clock | January 20, 2009There are 15 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, 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:
Preparing the Perfect Cuttlefish Meal: Complex Prey Handling by Dolphins:
Dolphins are well known for their complex social and foraging behaviours. Direct underwater observations of wild dolphin feeding behaviour…
clock | January 20, 2009Do we really have a new President? After eight dreary years, it's hard to believe it's possible. But here is the video documentation - it seems to be true!
clock | January 20, 2009Hourglass VII, the monthly carnival of the biology of aging, is up at brain health hacks
Grand Rounds 5:18: Ten Suggestions For Healthcare Reform, hosted by Dr.Val, now available on MedPage Today
clock | January 20, 2009Last year, the only snow day in the Triangle was January 20th. I remember, because a number of locals could not drive to the 2nd Science Blogging Conference. This year we were wiser so we organized it a few days early. And, lo and behold, on January 20th this year, we had snow again:
This was also the first time Juno saw snow. It took her three walks to lose the fear of this strange, white substance:
clock | January 19, 2009Fortify yourself with a flock of friends! You can select them at random, write to one, dine with one, visit one, or take your problems to one. There is always at least one who will understand, inspire, and give you the lift you may need at the time.
- George Matthew Adams
clock | January 19, 2009
Today, most of the ScienceOnline09 participants are either traveling home or trying to recover. While many managed to blog or liveblog during the conference, as well as discuss the conference on FriendFeed or Twitter and post pictures on Flickr, others have a different mode: taking some time to digest and then write thoughtful summaries later, once they are rested. First of those summaries are starting to show up online and I will keep updating you as others come in:
Highly Allochthonous: ScienceOnline Day 2: generalised ramblings
The Intersection: Echinoderms Emerge Victorious!
White Coat…
clock | January 19, 2009Just because I was busy with the conference does not meen that PLoS stopped the virtual presses to accommodate me! Of course, there are a bunch of cool new papers in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE that have been published last week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Action Potential Initiation in the Hodgkin-Huxley Model:
In 1952, Hodgkin and Huxley described the underlying mechanism for the…
clock | January 19, 2009The Giants' Shoulders #7 is up on The Questionable Authority
Encephalon #62 is up on The Mouse Trap
Gene Genie #42 is up on Genetic Future
Friday Ark #226 is up on Modulator
Carnival of the Green #163 is up on SustainaBee
clock | January 19, 2009Humans Are Reason For Why Domestic Animals Have Such Strange And Varied Coat Colors:
You notice it in your everyday life, the bewildering diversity in coat colour among our pigs, dogs and other domestic animals. This stark contrasts with the uniformity of colour within wild animals. A new study on pigs reveals that the prime explanation for this phenomenon is that humans have actively changed the coat colour of domestic animals by cherry-picking and actively selecting for rare mutations and that this process that has been going on for thousands of years.
Game Theory Explains Why You Can't…
clock | January 18, 2009ScienceOnline09 is over, people are going home, and the online coverage so far appears to be very positive. I hope that conversations started at the conference continue, online and offline.
In the meantime, if you have participated either in RealLife or virtually, and while the memories are still fresh in your mind, please take a minute and fill in the feedback form, to help us make the next year's conference even better. Thank you!
clock | January 18, 2009
And here is what bloggers wrote so far today:
The Logical Operator: Not-so-live blogging Science Online '09
The Logical Operator: Science Fiction on Science Blogs - Science Online '09, Day 1
The End Of The Pier Show: Lines Written At 1.20 am ET Sunday 18 January
The End Of The Pier Show: Prevarication, 7.30 am ET, Sunday 18 January
Highly Allochthonous: ScienceOnline Day 1: generalised ramblings
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Nature Blogging 101
White Coat Underground: Carolina dreamin'
Makroskop, laboratorium przyszÅoÅci: Science Online '09
The Flying Trilobite:…
clock | January 17, 2009Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.
- Charles Darwin
clock | January 17, 2009Too tired (and it's too late) to write anything myself....but others have done it:
Sciencewomen: Overwhelmed at ScienceOnline 2009
Sciencewomen: Open Access publishing at ScienceOnline 2009
Sciencewomen: Alice's gender and science session: How can we be allies?
Sciencewomen: ScienceOnline09: The day wends on
Highly Allochthonous: Liveblogging from ScienceOnline...
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): What Happened to Tangled Bank?
Adventures in Ethics and Science: ScienceOnline'09: Managing your online persona through transitions.
Culture Dish: Documents for my ScienceOnline…
clock | January 16, 2009What a phenomenon it has been - science fiction, space fiction - exploding out of nowhere, unexpectedly of course, as always happens when the human mind is being forced to expand; this time starwards, galaxy-wise, and who knows where next.
- Doris Lessing
clock | January 16, 2009
ScienceOnline09 is in full swing. I don't have much time and opportunity to go online, as you may have noticed - so many old friends to hug! Already a full day behind us - a lovely dinner at Town Hall Grill last night, Coffee Cupping this morning, Lab Tours in the afternoon (I went to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences), then a quick run home to see Mrs.Coturnix and walk the dog, then back to Sigma Xi, the Friday Fermentable, the Women's Networking Event and the amazing talk by Rebecca Skloot. An hour at the bar listening to ocean-bloggers singing shanties, then, exhausted, time…
clock | January 16, 2009
Primate Culture Is Just A Stone's Throw Away From Human Evolution, Study Finds:
For 30 years, scientists have been studying stone-handling behavior in several troops of Japanese macaques to catch a unique glimpse of primate culture. By watching these monkeys acquire and maintain behavioral traditions from generation to generation, the scientists have gained insight into the cultural evolution of humans.
New Evidence That Humans Make Aspirin's Active Principle -- Salicylic Acid:
Scientists in the United Kingdom are reporting new evidence that humans can make their own salicylic acid (SA) --…
clock | January 15, 2009True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception.
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
clock | January 15, 2009
High-tech Imaging Of Inner Ear Sheds Light On Hearing, Behavior Of Oldest Fossil Bird:
The earliest known bird, the magpie-sized Archaeopteryx, had a similar hearing range to the modern emu, which suggests that the 145 million-year-old creature -- despite its reptilian teeth and long tail -- was more birdlike than reptilian, according to new research.
High Caffeine Intake Linked To Hallucination Proneness:
High caffeine consumption could be linked to a greater tendency to hallucinate, a new research study suggests. People with a higher caffeine intake, from sources such as coffee, tea and…