Tid bits

To all those who are getting married tomorrow, on the longest day of the year, congratulations.

Below the fold: more Web2.0, a book on the history of cell biology, trashy science journalism in WIRED, and the latest on stem cell legislation.

From Coturnix I learn of this great site, Scitalks, that acts as a repository for science seminars and interviews.

After posting about the latest web2.0 tools from Nature, I was alerted to Jeffsbench. As the developer Curtis describes:

We have tried to integrate a lot of the same tools that Nature is using (i.e. social networking, social bookmarking, blogs, forums, etc.), but we put them all in one location with a slightly different interface.

Communication and information sharing among life scientists is very poor. Hopefully some of these new tools will help to improve it.

From Dan I learn that there is a new book about the history of Cell Biology (and on the development of cell culture) called Culturing Life. There is a review of the book in Science (I'm behind in my readings ...)

Want to boost your readership? A good strategy is to submit your favorite post to a carnival. An even better approach is to host a carnival ... in fact Mendel's Garden, the blog carnival devoted to genetics and biomedical research is looking for bloggers to host the August, September and October editions. If you are interested email me, RPM or Paul at (pdecell[AT]sunflower[DOT]com).

And what happened to WIRED? They used to be a pretty decent magazine, but they've been ... less interesting of late. Now from Lary Moran I read that they published this trash. Can we really take these guys seriously! This is a major stain on WIRED. The author of the article and many journalists need a serious science lesson. (For the latest on trashing and defending science journalism, fairly and unfairly see all these recent posts by various bloggers.)

Finally it looks as if Bush is goint to veto the stem cell legislation - bad, bad, bad. There was various posts and newspaper articles postulating that the publications of the recent breakthroughs on how to reprogram adult cells into totipotent stem cells were timed to coincide with the current stem cell legislation. As I pointed out in various comments, this is total nonsense. But here is some gossip for you (and Doug Melton hints at it as well) Bush wanted to invite a senior scientist on one of the papers to the Whitehouse to "explain the research" (i.e. photo-op) and the researcher in question refused saying that the whole exercise would be a waste of time. So much for all the conspiracies ...