Tid Bits

In the near future I can see that my blogging will slow down as my experiments become longer and more involved.

In the meantime, here's a few items to help pass the time away:

First off, yesterday the New NIH Public Access Policies were implemented:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

Everyone's blogging about it - in fact this week bloggers here at Sb (example #1) and over at Nature Networks (example #2) will be posting on this subject.

Next, congrats to Junot Diaz who just won the Pulitzer for his creation The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Our pseudointellectual-cum-food-orgy bookclub had a chance to meet with him last month to discuss his book and delve into the meaning of Fuku, The Fantastic Four and Frank Herbert's Dune.

Andre at Biocurious blogs about the newest microscopy techniques called PALM/STORM and STED (by the way baymate is playing around with STORM. We'll literally see how good our imaging can get!)

Dan at Migrations posted a clip from Jacob Brownowski's The Ascent of Man.
(more below the fold)

Absolute certainty is very dangerous indeed, it goes by another name, ideology.

Another great clip from Crooks and Liars on the bloggers and death.

I've been always interested in symbiosis. This year we'll be headed off to the Brittany coast were you can catch a glimpse of Convoluta roscoffensis, a flatworm that has formed an endosymbiotic relationship with algae. I first heard about this creature from Lynn Margulis' book, Symbiotic Plannet. And now Olivia Judson (author of Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation, and daughter of Horace Freeland Judson, author of The Eighth Day of Creation) who blogs at the NYTimes, has a post on the symbiotic relationship between the shrimp and gobi.

Finally some weird song chart meme has been spreading. Usually I'm immune to these, but I found a compilation of them, there's some good stuff there.

OK that's it for today. Know of anything else interesting? Leave a comment.