's insightful essay addressed the tradeoffs between the benefits obtained from genetically modified crops and the potential…

Does technology make you happy?

Call it part II of an ongoing miniseries. Or, if you prefer, one of many entries on happiness. Lets think about technology for a moment. Here I am typing on this laptop. Ideas flow (misspelled and grammatically incorrect) from my brain to my fingers to the keyboard ... over a wireless network ... into the vast ethereal space (known as the internet) ... to your home/workplace/café. So what good is any of it? You exclaim ... that's preposterous. Technology is good. You would then continue ... All these gadgets and gizmos, they're good on many fronts. They make us live longer, they help us to…

Let Them Eat...Whatever's In These Dented Cans From The Back Of My Pantry

Don't you just love food palaces? Round these parts in Philly, we have several new Wegmans stores to choose from, and of course Whole Foods. A new Whole Foods opened not far from where I live that includes a little bar - you can have a beer or glass of wine and a little something to eat if you find the experience of shopping for your whole foods wholly exhausting and need to partake of serious refreshment. The big chain grocery stores have even stepped up their games to stay in competition. In downtown Philly, there is Di Bruno Brothers, a gourmand's shopping paradise, not to mention…

I drive Glenn Beck (further) out of his mind

And if you're a Californian, so do you. Dave Neiwert catches this bit of wingnuttery: Beck: OK, there's something driving me to the edge of insanity, makes blood shoot right out my eyes, and that is California. California today, they voted against offshore drilling. Not on their land, or their shore, no. They also voted last week to raise emissions standards because it's too smoggy there and they care about the trees. Also, uh, in the stimulus, we found out today, it appears as though Hollywood can get a, um, bailout, from you and me, because nobody's going to see their movies. Hmmph! You'd…

The Massive Open University

They were amateurish videos, often black and white, sometimes just a disembodied hand writing simple equations on a blackboard as a quirky voice from off screen gave well practiced short lectures highlighting the essential learning elements. The pedagogy was revolutionary, university level material freely accessible by vast, unimaginable numbers - set to revolutionize education. Yes, The Open University was a revelation when I discovered their late night television broadcasts as a callow teen, bored with O-level chemistry. Here was real learning, advanced material presented much better than…

The Global Ant Project summit in Chicago

An oversized tyrannosaur photo-bombs the Global Ant Project group portrait, November 5-7 2009 at the Chicago Field Museum (photo by Darolyn Striley). Last week I attended a conference ambitiously titled "Global Ant Project synthesis meeting II".  Partly, I went out of curiosity about what this "Global Ant Project" might be.  But mostly, I went for the chance to catch up with old myrmecological friends, eavesdrop on the latest ant gossip, and visit Chicago's fabulous Field Museum of Natural History.  How'd it go?  Mission accomplished on all counts.  You can see my photos of the event…

That Was the Year That Was?

The 2006 Locus Reader's Poll is now up, with a convenient on-line ballot for you to vote for your favorite books and stories of the year. For those not in the know, Locus is sort of the trade magazine of the science fiction field, publishing extensive reviews, and also all manner of publishing news and fannish gossip. If you're not into science fiction or fantasy books, skip the rest of this post. (After the cut.) The on-line poll comes with pull-down menus to aid you in voting for the books recommended by the Locus staff, so you know it's completely scientific. The lists are pretty…

Is There Too Much Information?

Despite her corny conclusion, Courtney Martin's article Generation Overwhelmed does make a point: The world became too big and brutal, and we haven't figured out a way to process it all. That is, in essence, her response to Thomas Friedman's recent Op-Ed in the New York Times. Friedman calls the twenty-somethings Generation Q...too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good. What about the climate? What about the deficit? What about social security? Instead of focusing our attention on studying abroad, Friedman says the younger generation needs to light a fire…

What Post(s) Should I Submit to Open Lab?

Every year, the best science blog posts are collected in a book, the Open Laboratory (here are the 2006 and 2007 editions). Last year's edition included my cartoon, The Lab Fridge. It wasn't my best post of the year, but it filled one of the niche categories published in the book. Bora has been soliciting submissions for this year's edition of Open Lab. I've dug through my archives and found a few posts that I think are worthy of submission. Unfortunately, I'm the worst judge of my own writing, so I need some help. I've provided links to the short list of my best blogging of 2008 (up 'til…

Speaking of Technology ...

Linux Installed Base will Double This Year The success of consumer IT products like the ASUS Eee PC will help provide the leverage needed to get hardware vendors on board with open source, according to Dirk Hohndel, Intel's chief technologist for open source. He believes the install base of Linux-based desktops could potentially double this year, based just on Eee PC sales.. Speaking at open source conference Linux.conf.au in Melbourne yesterday, Hohndel said commercial pressure will be the incentive for traditionally Windows-centric hardware vendors to begin offering open source drivers and…

Comcast: Cap bandwith?

A while back I complained about an installation misadventure I had when I got Comcast service hooked up to my new abode. Since the misadventure was corrected, things have been generally OK, except that for a while Comcast's digital voice phone service produced an annoying buzz for a couple of weeks that made it almost unusable and that no amount of rebooting the modem would fix. Just as I was about to call customer service, the buzz spontaneously disappeared, and since then things have been more or less acceptable. In my area, at least, as far as I can tell BitTorrent traffic hasn't been…

IP madness

Eventually, enough rich and powerful people/companies will become sufficiently inconvenienced or annoyed at the archaic intellectual property laws under which we now live that change will happen. Or am I being totally naive? A few current stories relevant to this issue: From Slashdot: "As Chicago wages its battle to host the 2016 Olympics, it also finds itself scrapping over a valuable piece of cyberspace: the domain name of Chicago2016.com. The bid team along with the U.S. Olympic Committee are trying to wrest that online address from Stephen Frayne Jr., a 29-year-old MBA student. Frayne…

Reading List for Course on "Communication & Society" Posted; Blog Debate on the Internet's Impact on Community Scheduled to Take Place Between April 26 and May 3

Back in the fall, after hosting a class "blog" debate on the Internet and community, more than a few readers asked me whether I would post the reading list for the undergrad course I teach here at American University. Below is the schedule of readings assigned for the spring semester, along with a course description. As of right now, this spring semester's blog debate is scheduled to take place between April 26 and May 3. COURSE DESCRIPTION This course is an introduction to research exploring the many dimensions of "communication and society." As we will review, mass communication and…

Chipping Away at Healthcare Costs - or Not

Last year, Atul Gawande wrote an interesting New Yorker piece that compares present-day efforts to control healthcare costs with early 20th-century efforts to increase US farming productivity. The quest for more farming productivity succeeded not because of any grand, sweeping reform, he explains, but because the government, through the USDA, invested in pilot programs, scientific extensions, and provision of information to farmers. Gawande summarizes the recipe for success: The government never took over agriculture, but the government didn't leave it alone, either. It shaped a feedback loop…

#CNNFail #youtubefail #iranelection

Follow me on Twitter and you'll see this stream (to see more than one-sided conversation, search me there as well and check if there are comments on FriendFeed): RT @ljthornton Students: Roughly 2 hours of tweets from "student living in Tehran," 22: http://bit.ly/wVpJl #CNNFail: Twitterverse slams network's Iran absence. http://tr.im/osmp (via @jayrosen_nyu) @HowardKurtz Hours and hours of ....talking to the camera revealing no useful information? @HowardKurtz perhaps CNN and its audience have very different ideas of what is reporting, what is useful information, what is coverage. @…

The Friday Fermentable: Real Old-Vine Wine?

Among my favorite wines are those made from old-vine zinfandel, defined as vines with an age of greater than 50 years. Immigrants to the US from Italy, as well as Croatia and Eastern Europe, planted vines in various parts of California over 100 years ago, well before systematic irrigation. Most of these old, untamed vines were ripped out when the California wine industry exploded in the 1970s and were supplanted with nicely manicured and trellised vines possessing a more defined genetic heritage (and much greater yields per acre). The wily old zin vines that remain are true survivors,…

From the Archives: Balanced libraries: Thoughts on continuity and change by Walt Crawford

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Balanced Libraries: Thoughts On Continuity And Change, is from June 6, 2007. ======= The library literature. I don't know about you, but those three words strike fear in my heart. When I think library literature,…

More on Charlie Hebdo

Lots of responses to the terrorist attack against the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Some of it reasonable, some of it not. Matthew Yglesias said almost the same thing I did: Viewed in a vacuum, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons (or the Danish ones that preceded it) are hardly worthy of a stirring defense. They offer few ideas of value, contribute little to any important debates, and the world would likely have been a better place had everyone just been more polite in the first place. But in the context of a world where publishers of cartoons mocking Mohammed have been threatened,…

Ten Simple Ways to Increase Your Physical Activity

Photo by pugetsoundphotowalks. Regardless of your shape or size, physical activity has been shown to add years to your life, and life to your years. But believe it or not, the benefits of physical activity are not restricted to exercise performed in the gym. In fact, one of the easiest ways to improve your health may be through increasing the amount of low intensity physical activity you perform throughout the day. For example, simply increasing the number of steps that you take each day is very likely to reduce your risk for diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. It's still…

Who knew? My state's vaccine personal belief exemption rate stinks! (Part 2: What to do.)

After yesterday's post on the depressingly high (and increasing, apparently) rate of personal belief exemptions to vaccination requirements for entering school in the state of Michigan, I felt the need to pontificate a bit further. The reason is that MLive.com has posted some followup stories. Also, I didn't have a lot of time last night to write because I had the pleasure of attending the CFI-Michigan Solstice dinner to hang out with fellow skeptics and heathens. Unfortunately, the topic of the high exemption levels in Michigan came up. First up on the follow up story parade is one…

Links 2/25/11

Rainy today. But that's better than SNOW. Let's celebrate with some links. Science: Why You Should Be Jealous of South Korea. Has Ion Torrent Taken A 318-Sized Lead over MiSeq? The Strange Case of Ralph Hall Drying out the cane toad invasion Goodbye academia, I get a life. Other: Standard Washington cowardice Too Bad The GOP Filibustered The Windfall Profits Tax Three Years Ago-- Watch Oil Prices Go Through The Roof Are Climate Deniers and Front Groups Polluting Online Conversation With Denier-Bots? Can't Be Tamed: A Manifesto Thoughts on Teacher Seniority and "Last In, First Out" The Most…

Wednesday Links

It's beautiful out. But if you're stuck inside, here are some links for you. Science: The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash Research suggests flu vaccine doesn't prevent deaths among the elderly Antibiotic Use and Environmental Exposure are Key Factors Affecting Antibiotic Resistant Escherichia coli (E. coli) Carriage in Children in Peru Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds Other: Empathy and epistemic closure Printing Money Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed New Study: Liberals More Open Than Conservatives Online Goners Fiscal Sustainability Facts and Solutions…

The Tree of Life

tags: nature, natural selection, evolution, The Tree of Life, BBC One, David Attenborough, streaming video This streaming video is a beautiful animated clip describing the Tree of Life. Evolution shows how life diverged into the myriad life forms that we see today, and that we know existed in eons past. "The Tree of Life" was part of Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, which was broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday 1 February 2009. Narrated by the incomparable David Attenborough (you lucky, Brits, I am so jealous). [Although, I am told you can supposedly download it for free]. If you can, watch this…

This is not news

The Mirecki case is over. The trail has gone cold in the investigation of a roadside beating reported late last year by a Kansas University professor. Douglas County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Lt. Kari Wempe said Thursday that detectives had finished their paperwork related to religious studies professor Paul Mirecki's report that he was beaten by two unknown men on Dec. 5, 2005, on a roadside south of Lawrence. The office has not identified any suspects and, unless any new leads come in, the investigation is finished. At the time, Mirecki was under fire for comments he had posted online…

phylotaxis.com Nominated for a Webby!

Seed's daily science news aggregator, phylotaxis.com, has been nominated for a Webby Award in the category of 'Best Navigation/Structure.' Designed for Seed by artist Jonathan Harris, phylotaxis is based on the mathematical elegance of the Fibonacci Sequence, and the ordered growth of leaves on a plant stem. The appearance of the phylotaxis represents the integration of science's rationality and order with culture's energy and unpredictability. Result? A stunning visual arrangement continuously gathering and transmitting science news as it breaks on the web. Bestowed annually since 1996, the…